Critique my homebrew creatures & variant rules, please!

[xidoraven]

Ok, so I have been brewing a whole boatload of stuff over the last year or so, most of which is coming together into a campaign setting - which means it all needs a little review, revisions, and some play-testing or combat-storming if possible (in other, words, what works? what doesn't?)

I am asking for anyone who views this forum to take a minute and review a thing or two from these brews. Please rank it (out of 10) on how helpful, cool, or applicable it is for you, give it a thought or two, and if something seems unbalanced or out of place, let us all know.

To begin, I need to get a full review of two rolls I have been employing on my work with immortals/deities because of how it relates to new material - specifically review by people that have never seen it before....? If you are unfamiliar with how being a deity works in game, please see the SRDivine Rank & Traits.

Particularly, the rolls I need looked at are called 'Ego' and 'Spirit'. The former is a variant rule for intelligent items, and how two minds/psyches interact between divine powers; the latter is an inherent spiritual force driving the power without need for its Ego/Psyche (Subconscious, superconscious, divine consciousness). See them here: Ego Roll and Spirit Roll.

These were initially created for use with Deific Traits (De) as an alternative to Divine Rank-based divine dominance, for use with my other variant rules system for immortality, or Inath / Cabala Inata. Now I need to find a way to balance and strategize them for use with (another) system called Nymian Sigilry. In other words, I need to fix a chinked link in my chain, and I wonder where people will look at it and give me input like we all got here over the last good while.

Ego Rolls not to be confused with Egg Rolls. Thanks!
-will

[Celebrim]

Originally Posted by xidoraven

I am asking for anyone who views this forum to take a minute and review a thing or two from these brews. Please rank it (out of 10) on how helpful, cool, or applicable it is for you, give it a thought or two, and if something seems unbalanced or out of place, let us all know.

Hmmm... well, to begin with, it took me about 10 minutes of looking around your site for context to even begin to understand what you were talking about. Even so, I still don't think that its very clear with either 'ego' or 'spirit' rolls do, nor for that matter do I see that they do anything that couldn't be done more simply.

However, all of those impressions may simply be the product of my one overriding impression - your organization sucks. You've obviously got alot of creativity flowing and are crafting something here, but it has the appearance of a very cluttered workshop filled with experiments and abandoned projects.

I'm in no real position to critique your rules because they are meaningless without context, context which in some cases you haven't provided. You've got a stream of consciousness thing going as you leap from one novel idea to the next, and you really need to sit down and organize. You need to make lists. You need to make outlines and then rearrange your information so that it flows in a logical order and so that all the information about a single topic is in a single neatly labeled place. So for example, you first need to have a list of situations where an Ego roll is applicable. Then you need to describe in detail the possible outcomes of an Ego roll (or contest). Then you need a table listing everything's applicable modifier rather than rambling through the long list of caveats and edges cases. Put the caveats and edge cases in their own place.

Even once you get it all in place, my suspicion is that the system and cosmology you are working on are so personalized, that we really can't talk about it in terms of 'usefulness', because its highly unlikely that anyone can adopt such a ruleset into your game. It's too flavorful, and the flavor is too unique to your worldbuilding. There is nothing wrong with that, but barring you publishing a famous fantasy novel, its unlikely that the flavor will develop alot of fans.