05-02-2022, 07:58 AM | #1 |
Join Date: Jan 2018
Location: Sydney, Australia
|
Environmental Talents
I'd like opinions on this:
Philosophy One of the decisions a game designer has to make is how character abilities will be split from each other. In TFT there's a set of talents related to spotting things or getting along in an environment, which I'll call environmental talents - Alertness, Detect Traps, Naturalist, Seamanship, Swimming, Tracking, etc. TFT chooses to split these talents up by output, i.e. by what they do. Even a talent like Woodsman, which sounds like it relates to a specific environment, on close examination can be used in many environments and is actually defined by what it does. Another way to split these talents up would be by when they are used, which in this case means the environment in which they are used. This is more or less how advanced combat talents like Weapon Expert work: there's a different talent for each kind of weapon, but each one has the same benefits. We could instead choose to use an output-oriented approach for advanced combat talents, where the talent doesn't care what the weapon is, but each talent provides a different advantage: a bonus to damage, an improved defence, benefits in HTH, benefits against multi-hex opponents, etc. Or we could have an input-oriented approach to environment talents, where the talents are used in different environments but have similar effects. I actually believe both these changes would be a good thing for TFT. In the case of environment talents that's mostly driven by my experience of watching players generate characters. It is really common for a character to be partially built around an environment: "She grew up in the forest and she knows every animal and plant as a personal friend," or "Six years a fisherman before I was captured, five years a galley slave of pirates, and four years with the navy that rescued me, I may not know the land but by God I know the sea," or "I was raised by desert foxes and learnt all its ways." Conversely the choice of RAW talents is more commonly a matter of practicality: someone has to take Alertness, someone should probably have Woodsman so we don't starve, etc. When the forest expert who doesn't have Tracking goes into the forest and can't follow the enemy tracks, it feels kind of sad - I have Naturalist, you said that made me expert on the local animals, doesn't that help me track? When that forest expert does buy tracking to fix the problem, and goes into a desert and discovers they can track just as well there as they can in a forest, it feels gamey, really that shouldn't happen. I want to promote the input-based environmental talents, which I think are superior for most purposes. On the other hand there might be characters who want e.g. to play the equivalent of an ex-olympic swimmer who just swims in pools and doesn't know rivers or the sea. So some output-oriented talents should perhaps exist. This is a proposal for making environment talents defined by input. These could either replace or be used in parallel with output-oriented talents. Since it is the less radical proposal I'm assuming here they are used in parallel. A character in possession of both Swimming and Sea would then be particularly expert at swimming in the sea. Rules
|
Tags |
environment, split, talents |
|
|