“we did another rebuild again”
After last week’s session, this one was shorter and mostly technical. I’ve been working on revising my homebrew system to harmonize skills, specialities, and proficiencies. We do rebuilds from time to time, but the changes here were much bigger in scope.
In previous drafts, I explored the idea that adventurers have a common core of skills, which can be expanded with “skill specialities”. Essentially, it was an open-ended skill system. It sounds nice conceptually, but it ends up creating confusion with customization and adjudication. The base skills are broad, but the specialities were meant to be very narrow. This resulted in the door sabotage last session being done with Pick Locks, which makes absolutely no sense for a narrow skill speciality.
The solution in this case was an expanded and fixed skill list. It still needs some tweaking (I’m not happy with the social skills on it yet), but it’s an improvement. It replaces six base skills with twenty two skills, and you no longer get them from the open-ended list. This also simplifies the system because I don’t need to have multiple different cases with different rules (e.g., base skills can be used at no penalty untrained vs. skill specialities that had one). I can just have one case that works the same way.
The other big change was to proficiencies (and Armor). I was doing the D&D-style thing of having a prescribed list per class, but I wanted to provide ways to gain extra proficiencies. Classes in my system are fairly minimal, so having the fact you pick magician mean you only ever got a couple of weapons when you could take the rest of the combat specialties if you want felt at odds with the rest of the system. What I ended up doing was bringing proficiencies into the skills and specialities system.
What I did was drop the three combat skills (Shoot, Strike, Brawl) and replace them with weapon groups. If you want to use axes, you roll Axes + Strength to hit something with them. To compensate for the fact that you may want multiple weapon proficiencies, they’re cheaper (see below) than skills or specialities. I also reworked how Armor is calculated. It is now 11 + proficiency + Dodge or Block or Parry. The type of armor you wear provides different benefits:
Breaking things down this way also lets you decide whether to use attributes (Dodge is based on Dexterity), gear (Shields add their Block), or specialities (investing in Parry) to boost your Armor along with your proficiency. Armor is limited to +3 from your proficiency at most unless you wear HQ or special armor. It also makes Unarmored just a proficiency (instead of having an Unarmored Defense speciality), and then you can take Toughness to boost your Armor HP if you want.
To support these changes, I reworked advancement. Previously, you would spend EXP to gain a new level. When you gained a level, you got a few increases you could spend on increasing skills or specialities. The change is you spend EXP to increase things directly. Your total EXP determines your level. You can spend EXP to increase one thing as a camp activity, or you can increase any number (and gain a level) during weekly downtime.
The rebuild itself took a bit longer than expected it would, though I guess that wasn’t surprising. The system’s draft is (more or less) just an outline of notes in Scrivener. I’m intentionally avoiding laying it out right now due to its changing frequently but also because I end up spending a lot of time working on specific language instead of getting the system done. We’re getting closer, but I still have a ways to go before I can lay it out. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
We converted four characters: Deirdre (the barbarian), Dingo (the thief), and Tama (the cleric) along with Kitty (another thief, retainer). The players tended to go deep rather than wide. Deirdre took Unarmored +4, Toughness +2, and Parry +3. Her player really wants high defense, and he was able to do that. Dingo took a bunch of skills at +3. Tama took a few things at +3, and then her player complained about having low defense (but he didn’t invest in it like the others!). When I rebuilt Kitty, I spread her skills out. Most of the players took a quarter or less skills while I took half with her.
There are two reasons why I took lots of +1s instead of going deep: the penalty for untrained usage (of any kind) is −4, and the system uses 2d10 (so there are diminishing returns on increases). I think being able to do a bunch of things a little less well will be more useful than being very good at only a few things and terrible at the rest. We’ll see how things pay off. The way retainers work with skills is you can bring them into group rolls to help out using either that skill or Leadership.
