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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Death By Surfeit" data-source="post: 693285" data-attributes="member: 8646">Thank you, VVrayven and Gez. In the interests of productivity I will keep a hold on my tetchiness (defensiveness?) for now, bite down and my pride and just get on with mechanics. Indeed, a flame war is in none of our best interests. Thank you, too, for your recommendations Kahuna, it’s nice that you could contribute something to the project.With the issue having been discussed sufficiently for the time being (revision: add a -5 circumstantial modifier to Prowess checks for a ‘disinterested’ character), I feel it is only good to return to the topic at hand before: namely, the formation of Carnal Arts.*Drop aggression, all thee who would pass. DROP!*Good boy. Have a biscuit. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />Whilst I could contribute a lot of material to your exhaustive list of possible tricks/maneouvres/techniques/whatever, VVrayven, I hold a few concerns about the current nature of Carnal Arts that I would like us to be clear about. In a typical manner, the issues are listed below with my own suggestions underneath.A) SIMPLICITYThis is a key concern from my point of view. Carnal Arts may be intricate and rather convoluted, and players need to know exactly what they can do, what they can work towards, and what to apply in a given situation. Each Carnal Art is essentially a mini-class ability of multiple tweaks and boosts to the system, and as such we should limit their application somewhat in the interest of ease of use.B) BALANCENot the mundane too powerful/too weak kind of balance problems, but making things feel fair. Carnal Arts should be kept in line with the abilities of other characters - to make a tenuous comparison to prestige classes, characters must still level in the class after meeting the prerequisites - by no means should characters get something for nothing out of the deal. In my experience, players would feel a bit miffed if the person next to them gets, say, Adaptive Lover simply because he/she has the additional rank of Prowess needed to qualify for getting it.To get around this problem, we should add some sort of payoff cost for an Art - a feat taken, Prowess proficiencies (each rank giving a new technique), or whatever. Furthermore, we should cut down on straight bonuses and modifiers when arranging the feats, instead adding flexibility.C) FEELThe nature of Carnal Arts is rather dissimilar to the vast majority of D&D mechanics, and whilst this cannot really be helped, it can be integrated more smoothly by making mechanics simple, precise, and in line with the feel, if not the exact system, of D&D.Now I’ll confess here that I am a supporter of the mechanic I featured in the last post - ie. a feat to unlock, increasing techniques by rank and limited application (too limited, perhaps?) and have been brainstorming six such Carnal Arts, one for each key ability. I’ll put forward my notes on my next post, but I’ve warbled on enough for now.Speak to you all soon,Death By Surfeit</blockquote>

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