G33X Nexus Entertainment > Precursors

Player Creation

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fehknt:
There's a game system called Alternity that does the perk/flaw stuff.  You get X character points and get to spend them on any combination of raw stats and perks, while a flaw or three can give you a couple extra points.

The key to the system working, I think, is that in a perk/flaw situation, you always lost more than a perk gave you that cost an equivalant amount.  Maybe not much more, but enough to make it count.  The perks/flaws made for a good basis for your character concept.

If the ranges aren't too great that the randomness will cause, then I see no problem -- the main problem is with many large ranges of numbers, then it becomes worth it to re-do your character many times to get good numbers. To vary it to add some flavor and not too much more I think would work just fine.

It's usually easiest to do the perks/flaws on a point basis, rather than 1 for X basis...  but that's your call.  I like the idea of being able to nerf your own stats for extra goodness in the perk area, myself (or perks without any flaws).

whitelynx:
I definitely agree that edges and flaws should be done on a point-based system, but I'm undecided whether we should do edges and flaws with the same points as skills. There are some very good reasons to keep these separate, mostly ease of balance.

As far as the stats system in general, I envision more than just different settings for your point spread. Thinking in an interface sense, I envision a slider that can go from a very flat spread (about 5 points worth of spread from min to max) to a very steep slope. (about 50 points spread) That way people can set it any way they want, and there's more variance just from where they happened to have clicked it. In this case, user error could be enough randomness. ;-)

I definitely think it's still a good idea to add some randomness to the _outcomes_ of the points, but not necessarily to the points themselves. Taking the example Chris was giving of a very Shadowrun-like assets system, a certain number of points put into assets would give you a certain range of outcomes. This way people could make minor adjustments however they felt appropriate, but within the bounds of the spread they chose earlier. I almost think that there should be minimums as well as maximums for each slot to further enforce the point spread idea. (it would be easier to show this on a whiteboard, but oh well...)

Dave

whitelynx:
Thinking more about this, I have come up with the following rough idea for the method of character creation:

1. Player ranks their character's stats into different slots. The stats here could include wealth/assets, physical attributes (constitution, dexterity, strength), mental attributes (intelligence, wisdom, charisma), skills (this may actually be determined by their intelligence), or knowledge (ditto).

2. Player chooses a distribution for the slots. This limits how many points they can put into each slot. The distribution would basically be the spread from the highest slot to the lowest.

3. Player distributes a fixed number of points between the different slots.

4. Player chooses edges and flaws. (this may be integrated with 3 if we decide to share points between the two... edges and flaws could even be in a slot.)

5. Choose skills.

6. Choose knowledge.

Much of this is again ripped from Shadowrun, as Chris was saying. The split between skills and knowledge is one thing that I really admire about Shadowrun. Integrating knowledge into an MMORPG may prove challenging, however...

Dave

fehknt:
Knowelege could give characters additional options when talking to NPCs?  You only know to ask if there's a link between two things if you know of the other thing that happened 100 years ago...  Just a thought.

Morgul:
Well, knowledge has more 'practical' applications. Do you know how to repair something? How about how to dock a ship? Do you know how to read anything other than English? Do you know how to read? Things like that I believe are where knowledge would be used....

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