If it turns out they should have gone broadly in their skills, the easy fix is to spend EXP to buy more. The base cost for skills is 4 EXP to get +1 (7 EXP for +2, 12 EXP for +3, 19 EXP for +4, and 30 EXP for +5). If you’re an expert, you get a discount equal to the rank on skills and non-combat specialities. Warriors get the same on proficiencies and combat specialties. Proficiencies are naturally discounted the same for everyone, so warriors effectively get a double discount. The average EXP per session is 5~6 EXP, so it’s not too hard to get EXP to buy skills you were missing.
Oh, and one more thing. I changed EXP progression to gain levels. The old method had you buy based on the next level (2 × next level, so 2 was 10 EXP, 3 was 15 EXP, etc), but I changed it to a flat 35 EXP × level for the next level. At character creation, you start with 50 EXP. You get a few default skills, specialities, and proficiencies based on your class; but the rest of your starting EXP is available to spend on more if you want (though there is no reason not to spend it).
One thing that drives me crazy is games that make it difficult to know whether you built characters correctly. The way I have set things up, you should be able to know whether you have the right number of skills and the level you should have based just on the numbers on your sheet. Knowing what level you should be is just a simple calculation based on your total EXP (divide it by 35). The EXP value of your skills plus unspent should equal your total. That’s why character creation works the way it does. “Free” skills messes up your ability to validate.
I also had to bring all the old combat specialities up-to-date for this draft, but maybe I’ll talk about that next time. We were using them from several drafts ago, and it was getting confusing what they did as things changed but did not get documented (Unarmored Defense changed three times at least). Next session we will be presumably starting off with the gambit to trick the dragon into eating the poisoned corpse, which should let us try out the crafting rules and replacement for clocks (called trackers, which uses progress points and rolls to make progress versus the total).
After last week’s session, this one was shorter and mostly technical. I’ve been working on revising my homebrew system to harmonize skills, specialities, and proficiencies. We do rebuilds from time to time, but the changes here were much bigger in scope.
In previous drafts, I explored the idea that adventurers have a common core of skills, which can be expanded with “skill specialities”. Essentially, it was an open-ended skill system. It sounds nice conceptually, but it ends up creating confusion with customization and adjudication. The base skills are broad, but the specialities were meant to be very narrow. This resulted in the door sabotage last session being done with Pick Locks, which makes absolutely no sense for a narrow skill speciality.
The solution in this case was an expanded and fixed skill list. It still needs some tweaking (I’m not happy with the social skills on it yet), but it’s an improvement. It replaces six base skills with twenty two skills, and you no longer get them from the open-ended list. This also simplifies the system because I don’t need to have multiple different cases with different rules (e.g., base skills can be used at no penalty untrained vs. skill specialities that had one). I can just have one case that works the same way.
The other big change was to proficiencies (and Armor). I was doing the D&D-style thing of having a prescribed list per class, but I wanted to provide ways to gain extra proficiencies. Classes in my system are fairly minimal, so having the fact you pick magician mean you only ever got a couple of weapons when you could take the rest of the combat specialties if you want felt at odds with the rest of the system. What I ended up doing was bringing proficiencies into the skills and specialities system.
What I did was drop the three combat skills (Shoot, Strike, Brawl) and replace them with weapon groups. If you want to use axes, you roll Axes + Strength to hit something with them. To compensate for the fact that you may want multiple weapon proficiencies, they’re cheaper (see below) than skills or specialities. I also reworked how Armor is calculated. It is now 11 + proficiency + Dodge or Block or Parry. The type of armor you wear provides different benefits:
- Light: Dodge +1, Armor HP +0
- Medium: Dodge +0, Armor HP +1
- Heavy: Dodge −1, Armor HP +2
Breaking things down this way also lets you decide whether to use attributes (Dodge is based on Dexterity), gear (Shields add their Block), or specialities (investing in Parry) to boost your Armor along with your proficiency. Armor is limited to +3 from your proficiency at most unless you wear HQ or special armor. It also makes Unarmored just a proficiency (instead of having an Unarmored Defense speciality), and then you can take Toughness to boost your Armor HP if you want.
