The Campaign Builder's Guild

I love pumping out the fluff for this, but crunch is where I have some difficulty. I can come up with all kinds of systems, but properly balancing them eludes me. I have realized that if I am going to give certain races their own small bonuses, that I need a base template for creation so I know what to do with those bonuses.

So here we are, I need some help designing a character sheet. Vreeg has told me I am welcome to take ideas from his campaign (which I absolutely love and may well do) but firstly I want to get an idea of what I want/need.

So then, I want the system to be:
- Classless: I hate forcing players (or myself) to stuff their character concept all into a little pre-made shell.
- Skill Based: Expounding upon the above, I hate when getting a magical class level somehow makes you better at picking locks, or jumping far, etc. Your experience should go to what you are actually using (and you should get some exp for failing since you can still learn from your mistakes).

So that covers my ideas for the system so far. It matches very much what Celtricia uses so we will see how that winds up. Next up is the attributes. I need to see what all I need.

There are alot of different things that people can do but to sum them up we have:
- Exert Body: The ability to promptly use muscle strength to move something. Forcing a door open, lifting a heavy load, or swinging a sword all cause you to exert yourself.
- Muscular Endurance: The ability to maintain exertion on a task for a certain amount of time. Swimming, running (or using the above example, holding up a heavy load for a long time) all require muscular endurance.
- Dexterity: The ability to control small precise movement, primarily associated with the hands. Firing a bow, or chiseling a statue both require dexterity.
- Agility: The ability to make quick and controlled full body movement. Agility utilizes various parts of the body, making them work in concert to achieve a desired result. This includes dodging a sword swipe, balancing on a narrow ledge, or reacting to a trap.
- Coordination: The ability to connect perception to reaction. Catching a ball or aiming at a target both require this.
- Health/Resistance: The ability to avoid succumbing from bodily damage. Shaking off an arrow in the arm, Overcoming a disease or poison, or remaining standing after a blow to the head... all of these require resistance. Health is closely tied to this (close enough it can't truly be separated). Health is the measurement of how much bodily harm you can take before your resistance begins to break down (and you eventually succumb and pass out or die from the damage).
- Intellect: The ability to store and analyze stored data. Recalling information on how to tie a knot or coming up with a plan to trap an animal are both examples of intellectual use.
- Wisdom: The ability to react to the world around you in a rational manner based on your perceptions and thoughts. Wisdom governs things such as telling if a person is bluffing, spotting something that is hiding, and observing social etiquette.
- Perception: Perception is the capability of receiving sensory input about the world around you. The five senses all fall under perception. Seeing something in the brush (though wisdom allows you to recognize what it is you see), smelling baked goods in the other room, or feeling a pea under your mattress all fall under perception.
- Personality: The collection of personal habits and traits that help decide how others react to you. Being able to call on a friend for help, being the center of attention at a party, and quickly earning a reputation all are based on your personality.
- Appearance: How you look. Seducing the priestess or drawing the attention of the guards with the appearance of your body both are based on your appearance.

Of course the above attributes can be reverted back to their DnD base (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma). However, I want to take a look at how I am going to best work these in, combining ones that fit together and keeping others separate.

Looking further into this I think I can safely lump a fair few together, simply using skills to base what a person is or isn't good at. So then I think I have a grouping of 7 skills based on what I feel can and cannot be combined.

Strength - Heavy but temporary exertion (melee combat, jumping, lifting)
Endurance - Long term exertion (carrying, jogging, swimming)
Coordination - Accurate control of the body (dodging, balancing, aiming)
Health - Resisting damage (physical, poison, disease)
Intelligence - Handling information (remembering, inventing, thinking)
Wisdom - Reasoning based on information and perception (perceiving, reasoning, judging)
Charisma - Interaction with others based on personality and appearance (stirring up people, performing, bribing)

So that is the basis. For now we will use Celtricia standard rolls to determine results (6d4, best 5) though later on we may go for something else depending. Anyhow we have our base from which we can expound other things. However we now come to the skill part. This is one I am perhaps not yet sure. However it gives me an idea. Perhaps a combination of your race, social class, and upbringing will determine your starting skill sets. All characters will have this so as long as we keep skill sets balanced it should work.

So you choose your race from the list. Then you roll for social class and your roll determines what you are based on the classes available to that race. Lastly you roll for upbringing which decides things based on your social class to show how you were brought up. Lastly you roll stats. So lets have an example...

You decide you want to play a Palaoyrian (someone from Palaoyr and the surrounding land) so you mark that up on your sheet and roll for class. As Palaoyr is heavily merchant based with an elected government its class chart might look like:

d% Roll:
1-40: Peasant (likely ties to other peasants and to farm owners, possible ties to city shop owners)
41-70: Low Class (possible ties to merchants guild and/or marketplace members)
71-90: Middle Class (likely ties to merchants guild and/or marketplace members)
91-98: Upper Class (likely ties to government officials and/or merchants guild upper members)
99-00: Noble (close ties to upper local government and/or merchants guild leadership)

So you roll a 65 and get middle class. Next you need your upbringing and based on your roll you get the following chart:

General Merchant (Brought up into the standard traders market, likely member of merchants guild)
Agricultural Overseer (Brought up into the food business, experience managing a farm or ranch)
Market Merchant (Brought up into the mordru market, experience with fast paced salesmanship)

etc etc...

