Now THIS is an interesting thought. The question that needs to be asked is; is there a way to formalize this? If we are numberless, you are going to see some misjudgments about what the characters capabilities are anyway. One way might be to give feedback to others present who possess the same skill and letting roleplay guide the teaching process.
Yes, I think we can formalize it. On reflection, the same skill would probably be used for evaluating your own skills as for evaluating another person's skills, but evaluating yourself would have a higher difficulty.
Actually, this could apply to everything, not just skill level. For example, combatants should not always know how badly they're injured, especially while the combat is still going on. You may think you have only a minor wound and not realize you are bleeding internally, or you may think a messy but minor wound is serious. I assume we'll have several different skills for evaluating medical condition, skill level, weapon quality, and so forth.
What normally gets called constitution is only partially inherent. In big parts, it is dependent on the fitness level of the individual. The same thing with strength. Dexterity can to some extent be trained.
Quickness, hearing and vision are purely innate.
I think quickness can be improved. Some people claim it's possible to improve hearing and vision through training, but I don't know if that's true, and even if it is I'm sure it's very limited. Anyway, I agree with your main point that many or most stats are only partially inherent.
Height, wieght and appearance mainly play a role in the self that the player is exploring. People usually wat to create a beautiful, ot idealized self. Sometimes they don't.
True enough, but physical dimensions obviously will be very important in-game, and appearance also affects NPC reactions (and PC reactions, if the avatar accurately reflects the appearance stat).
Appearance can be improved, too, through cosmetic surgery if nothing else. Of course, this is really just a change in physical dimensions. I wonder if we could reduce appearance to a number based on physical dimensions. It's said that beauty can be measured by a computer (symmetry in terms of phi).
Charisma and empathy are related, stemming from an inderstanding of human beings.
Morale and discipline are certainly learnable.
Many of the personality traits described are perfectly valid for NPCs, but I'm not sure that players would accept them for PCs, so we'll leave them out of the discussion. Will, judgement, common sense, reasoning, memory, and mental quickness are, imho, nonsense stats in a game setting. They are either class attributes (mages, divine casters) or they are dump stats and tend to have no relevance on how the character is played. This is something that annoyed me when playing in NWN PWs - people dump stat attributes to maximize their chosen class and then go on to play the person that they would like to be; be it the charismatic warrior in a leadership role, etc. Going by this experience, I'd really rather leave these things completely off the character sheet if at all possible. Also, the things that normally fall under intelligence would really act as modifiers to other skills. What this in effect becomes is a permanent skill modifier. This is why I think it?s worth experimenting with strength, fitness, dexterity and charisma as trainable skills.
All good points. Since PC's can become NPC's, though, I think they'll need personality traits and mental attributes. If a player drops out, the character may only be a PC once or twice and may be an NPC thereafter. We mentioned the possibility of evaluating a player's behavior and setting the personality traits based on that, or allowing the player to set the personality traits, so that the character behaves consistently in NPC mode.
It's true that most players ignore mental attributes, but some people really enjoy role-playing them correctly. Also, some of them are important for such things as spell resistance, academic skills, skill gain (speed of learning), social skills, and (in the case of mental quickness) reaction speed.
Stats aren't truly skills, but the more I think about it, the more I think treating stats as skills might work if done carefully. After all, many skills are also partially inherent (native talent).
What I?d introduce is talents and handicaps. Let?s allow the player to decide that a character is talented in different skills. We give them a number of talent points that they can spend on different skill families, say five for example. They might for example be talented in movement related skills (dexterity), fitness, physical strength, etc. They could even choose to be talented in skills that are not immediately available to them due to prerequisites. Putting a talent skill to a family increases the rate of skill gain in that skill by a considerable margin. The player could put all five of their talents into one family for a cumulative effect, or spread them around.
For each talent that a player takes, they must take a handicap, which is the reverse. Players will likely use these for ?dump skills? to create de-facto classes.
This is similar to the system I use in my paper-and-pencil RPG; I even have Talent Points. A character's talent in a given skill family is rated on a scale of 1 to 5, with 3 being average and 5 being exceptionally talented. (0 indicates that a character cannot learn skills in that family at all; for example, a character without the ability to use magic would have Talent of 0 in Magical.) The number of Talent 4 and 5 categories is limited based on the character's Will. I use the following formula to determine the days of training required to raise a skill one level.
Cost in Days = (Rank to be Attained) * 2 * (1.45 ? 0.15 * Talent)
So, for example, going from skill level 1 to 2 would take 4 days if the Talent is 3, or 2.8 days if the Talent is 5. The difference isn't huge at low skill levels but is significant at higher levels. I modify the result based on stats and possibly other factors such as the skill of the tutor. It's probably somewhat simplistic, but seems to work pretty well for a paper-and-pencil RPG, at any rate.
Hmmm? good question. How does this fit in with being numberless? If we are numberless, we can allow the players to select their talents and get going. The skills ? especially the easily learned basics ? will come very quickly.
What you describe should work for talents, but characters should have initial skills. Perhaps they could choose a template (warrior, healer, etc.) and then modify if desired. They could also have a starting package based on background (race, culture, and social class) which they couldn't modify. In my system, I build templates (or allow players to build from scratch if desired) worth 300 days of training (modified by stats); this represents the discretionary part of their background training. (When you get right down to it, most skills acquired in childhood are not discretionary. I know mine weren't.
)
For the innate attributes (such as quickness, hearing and vision are purely innate), give a set of sliders at character creation. The player can increase one or more at the expense of the others, or leave them all at the default "average".
Sounds good.
I also think that the skills that require grinding should be grindable while offline. Log off and leave your character training at a training hall, working at an anvil or studying in a library for example.
