Leveling up skills

[Bill_in_IN]

Originally Posted by David Bofinger

The problem starts when the player says, "I imagine Kurt as a demigod, above average ST and DX, genius IQ, ..." and you have to tell them no.

My theory of character design is:
1. defining talents, e.g. "He's a merchant."
2. IQ, determined from Step 1
3. ST and DX, using whatever points are left
4. Other talents.

The game kind of implies doing 2 & 3 first, then 1 and 4, and this is broken.



Most characters get pushed into the combatant role because the campaign they are in is mostly about combat, and whether they live or die depends in large part on their grace and tankishness.

I concur.

Originally Posted by David Bofinger

As soon as the mechanics differ between periods, players are pushed into optimising by choosing abilities during the period when they are cheapest. So RAW characters get their IQ during generation then load up on DX and maybe ST afterwards.

Also the inelegance offends me.



And in a few games it might make sense. If all characters are ordinary children in our world, and at game start they get thrown through a mystic portal to a secondary world and start acquiring new skills, then it makes a lot of sense to use different mechanics in the two phases.

...


It's a consequence of constant talent cost and rapidly rising attribute cost, and hard to fix unless you decide to hate at least one of those two.

With a couple of NPCs in my game, I experimented with beginning characters with a twist. These two characters come from privilege. Like nobility/knights, they have been trained/educated their entire lives to be warriors and leaders. So, their back story allowed for them to have more talents than their total IQ per current RAW. For example, one has an IQ high enough to be an Expert Horseman and a pole weapon expert because his IQ can accommodate it. So, he's an expert with a javelin and a spear thrower while on horseback. Not an ominous character but well-equipped to be a pimple-faced officer in the Army. The thought process is that they have been collecting XP since they were children. They increased their Attributes from much lower than 32 points even though that is where they are starting in the game. After introducing this aspect via NPC backstories, I could entertain doing such a thing with a PC provided that the general process was properly tracked. It would make character generation a bit longer and the checks for avoiding rule violations would also have to be done. However, I would reserve it for PCs that have a backstory that justifies it. In this case, the child of royalty or noblemen has years of access to training and education that is inaccessible to others. So, while I still insist that they start at 32 points, they can have more talents than the total of their beginning IQ. The assumption is that they started at a lower Attribute total as a child and has been spending XP on learning talents while much of their ST, DX, and IQ has progressed to the young adult total of 32 points.

So, this character generation process would be it's own side project between the GM and player. The new PC can be introduced into the same time period as the rest of the game but the generation process goes into more detail to account for the backstory. To some degree, this happens with every character that is generated but the average beginning character has an average life up to that point and are limited per RAW in their talents at creation. Some GMs want a small backstory for new characters. The process that I mentioned allows for a more extensive backstory and it's effect on character generation. As a GM, I wouldn't make it the norm by any means but we do strive to have an interesting array of PCs and NPCs in our games. You don't really have to change the base rules to do this. You just have to allow some framework for the character to have actually started its XP earning and Attribute development at a time that is earlier than their introduction to the game. At character generation, a GM could allow for more talents based upon their back story and attributes.