Before I get into my quoting marathon, I've chewed on and modified the original proposal for changes. If it changes at all, this is where I'd be leaning:
- Attributes and skills work on a 1-8 scale, with 9-10 being T5 territory like the 6th dot is now.
- The core attributes: Agility, Brawn, Cunning, Will, and Perception.
- Three derived attributes: Trauma (the average of brawn and will), Reflex (the average of agility and cunning), and Body (1/3 Brawn)
- Skills and attributes are rolled independently.
- Skills are tied to an attribute, but only to determine their starting value when first purchased (1/3 of the governing attribute, rounding down).
- Untrained skills can use whichever attribute is appropriate at the time at its full die pool, but all dice rolled work at max TN.
The scale, again, using Brawn as an illustration:
1. Small animals.
2. Children, the disabled.
3. Sedentary office workers
4. Average, active people. Farmers, laborers
5-6. Professional athletes.
7-8 Professional Strongman types. The height of what normal people can actually achieve.
9-10. Genetic freaks. Tier 5 material. Andrey the Giant. Hafthor Bjornson.
Social was killed when I realized that it didn't seem to mean anything. Its only purpose is to power skills, all of which could easily be linked to cunning or will. On the other hand, this makes edges that might have a social component (whether due to physical beauty or reputation) slightly stronger/more interesting by comparison as you can't simply buy "charisma" now.
The above keeps attributes from outright replacing skills at any point. Pairing the skill benefit from attributes to a 1/3 scale instead of a 1/2 scale means that the average person will get 1 point out of it, but exceptionally high or low scores still affect your skills. Skill-based characters will thus be better off investing in Skills, rather than attributes.
I'm not sure I'm worried about "dead levels" in this proposal simply because it's an expensive proposition to invest enough points in an attribute to get up to that next level of a skill. Conversely, because the attribute list has been pared down as much as it has, none of the attributes have so little effect that it's easy to decide to leave it at 3 just because it's not adding a benefit to some skill.
nemedeus wrote:or the X+Y paradigm, to solve the problem of skill characters vs. generalists, i'd suggest the following:
Picking up the mastery level idea, instead of the higher ranks granting bonus dice or auto successes, let's set it up like this:
--Normal Skill Range: 1 - 5, where every rank adds a die as before
--Mastery Range: 6 - 8, where every rank decreases TN by 1.
I guess, it would work just as well for d6 if we limit it to one mastery level (that is, 6 for TN3 and TN2 with advantage). Essentially like the Shades in Burning Wheel.
So yeah, i'm definitely advocate for this system, if X+Y stays (I guess i'll write that down in my campaign doc).
Amusingly, that's in essence the TROS Companion skill system in reverse.
PsiPhire wrote:I've always had the opinion that attributes should make skills easier to learn/improve, but not add to them directly. Just because your character has a high intelligence score doesn't mean they automatically know something about everything, but they'll find it much easier to learn or improve intelligence-based skills. The same can be said for other attributes. I can't think of a game that has attributes implemented in this fashion though.
That's an interesting thought, though, in essence, that's what the original proposal does. Having a high agility doesn't inherently make your character automatically good at agility-based skills, it just means when you buy them they start at a higher level.
thirtythr33 wrote:Marras wrote:I think Thirty33 has a point about unskilled rolls using attributes with highest TNs. It might not be a biggie but something to take into consideration when other things get settled.
The only way around it I can think of is to have skills start at 3 dice when you buy the first rank. That means the new system would effectively range from 3-10. Then you can choose how to handle unskilled attempts. Either they operate off your attribute at a big penalty or you just get a flat 1 or 2 dice on any check.
Or else, you do something like attribute/2 or attribute -2 to make a base for skills, which skills then build on top of. But then you are locked into having fixed attributes for each skill since calculating anything more complicated than attribute + skill is too cumbersome to do on the fly.
What I'd originally proposed was simply to tie the starting value of the skill to the attribute and being done with it.
