NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8315181" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, as I say, I see it in terms of connectivity. This was a huge problem with AD&D. Because it has all those wonky different VERY specific subsystems it is literally impossible to logically impose an advantage universally, or a disadvantage. Some things are d6 roll low, some roll high, some are other kinds of dice, and heck if you happen to be a Ranger then its a 3rd kind of die for the same thing! It is bonkers. And I sense that most Indy game designers have sort of grokked this. I mean PbtA has a pretty small repertoire of different things, and it is rare to find a modern game (heck, even D&D) that doesn't cast everything into a common resolution framework governed by a single unified set of rules. I do still see player-facing as being a bit of a holdout area. However, for example, my most recent rewriting of HoML rules really only has one player-facing element that defines a character's capabilities, which are boons. That is your 'stuff', your training, etc. Characters, at a low level as entities are described by attributes, but you don't get this whole variety of different 'things' in my design like you do in 4e, where you have Race, Class, Powers, Feats, Rituals, PPs, EDs, etc. All you can really have in HoML are boons and afflictions as a PC, technically. It makes things very 'flat' and writing actual rules that 'bite' very easy. I mean, technically for instance, the equivalent of a 'level drain' in HoML could literally say "You Lose a Boon" and that is all that is needed. Every other system implication and consequence is implicit in those 4 words. It would suffice for "I gave up/lost something" or "Something was Taken From Me" or 100 other situations too. The actually fictional and mechanical consequences of a specific instance are pretty open-ended though.Admittedly, resources and general (fixed) attributes also still exist, but even boons can be classified as attributes, so things are really very universal.</blockquote>

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