I agree, active roleplaying comes first. I must have missed Yakumo's old thread on this. I'll look it up.
(TONS of mechanics discussion here. Feel free to skip if you like)
Wow, you're right on target with my thinking. I was going to reduce the number of abilities to 5, however, rolling a few of the concepts together/eliminating some/adding others. My current list is as follows, and I will confess, is largely inspired by 7th Sea:
- Brawn (Think Strength and Constitution; raw physical power and toughness)
- Finesse (Agility, speed, dexterity, hand-eye coordination, reflexes, etc)
- Intellect (Intelligence, reasoning, common sense, memory, wits, etc.)
- Moxie (That special something undefinable, the X-factor, Panache--basically an attribute for supernatural will and, to an extent, charisma)
- Perseverence (The ability to keep on going, resolve, inability to quit, etc.)
These five abilities (considered the 'active' version) are matched with five corresponding 'passive' abilities--saving throws, if you will:
- Fortitude (Resisting poison, disease, fatigue, physical damage, etc.)
- Reflexes (Avoiding area damage, catching a falling rope, spatial reactions, that kind of thing)
- Perception (The mind's ability to recognize and perceive falsehoods--illusions, compulsions, stealth, and so forth)
- Luck (All others dangers that need avoiding, when other situations don't apply, picking which PC has 'bad' luck)
- Recovery ('Passive' Perseverence involves recovering from damage/conditions when a save is failed. Recuperating from damage, poison, enchantments, fatigue, etc. This concerns them all)
By default, the active and passive abilities have the same score (typically -5 through +5), which is applied to rolls for those scenarios. Active abilities are added to skills (and unlike D&D, there isn't a set ability for each skill--more on that later). Passive abilities do not have a skill added to them, but can be raised independently through Talents (again, more on those down the line).
Skills run exactly the way you suggested above. There are 'combat' skills (literally sword, axe, bow, dodge, block, etc.), and other non-combat skills that run the usual range. Furthermore, there are Supernatural skills, borrowing some ideas from M&M and TrueSorcery to develop a skill-based system for that. It's been... a little tricky. Especially in order to make it flexible for multiple genres. At the moment, there are roughly 30 'professional' skills, 30 'martial' skills (melee, ranged, defense, and other physical skills), and a limit of 20 supernatural skills that a given character can acquire (through Talent expenditure). I wanted to simplify this, but it got to a point where combat was MUCH easier to simplify than other skills, which would've disrupted the balance between a big, strong, unskilled barbarian character and a weak, knowledgeable wizard type.
But in essence, it creates the basic mechanic for rolling: d20+ability+skill vs. Difficulty. I stuck with the standard d20 style of rolling simply because I think that's what most people are used to, and because that made it easy for me to calculate the odds of any given situation (each number on a d20 is 5%). Subject to change if it seems more suitably (I've strongly considered d10, for instance, but I'm not sure that it makes enough of a difference).
Unfortunately, I couldn't quite fit EVERYTHING into the above Abilities and Skills, so there are Talents--the anomalous things I couldn't quite fit in the base mechanic. I still think it's significantly more straight-forward than D&D, and most importantly, eliminates the need for classes and levels by giving it a BRP/RuneQuest style.
I've tried very hard to think about all the different ways GMs might want characters to level online, and the idea is to keep it flexible enough to accomodate all of them. If a GM wants to personally pick what new skills a characters picks up, they can. If they want to let characters choose and assign them points, that's possible, too. I'm considering a combination of the two as a baseline, much like Rinascimento, where the GM picks out areas a character is allowed to improve, based on what they've been studying/doing in-game.
I also want the system to be feasible for GMs who don't want characters to level up at all, for instance in a Short. Simply give them more starting points to spend and inform them that that's it, that's the way they are, don't plan on more. This holds a certain appeal to me.
The main point being that leveling up is open to the GM's personal tastes.
Mostly horrifying to me.
I want to eliminate excessive rolling, too, but I don't want to go full free-form, to the point where there's no wondering if a certain action can be accomplished or not. I prefer something along the lines of 'taking 10' with D&D, where a skill can be considered high enough that some things uses are automatically successful. I've been debating about where to draw this line, but tentatively one could 'Take 5' without any extra time. It'd allow a GM to speed things along if they chose, and a player to reliably gauge their character's capabilities. But I'm still toying with the idea.