In hindsight, it's kinda weird that we're more accepting of the idea of "skills have no ties to attributes whatsoever" than "skills are tied to a specific attribute when you first learn them."
thirtythr33 wrote:Korbel wrote:At character creation, the cost for buying skills is:
up to the value of the corresponding Attribute - 1 point for 1 dot
above this value - 2 points for 1 dot.
Unfortunately that would defeat the point of the exercise. One of the problems right now is that attributes are better for skills than skills are. This would only make the problem worse.
thirtythr33 wrote:
Bingo.
thirtythr33 wrote:I am imagining wound charts to look something like this:
Cutting
Impact 2 / 4 / 6 / 8 / 10
NA / NA / TN5 / TN5 / TN6
Piercing
Impact 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5
NA / NA / TN5 / TN5 / TN6
Blunt
Impact 2 / 4 / 6 / 8 / 10
NA / NA / NA / TN5 / TN5
I was working on the notion of a level 5 blunt wound having TN6, but I don't view this as being weirder than the TNs for blunt wounds being one level behind across the board now. A level 3 wound still has Impact 6, so even without the TN-shift, it's going to have a huge impact on the fight.
That said, having the cap at TN6 makes the death spiral in the game slightly less brutal. TN8 gives you a 30% chance per die. TN 9 gives you a 20% chance. TN10 gives you a 10% chance. TN5 on a d6 gives you a 33% chance. TN6 gives you a 16% chance.
EinBein wrote:Until now, I haven't posted in this thread because I was uncertain what to think. But the discussion increasingly steers in a direction that makes me fear for this ingenious ruleset. Many (not all) of the "solutions" proposed seem so artificial and unwieldy, that the original idea of simplification gets buried more and more below a heap of scrap (no offense guys, but some of the ideas really lose the footing in terms of playability...).
Agreed. So far none of the proposals quite pass the benchmark for me. They either fail to accomplish the aims of the change as well as the originally proposed change, or they are patches that make things messier than I'm comfortable with.
EinBein wrote:The biggest advantage of X+Y (at least in my opinion) is, that it helps the players narrating their actions. When playing Shadwrun with my group, where X+Y is fixed for every attribute-skill-combination, no one ever takes the time to describe actions in more detail than necessary. When playing BoB though, the same lazy players describe the actions of their characters in order to force a certain attribute to be rolled. That's just glorious and would be dead with fixed attributes or no attributes for skills. I can see the advantages and intentions of Agamemnons original proposal, but can not see how they would outweigh the drawbacks... Especially in a game focussing so much on lively narration and drama like BoB.
I can see this argument, though in my experience the X has been pretty obvious in most cases, rather than a result of the players trying to angle to use Speed+Y instead of Agility+Y. Then again, my group is fond of embellishing. The problem is that skills are the severely at the moment undervalued and hit their cap too quickly.
EinBein wrote:In BoB, where every rating in an attribute is linked to a qualitative description that can be presented by GM and players alike, dead levels have the potential to harm narration again. As Agamemnon pointed out, players should be able to deduct NPC abilities by how they behave, look like and move, and the same should be true and consistent for PCs. This symmetry is in danger, if halved attributes become a thing. As of now, I see no good reasons why players shouldn't care for optimum point allocation with divided attributes. And if they do, the choices that were before in favor of a coherent character concept may in future be in favor of "one point more in a certain (derived) attribute" or even "one point more in every skill associated with a certain attribute". Again, imho, it's against the narrative core.
One could argue that there is no good reason for a mechanically-minded player not to max out their attributes in hope of the best benefit spread
now. Though I think switching to a 1/3 setup does wonders to alleviate the issue.
The scale above is still tight enough that you can, at a glance, work out what an NPCs stats should be. It's broken into the same steps as the one we have now, save that there is slightly more room in the highest reaches where human NPCs should rarely be in the first place.