To support these changes, I reworked advancement. Previously, you would spend EXP to gain a new level. When you gained a level, you got a few increases you could spend on increasing skills or specialities. The change is you spend EXP to increase things directly. Your total EXP determines your level. You can spend EXP to increase one thing as a camp activity, or you can increase any number (and gain a level) during weekly downtime.
The rebuild itself took a bit longer than expected it would, though I guess that wasn’t surprising. The system’s draft is (more or less) just an outline of notes in Scrivener. I’m intentionally avoiding laying it out right now due to its changing frequently but also because I end up spending a lot of time working on specific language instead of getting the system done. We’re getting closer, but I still have a ways to go before I can lay it out. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
We converted four characters: Deirdre (the barbarian), Dingo (the thief), and Tama (the cleric) along with Kitty (another thief, retainer). The players tended to go deep rather than wide. Deirdre took Unarmored +4, Toughness +2, and Parry +3. Her player really wants high defense, and he was able to do that. Dingo took a bunch of skills at +3. Tama took a few things at +3, and then her player complained about having low defense (but he didn’t invest in it like the others!). When I rebuilt Kitty, I spread her skills out. Most of the players took a quarter or less skills while I took half with her.
There are two reasons why I took lots of +1s instead of going deep: the penalty for untrained usage (of any kind) is −4, and the system uses 2d10 (so there are diminishing returns on increases). I think being able to do a bunch of things a little less well will be more useful than being very good at only a few things and terrible at the rest. We’ll see how things pay off. The way retainers work with skills is you can bring them into group rolls to help out using either that skill or Leadership.
If it turns out they should have gone broadly in their skills, the easy fix is to spend EXP to buy more. The base cost for skills is 4 EXP to get +1 (7 EXP for +2, 12 EXP for +3, 19 EXP for +4, and 30 EXP for +5). If you’re an expert, you get a discount equal to the rank on skills and non-combat specialities. Warriors get the same on proficiencies and combat specialties. Proficiencies are naturally discounted the same for everyone, so warriors effectively get a double discount. The average EXP per session is 5~6 EXP, so it’s not too hard to get EXP to buy skills you were missing.
Oh, and one more thing. I changed EXP progression to gain levels. The old method had you buy based on the next level (2 × next level, so 2 was 10 EXP, 3 was 15 EXP, etc), but I changed it to a flat 35 EXP × level for the next level. At character creation, you start with 50 EXP. You get a few default skills, specialities, and proficiencies based on your class; but the rest of your starting EXP is available to spend on more if you want (though there is no reason not to spend it).
One thing that drives me crazy is games that make it difficult to know whether you built characters correctly. The way I have set things up, you should be able to know whether you have the right number of skills and the level you should have based just on the numbers on your sheet. Knowing what level you should be is just a simple calculation based on your total EXP (divide it by 35). The EXP value of your skills plus unspent should equal your total. That’s why character creation works the way it does. “Free” skills messes up your ability to validate.
I also had to bring all the old combat specialities up-to-date for this draft, but maybe I’ll talk about that next time. We were using them from several drafts ago, and it was getting confusing what they did as things changed but did not get documented (Unarmored Defense changed three times at least). Next session we will be presumably starting off with the gambit to trick the dragon into eating the poisoned corpse, which should let us try out the crafting rules and replacement for clocks (called trackers, which uses progress points and rolls to make progress versus the total).
” They murdered it before it could even act. They then headed north through another passage where Deirdre walked right into the trap. I mentioned that there was a bead in the center of the room, so she walked right in, and it exploded. Everyone had to resist blindness. Tama opted to turn it into a called Defense Check (meaning she succeeded and got to resist the stress gain). Deirdre rolled well. Dingo failed. Tama used some of her MP to cast Cleanse on Dingo to remove the blindness.
