Dr. Strangemonkey said:
I wonder how I should interpret that comment...
Strength is easy. You can map it to the mental construction of muscle memory conceptually, but practically you say that strength is a measure of your soul's ability to move nerve clusters, artificial or biological. As a result Strength scores determine what size of golem you are capable of mastering.
Perhaps the Character Strength should be interpreted as the ability to use the body's strength
efficiently - you can still use a body that's much stronger than you are, but this will result in penalties to skills, to hit tolls, and so on...
This will also help to create the "clumsy giant syndrome" frequently seen in movies and cartoons - big and strong characters do a lot of damage, but are less likely to hit than smaller and agile ones. Compare that with D&D giants, who almost always hit!
All the physical attributes become the pool you build your golems off of. At maximum effeciency you should have a construct that is mapped directly to your scores, but you can fudge them around if you are willing to take on some ineffeciencies. IE, choosing a bigger construct than you are normally capable of piloting and taking a hit to dex even as you go up in strength.
Voila, instant justification for attribute trade offs and size to strength mapping.
Interesting, but I'd like to keep the math at a minimum...
I would disagree with the size=HP idea, it seems to throw off game balance and probably doesn't reflect the idea of an intelligence holding onto a body through sheer experience and skill even as physical damage is done that is a staple of most genres dealing with this concept. Though there should be some real game reflection of the durability and toughness of the construct. It also just seems counterintuitive to me that size would map directly to survivability. All too many big things in our world are fairly delicate in terms of functionality.
Well, it's not automatic. Still, a big slab of iron (to pick one example) will withstand a lot more damage than a small one, and in general, larger golems will endure more punishment than a small one. But this is independent of vitality points.
I like the idea that Daimons are better at 'physical' attributes than humans as their intelligences were crafted for the post-human construct based world and that humans are actually better at magic since they more or less evolved/developed it and have been living in a magical world for far longer than the Daimons have.
I have to think about that...
Would also be interesting to have age of soul as a starting characteristic. I'm not certain how you would balance it, but it would be a really cool new twist.
Perhaps the ability to manage the physical world (=physical attributes) becomes weaker as the soul ages, just as the soul itself becomes stronger (=mental attributes)?
You could run a whole memory economy sort of thing. Where truly lethal combat involves crippling souls with so many horrific, if false, memories that they become incapable of coherent action.
It would stand as an interesting justification for bringing in an Akashic like skill/memory manipulating class. Or a sort of false cleric who can simulate the effects of divine magic save only in relationship to the world of the disembodied. Who through their powerful new levels of soul manipulation could prove to be a real threat to the world devourer.
I'll have to think about that. But I'm not too eager to make manipulation of memories too easy, as that might have weird effects on experience points and level.
There should be a sort of very basic set of classes, along the lines of racial classes as developed by say AU or UA, that represents people who become very specialized in utilizing certain types of bodies.
For aesthetic reasons, I want to stick to the basic classes as much as possible. But there will certainly a place for more specialized feats and prestige classes...
You might actually have an order of druids that has totally eschewed meat as a means of showing the utmost preservational respect for nature. Which, ironically, functions more on the presence of proto soul energy in the world around the druid user than on the innate soul energy of the druid his or her self.
I had thought of limiting druids to inhabiting the bodies of natural plants and animals only - no constructs, alchemical chimera, etc. And even in those cases, it is more of a symbiosis than an usurpation of the body. This will give the druid some better abilities while in these bodies, however, since they can also use the instincts of the animal...
Thieves are going to have trouble with the backstab ability, something will have to be adjusted there.
Well, there are plenty of biological bodies left, which
can be backstabbed. Most humans will prefer to remain in humanoid bodies, since that's what "feels" the most comfortable to them. Golem bodies feel relatively "numb" to them.
I'll need some time to think all those other points you mentioned through...
