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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fenris-77" data-source="post: 9896725" data-attributes="member: 6993955">I've been thinking a lot lately about both factions and how skill rolls look over the SD level spread. A thief with +3 to Dex and ADV on opening locks form his class starts the game about as good as they will ever be at lockpicking. That's cool, but p0art of me wants a little bit more range, but I also didn't to get crazy with DCs or add whole new skill mechanics.This brings me to the idea of ranks, which comes initially from the faction rank mechanics from Blades in the Dark. One, PC would have ranks from 1-4 based on level (1-3/4-6/7-8/9-10). Two, objects, NPCs, locations, and factions can also have ranks in the same 1-4 range representing general quality/scale/complexity/whatever. These ranks can be compared to determine whether or not ADV is applied based on class skills. A thief, for example, would only get ADV on opening locks of equal or lesser rank than their own. If all you are doing is dungeon crawling this probably represents too much granularity, but in more complex environments, like cities, where you would reasonably have a lot more range compared to level I think it's a useful idea.So a first level thief will encounter a lot more very difficult to open locks in an urban environment than a level 8 thief will, which makes perfect sense to me. I also think this idea provides some soft gates for engagement by the party. If the party knows that a given faction is rank 4 and they are only rank 1, they know it'll be a tough go to break into their base, or bluff their agents, or what have you. In also think it's pretty reasonable to make high level NPCs harder to bluff and fool for low level characters.Within each rank you'd still get the same range of DCs you'd expect of course. I'm still not sure about the exact mechanical implementation, but I like the idea a lot. I think it has some wide and useful application for SD play. Anyway, that's my design idea of the day. Thoughts?</blockquote>

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