I agree. However, depending on your character's discipline, he may stop after a while and go have a beer.
As for skill checks you can use the default physical abilities and then modify from the skill sets. (I know I showed a six degrees thing in a different post, this is just another take.) If you are not dexterous, you shouldn't be able to pick locks well, unless you have crazy time spent learning it. It would be better off working on your basic dexterity and then working on lock picking. Now should you gain dexterity if you work on lock picking? Initially I thought yes, but now I';m not so sold. If I practice guitar, which requires dexterity, I don't think I would be that much better at juggling. I know those are different facets of dexterity, some might say totally different skills, but if you meet a very dexterious person they are able to probably juggle and play guitar much better with fewer lessons then someone with less initial dexterity.
I would say guitar and lockpicking would require manual dexterity, rather than agility. It seems to make sense that using manual dexterity (by playing guitar, for example) would increase it, and thereby improve other skills that depend on it. Similarly, weight lifting should improve strength, which improves your chance of bashing in doors. I think the key is that some stats (like some skills) are interrelated. A character with high strength will probably also be pretty fit.
PD characters would be accepting superfast skill gains with bonuses (more talent points to start with?) and can become Siegfried or Hercules or Achilles; someone able to lift a couple of tons, shoot nuclear fireballs out of their XXXX and go into melee combat against dozens. Then a scorpion comes along...
Perhaps we do something like give PDs N times the number of initial skill points and K times the skill payout?
I think we should avoid making PD/non-PD part of the actual ruleset. It seems like it should be part of the world, and I think it's important to keep the world and the ruleset separate, since the ruleset should be portable between worlds. Can we make the PD modifications a filter, rather than a core part of the ruleset?
Ahhh... aging giving talents and handicaps? I like that.
So do I. It makes sense that aging would change your talent in certain areas.
Now THAT is a good question? Would it free players from the tyranny of numbers by telling them that they are good at what they do a lot and quickly forget those things they crammed (ground); allowing them to pursue the interest of the day without worrying about their character sheet? Or would it be like sending them to prison in a blindfold?
I think it depends on the player. Many won't care very much, some will love it, and some will hate it. I think the solution is to make it difficult enough to get the numbers that those who don't really care won't bother, but not so difficult that those who really want them will get frustrated. Letting them hack into the code (of the ruleset, not the world) should accomplish this.
The slider is the way to do it in a numberless system, or even picking adjectives to describe things, very strong, super strong, weak, total whimp. If we allow nubmers then you can go from there.
I like the slider option: Fast and efficient to keep character generation moving, but still numberless.
This works, but I figure that mathmatically there are only X number of hours in a day. If that's the case the the amount of time you can devote to development is X. There is your hard cap, unless you know of a better way to train, but even then if you had the best way to train for X hours, that would eb the maximum number of points you could have, so in effect you have a hard cap.
You may be right, but hard caps tend to frustrate players. Soft caps are less intrusive and thus less frustrating, especially when they're realistic.
As for the blindfold comment, it's going to be a bit of both really. That's why I like being able to allow the player to take off the blindfold if you want to. All the math is going to be there no matter what. It's just a question of what people see. I'm not saying we have to give the option, but I do think not having it could alienate a part of the population.
I agree that players should be able to take off the blindfold, but not in context. Numbers are inherently out of context anyway (at least in a historical or fantasy setting); when you pull up a character sheet with numbers on it, you're stepping out of context. So a player who wants the numbers should be willing to go out of the game entirely and look at the code. If we make it reasonably easy to do that (but still require some effort), they should be satisfied.
One question that comes to mind is how do we handle the more physics based magic phase diagrams? Do we course grain them to a pinch of this to a whole lot of arm waving, or do we put some numbers there for people to really define the boundries? If we are trying to allow people to really explore that system I like the later approach just beacuse it allows for nuances that the other really doesn't allow.
I'm not familiar with the magic system, so I can't comment on that.
Another idea, maybe the numbers come from how much you train. An athelete usually knows their capabilities to run and jump better than me, because that's what they do. Maybe as you progress the more you know of where you sit in the realm of possiblities. Just another take.
Yes, characters with higher skill level should be better able to evaluate their skill. Perhaps they would automatically gain ranks in evaluating skills (their own or others'). They could also go to trainers to be evaluated. However, except in high-tech societies, this wouldn't give them numbers, just a more accurate and more detailed evaluation. In a high-tech society there would be numbers, but they may not be completely accurate or as detailed as the numbers in the code.
I want to think more about the pros and cons of numberless. It will certainly alienate a certain player type. The question is, will it appeal to another?
Yes, I'm sure it will. In addition to hardcore role-players and simulationists, it will appeal to people who prefer more freeform games: LARP's, storytelling games, forum-based nation-simulation games, and the like. People who want the game mechanics to be transparent so they don't get in the way.
Also if we modify the world a bit to somethng smaller and then allow you to transport between worlds you could have different lands easily addable but controled by the border guards. That would allow us to tinker with different socio-ecomonic landscapes as well as different types of fantasy. People sometimes keep the pvp seperate from the coop modes, maybe we can use that where certain worlds you need to sign in a PD to allow your character to go there since your gods don't hold sway there.
I like this idea. You could have several very small worlds with different genres.
Y'know, I'd actually be happy with 10-20 people. Edward is aiming at small groups for his thing.
Yes, I'm aiming for 6 players initially, though I can see a version as a wargame or nation-simulation game with 10-20 players.
We are building some pretty radical ideas. The reality is that we won't initially be able to implement them AND a big world. So we'll be building a smallish world to start anyway.
Starting small and scaling up is always good. Of course you need to make sure you can scale up when you're ready, but I think we're doing that.