EinBein wrote:We played a BoB beta test during our last RPG weekend and even though I'm still not ready with writing down what we experienced, it took us all by surprise. We hadn't cared too much for SA's in our TRoS and Blade games, because they didn't appeal to my players. But in our BoB beta, I prepared a set of characters with closely tied SA's and nothing else. And what happened from then was just great, top notch drama.
One day I'll write up what happened when I tried to run the demo adventure for the first time with my home group. My notes started with "They leave the village with Heinar in custody." We got four sessions worth of material out of it, probably twelve hours of play. They never actually left the village with Heinar in custody. I learned an important lesson in 'Bastard prep that day. You need to write that up and share it with the group.
EinBein wrote:As a bottom line: The flow (low complexity of rules) and the narrative (supportive rules in general and coherent character design in particular) are my main concern, and I know both work perfectly with the current state of the rules.
Agreed. I don't think the flow is in any way disrupted by the current proposal, however. If anything, it's objectively simpler in play (one step fewer calculations). The narrative is a debatable issue, but I'm not sure that the above really damages the narrative. This is a subjective issue to be thought on further.
EinBein wrote:Proposal for solution of 1) and 3) Increase the qualitative value of the skill rating
[quote="Added to "untrained" paragraph on p.34 (one could even replace the paragraph in question with this rule)"]If the Ob of the task is higher than the skill rating in use, the best achievable result is a mitigated success, regardless of the MoS.
You could say this adds an additional step to skill checks ("check rating of skill against Ob"), but as the player needs to read his skill rating anyhow, this is fairly easy imho. Additionally, I believe it is coherent with in-game logic (maybe more simple than reality, but okay from a narrative point of view).
Characters with a huge amount of dice from attributes and SAs can still succeed, but they will always do so at a cost, that will drive the drama as a side effect. Only trained characters will be able to really benefit from the use of skills, which sets them apart from other specialized builds.[/quote]
Hrm. That's a possibility. My only immediate concerns are:
1. We flatten the potential curve of outcomes significantly. I feel like that would result in most rolls being mitigated results. Skills are 1/3 of the total die pool you can get for a skill check (Which, in my opinion, is the core of the problem here). Most PCs will have skills of 3s and 4s (if they invested anything in skills at all).. which will mean any test that they make will either be:
A) Low enough ob that it was relatively easy without SAs firing.
B) A mitigated success.
The majority of A is often not worth rolling. I've seen a lot of ob4s and 5s at my table, occasionally 6+ as well when they were trying to do something exceptionally heroic -- which is what SAs are for, really. The only time this won't be true is if your skills are high enough and your attributes low enough that the skill makes up 50% or higher of the total pool.
2. We substantially increase the frequency of which I as a GM have to improvise a way to complicate things which is sometimes a good deal of work on the spot -- to the point where I'm thinking about fiddling with the complications rules to make it easier to GM.
3. The primary issue I had was not player vs. ob, but player vs. player. As Korbel points out the initial issue was when a someone with one dot can beat someone with 5 because their SAs are firing. SAs
should help the underdog.. but when the minimum possible rank can beat the maximum possible rank, we need more room between the two.
EinBein wrote:Proposal for solution of 2) Increase the range to 1 to 6 while keeping the current priority table
I still struggle with the current "double maximum" of attributes and skills. Rating 5 is described as "pinnacle of human achievement" (attributes) or "upper echelons of human achievement" (skills). Rating 6 is just even more. I would just flatten the curve a bit and integrate rating 6 to be the new natural maximum. Otherwise, I see a lot of "pinnacles" with "super human" elements in an average gaming group, as you don't even need to minmax to reach these values. Together with my first proposed amendment, I think there will be enough motivation to grow the skill set after character creation.
To be fair, the player-characters are, by definition, exceptional individuals. That said, this cap is also why I'm in favor of the scale rewrite I suggested. On the other hand, I can only fit so many dice in my hand. I prefer not to get to the point where we require dice cups to make rolls -- which we could get to if the new maximums are 7+7 for a roll.