🚀 go-pugleaf

sos@oz.plymouth.edu (Steffan O'Sullivan) writes:


>To be honest, though, I'm not sure I'm liking the direction Loren's
>system is going - it's getting too complicated for a game with the word
>Simple in the title.  More thoughts later - I just wanted to reassure
>Paul that his objection would be valid if a hand were to be held, but
>that I wouldn't want such a situation.

Seriously!  One thing that bugs me is that discussions of game design
seem to move instantly to combat systems.  Can we chill on that for a
while?  The card system is very elegant but only good for conflicts. And
it is getting complicated fast.

To return to Stephan's original SLUG suggestion...  I like the idea of
selecting anything in the world as skills/attributes. Perhaps a
"standard" list to start out with, of the stereotypical ones, would be
good, but by all means let it get weird.

I wouldn't *force* players to take negatives for every positive; this
would land you, as Stephan implies in his examples, with character
sheets full of pointless negative attributes and skills (the Waco
Kid's Needlepoint skill) which exist merely to justify the positives
and may never come into play.  How many negative attributes did Indy
Jones have?  Did they really justify his positives?  Or were they all
in things we didn't see, like Ballet, or Weasel Taming?  I'd give
players a certain amount of positives for free.  And I'd make it a
random amount.  (sound of S.O'S. retching in the background!) The
reasoning: psychological.  If I have the same number of points to
increase my attributes as everybody else, every single frivolous but
interesting ability will lower my amount of non-frivolous, useful
abilities and make me relatively weak in the party.  Whereas if there
is a certain degree of randomness built in, there's going to be some
variation no matter what, and there is no absolute Game Balance
between characters, so Devil take the hindmost.

Anyway, another great idea is that of leaving things in reserve for
when they're needed.  That should be allowed; after all, in stories we
often discover things about characters that would never have come up
if the plot hadn't taken a certain direction...  I like that.  Perhaps
a certain number of those should be given free, without negatives,
too.

What say?

(In my "dream system", characteristics would not necessarily be listed
in terms of ability or power, on graded scales of any time.  They
would be whatever properties defined the character, whether useful or
not, and gave him a place in the story.  They would accumulate during
the story, and not be spelled out beforehand (though they could be
planned, they needn't be)...  But I'm not sure in how much detail such
a thing can be done...)

Ed Heil. Yes, THE Ed Heil
c/o Chris Lantinga, clanti55@ursa.calvin.edu