Interesting, I know themes became pretty popular but I felt like they were an unnecessary addition to the chargen process from day 1. The best-written ones are those that grant class skills to players who want to play a pious fighter or whatever, and as a DM I'd rather just houserule out the concept of class v. non-class skills. And I'd rather the original dev team would have dropped the concept to begin with, so I don't have to house rule it.
I guess that's a way that you could do it, but it introduces a number of complications. First and foremost, when you declare that someone with a feat can do something cool, you're essentially saying that someone without the feat can't do that thing; and that's kind of lame, from an improvisational standpoint. Second, you're not establishing that they're any better at normal usage - the expert at arcane runes isn't any better at identifying them than anyone else, unless something weird is going on. Third, "making good stuff happen" can quickly get into the territory of the character being lucky rather than skilled; if the player can decide that a particular arcane rune belonged to whatever thing that the character happened to study and so it works a particular way, then in addition to controversial narrative-control stuff that's best avoided, it means the character just got lucky rather than them actually being more skilled. (Unless I'm mis-reading you on that last point.)
I don't think this is true at all.
No, he WILL identify them (as long as he has Inspiration) when it matters to the player. Other character's won't. As to what benefits he gets on a routine basis, that's more variable, but due to the fact that this leveraging exists you don't HAVE to try to find some specific unique mechanic, it can be something like a static bonus applied to a fairly narrow category of situations.
So what? First I don't have an issue with 'narrative-control stuff', there's nothing there to BE avoided! Secondly, if a player wants to characterize his PC's accomplishments as partly or even entirely luck then that's fine with me.
And that's exactly the blandness that was being railed against here! I'm not against a feat that does that, IN MY SYSTEM, because it can be leveraged with Inspiration and thus inherently becomes something more interesting. That was my point. Now, as a matter of design principle I'd give it a better name, like "Desciple of the White Order" or something and thus create some more interesting 'hook potential' there.
Litterally, there was a Cleave at-will, for instance.
I think that I don't understand enough about your system to make a coherent argument. I'm getting flashbacks to when I read FATE, and that's not fair to you.
It's not just numbers going up. It's also the underlying reality which those numbers represent. The character doesn't just have +5 to Arcana checks. The character is also an expert at identifying arcane runes, and everything else that falls under the skill. It gives you the opportunity to play a character who is exceptionally good at one type of thing. It might not mean much from a mechanical standpoint, but giving anyone a specialty can work as a character hook. Even the old Ghostbusters game from West End had that going for it.
And that's why the better sorts of point-buy games don't ask you to choose between the two. When the designers of early Shadowrun noticed that players were only taking combat and magic skills at the expense of anything flavorful or circumstantial, they added in an entirely new category of skill to cover obscure knowledge and hobbies, so you don't lose your combat edge by also knowing about elven wines.
Eh, I think its sort of like "4e meets FATE", though mechanically its pretty much all coming out of 4e-type d20 mechanics. I just found that I could add this inspiration-type mechanic which then led leveraging any character attribute as something like an 'aspect'. I'm only slowly working through the full implications of that, but its fun!
I'm leery of the whole 'underlying reality' line of discussion, since there is a strong sense in which that isn't really defined and thus you can end up boxed out of a lot of techniques that are genuinely useful. OTOH I do have a strong attachment to narrative and how mechanical character elements reinforce and support a coherent story.
From a balance perspective, that could work. I mean, according to the informed opinion of some professionals who actually enjoy FATE, you can pretty much always apply your aspects in any situation you feel like, as long as you write them vaguely enough or are skilled as a player in persuading the GM. It works as a game (to the extent that it does) because aspects are meaningless outside of the context of the fate point economy, and rather than actually trying to model the relevant factors of causal processes (as in a traditional RPG), the mechanics are just there to make sure that the story ends up with the proper and thematic levels of dramatic tension.