But it'll never be entirely dice-free.
This is super-problematic, because then combat becomes either impossible or completely unnecessary. Granted, I can conceive of a play style wherein that would be desired, I just wouldn't want to play it.
I'm trying to simplify the existing systems and adapt what I can from them to online use without completely revising the core tenets of them.
This is interesting, and I kind of want to run numbers on it some more and figure out how to balance it, though I'm hesitant to do so. The adaptation I've conceived of for combat does incidentally use about 5 health levels for simplicity, but damage is done a bit differently. It also still uses d20's, which I find preferrable simply because of they way they scale with points.
At any rate, the current idea is to keep the above 'combat' skills, which are both offensive and defense. An attacker rolls their skill (modified by any situational circumstances) vs. an opponent's defense, as if the opponent is taking 10. If they hit, they deal damage appropriate to their Brawn and the weapon's damage rating--no roll involved. The damage then sets the DC for a character's Fortitude Save to resist the damage, and is cumulative until a roll is failed. Failure drops the character down a health level.
That sounds a little complicated, I guess, but it falls into place simply to me. Say a character has Brawn 2 and a dagger is Damage 3. They deal 5 damage on a successful hit. The first hit has a DC of 5 to resist, the second 10, the third 15, and so on until the defender fails a roll, whereupon the count resets.
It involves a
tiny bit of book-keeping, but only for the duration of the combat, which I find much easier to track. There are only 5 health levels (including 'Normal'), so combat is pretty quick.
To further simplify combat, I've borrowed from 7th Sea and M&M to integrate 'goons'--simple minions that have only one health level, so when they fail a roll, they're dead, just like that. Nicer for the GM that way. I could further simplify it by 'when they're hit, they're gone', but that might be too far. I've also considered a quicker stat block for them, as 7th Sea does for their Brute Squads, but haven't sat down to thoroughly look at it yet.
The main objective here is so that combat has at least a little depth and strategy to it without being very complicated. It also allows a bit of personal taste--a GM can make combat more or less complicated with the usual grappling, tripping, sundering, etc. if they want to, or just leave it at combat skills. I also want there to be some danger of lasting damage/injury from a combat and fear of death, so it isn't completely trivial.
A couple other combat considerations: again, group initiative; no map; no specified length for a 'round' of combat (this way if a combat sequence is not perfectly in line with other simultaneous roleplay, it's no biggie--the time comes out in the GM's description of combat, so that a round can last a few seconds or a few minutes. Or, scaling the whole thing up to mass combat, an hour or more).
Spells are both easier and harder than combat. I don't want to make a standard list of spells, because I think that's too uninventive and bland. I like flexible magic. I'm trying for effects-based, but that hasn't been entirely possible. At any rate, whatever I do settle on will involve a 'skill check' to use a kind of power for a given effect--the more powerful or complicated, the bigger the check. If it succeeds, the effect happens, and if it's harmful then it involves a Save from the opposing party (Fort, Reflex, Perception, or Luck)
In the end, I guess it's a lot like what you're saying, but with a wider range of results. TrueSorcery has been valuable as a starting point of gauging how complex any given interpretation of an effect is, reducing them to 'Enchant', 'Afflict', 'Healing', and other generalized effects. M&M is similar in a lot of ways, too, though I'd prefer the skills to cover the genre-specific descriptor of that power. It's... tricky.
Whatever the case, I want Supernatural Skills 'unlocked' via Talent expenditures, for balance reasons.
I think Saving Throws are pretty essential and actually help to streamline a lot of other annoying mechanics, but I see your point on all the rest. AoO's especially. Critical hits I hadn't considered, but that's a pretty good point, too, but players do tend to enjoy rolling crits
Basically, though, I don't want any 'interrupt' effects, because there's no place for them to happen between a DM specifying a danger and the character being affected by it. They have no good place in online roleplaying, because they're either superfluous or necessitate backtracking and rewriting, which I absolutely do not want.
I'm less worried about what money looks like in-game, and more how it looks out-of-game. This makes me partial to the 'Wealth' mechanic d20 Modern has, where your finances are determined by a number: +7, for instance. You make 'purchase rolls' against a DC, as appropriate for how tough the item is to get. In its current form, I think the Wealth Roll is a little unnecessarily unwieldy, but I think that can be fixed, perhaps with your earlier idea of eliminating the rolling. Say... you have a certain amount of Wealth, much like a skill. You can 'Take 5', Take 10', or 'Take 20'--forget rolling. If you Take 5, no thought involved, you can just buy anything of that, uh, 'wealth level'. If you have to Take 10, your Wealth goes down by one as a result. If you have to take 20, it goes down by 5.
Example: A night at a cheap inn is a Wealth Value of, say, 6. As long as you're not destitute (+1 or higher), you can easily afford it. But bribing your way into a high society club involves a lot more funds, more like Wealth Value 12. Only a fairly affluent person (+7 or higher) is going to be able to swing that without any problems, but as long as you're not destitute, you can set aside enough cash to do it (+2 or higher).
It kind of falls apart on the 'Take 20' portion, where even someone destitute can afford super-expensive stuff. Unless you can't go below 0 or something. I don't know, this is the first time I've settled into working it out. Maybe it needs to be more condensed than a d20, something more like a 1-10 value.
But I don't want people to have to track coins, or bank accounts, or credit card limits, or silly stuff like that. A Wealth value works for all settings, so I like it.
I agree--up to a point. Some settings are magic-heavy, or at least chock full of powerful items, whether they are explained via super science or magic. Here the effects-based magic works out, as an item can be assumed to have a certain skill rolled to a certain number, making its effects finite and defined. But this is up to individual GMs--the default assumes that magic items are given out sparingly. I might even incorporate them into Talents or something.
Yes--though I do favor
some kind of limitation. I'm thinking Fatigue can play a part here, running analagous to health levels. Use of spells incurs a Fort save vs. the same DC the power needed to beat to be cast in the first place, and failure drops the character down a Fatigue level. It's a thought, anyway.
You're pretty much on par with my thinking here. I wanted to simplify it, and yet allow for a character to be naturally more suited to social situations then others--hence the skills Subterfuge and Expression, borrowed from White Wolf. The ability to go with these isn't defined, but is typically either Moxie or Intellect, depending on the type of conversation. Perseverence could be used for a particularly drawn out debate, like dealing with bureaucracy, or under interrogation by the military, or perhaps simply when really, really tired.
At any rate, the theory is this. The result of what a character says in any given situation is based on what they actually type out. However, the character's ability to convey that dialogue is governed by 'Expression'. This covers all the nuances of communication--mumbling, slurring words, stuttering, maintaining solid eye contact, avoiding ticks and twitches, and basically just communicating effectively. A character good with people has a high Expression, and can get their words across--for good or ill--as it is written. A character with low Expression has trouble getting what's in their head across to their audience. It's up to the GM to determine what this means, but basically a GM has free reign to look at text in the 'worst possible light' if a character rolls poorly. Even with low Expression, however, it's possible for a militant soldier to convince someone through actual eloquent roleplaying to the point where even poorly received, the speech works for itself.
Subterfuge is simpler--your ability to lie convincingly. Some people are just naturally better or worse at lying, or have the training/habits/experience to pull it off. This doesn't account for anything the lie itself hasn't considered--if a character invents a lie that the NPC already knows to be false because they have other information, it's impossible to fool them. This is just the ability to make the typed text appear completely genuine for what it is.
So, to an extent, a lie is still only as good as the player's ability to make it seem plausible.
Relax, I'm just as bad, and it was pleasantly surprising to get such a great volume of feedback.
You've even gotten me thinking about things I hadn't yet considered. It seems in general, though, like you and I have some definite similarities in the way we'd like to see things go.
I think he'd fit right in.
Actually, I've kind of missed Dragonlance, too. I might revive it when Dark Sun wraps up, or Ars Magica (whichever one ends first). I can't decide if I'd want to keep it as-written with D&D mechanics or to try it with this Forum System. It probably depends on a number of factors, like whether it's been playtested, and what draws more of the original players.