Based on your rolls you would get the basis for your characters skill set (skills you already have ranks in that also level up faster thanks to your knowledge of them). So a middle class general merchant would have skills based on appraisal and presentation of items as well as haggling prices and finding deals. I might also have another chart that lets a person roll to determine things like parents business and knowledge that could give additional skills (your dads an ironworker so you get a slight bonus to crafting iron items thanks to the basics he taught you). After all this is done you roll stats and add everything up and you have the standard for your character.

With my lack of crunch talent though I am not sure how well this will work. So please if you spot discrepancies or errors let me know. I am also open to ideas and even just simple "this looks nice"'s. Anyhow, I would like to thank Vreeg for his great help, and to thank anyone who has or will in the future help me make this setting and its rules a reality. Thank you.

Hmm, any specific reason you want health to be a separate score and not a part of either strength or endurance. Okay, we are back to the standard D&D layout then, but i'm trouble coming up with a character who has high strength/endurance but low health, for example. Might just be me though.
Looks good otherwise; can't really give you any comments on the whole skill system since i'm not really an expert on that.

Because a persons constitution isn't tied to their muscular capability. For example, I as a person have exceptional muscular strength (I am a very quick runner). However, I have a lower fortitude. An example of this being that I get nauseated easily.

Thus I have high strength low health.

Pretty much the same thing Crippled Crow said. I'd suggest having it somehow linked to Endurance, maybe in a sort of A = B manner.

One thing to keep in mind is, the more things you have linked to a single given stat, the more powerful that stat is. You can balance this by either removing things from that one stat (changing it from A = B+C+D, to just A = B+C), adding more stuff to another stat (E = F to E = F+G), or a little bit of both. Playtesting the different tricks and actions and such (B, C, D, F and G, in my examples) will help you get a decent idea of which are more important.

I am a bit confused here. Muscular strength is the ability to exert your muscles over time (like swimming, long distance running, or carrying a heavy load) while health is the ability to resist unwanted or dangerous bodily conditions (overcoming sickness or poison, avoiding nausea, staying standing after being stabbed in the gut). Certainly people can have high endurance and high health, but they can also have one low and one high (the buff fighter who gets sick at the slightest scent of nasty stuff, or the odd skinny dude who has built up a resistance to poison from being a food taster for the king).

Ah, okay, it's just the way i read it, it really sounds like health has an effect on how much "damage" you can take (physically). And i'm not sure that has anything to do with something beyond your physical training? Of course, it depends on whether we are talking natural healing of wounds or the ability to survive a blow or deep slash?

To put it simply converted to DnD... Health is constitution (how much damage you can handle, how resistant you are to being overcome by harm, etc) while endurance and strength are DnD strength split into two parts.

hmm, okay, but to take your frail, yet poison-resistant, guy from before as an example, he could probably survive several doses of poison as well as a dozen virulent diseases, but you're saying that he will also be able to take two dozen hits in a barfight? Admitted, i don't know how you're going to handle damage, and if your health even has a high impact, but just wondering.

Well it is a difficult thing to work out. I could use the entire above thing totally split up but then I would have 12 different skills. Just seems like a bit much. So perhaps suggestions on what should and should not be combined as skills. Or even what should be split up more.

Nomadic, one of the issues you're getting yourself into is extremes. Someone who is overweight, for example, isn't overweight because of their stats, it's because they have an "overweight" flaw. That poison immune but low endurance character has a "poison immune" advantage.

Endurance and health are linked. Well rounded athletes (ones with high endurance) are generally very healthy. It's general enough that it should be the norm; things outside of the norms can be handled with flaws and advantages.

World of Darkness might be an interesting system for you to look at for inspiration. They have 9 stats that can be set up on a grid by Physical, Mental, Personality vs. Force, Defense, and Agility. For Physicals, you get Strength, Endurance, and Dexterity (I forget the others).

Then everything else seems to be skill based, though there are advantages and disadvantages. Skills can use different stats as well, depending on what's being done (an athletics skill could use any physical skill: hitting a target at range would be Dex, running for an hour would be Endurance, and lifting a heavy object would be strength).

As for skill based systems, you need to be careful that every skill is even. In the "Legend of the Five Rings" system, weapon skills cost the same as social skills and such, so the only reason warriors had better to hit than non-warriors is that warriors gained a free skill point in a couple of weapon skills; all that did was make it slightly more expensive for others to get them maxed.

As for leveling skills based on usage, you'd have to create a big sheet for skills, but here's my recommendation: whenever someone attempts a skill check who's success carries weight and importance, there's a space to make a tally. If they succeed, they get another tally. Then there would be a chart or table to tell you how many tally's you need to "level" the skill. I say a check that carries weight to mean that the check is challenging for you, or a check that is very important for you to succeed. If you can forge a gladius with your eyes close, doing so will not gain you any skill, for example.

This might be a lot of extra work, but it could be rewarding for the right kind of group.

I really dislike flaws/advantages (though I don't mind someone using a flaw by itself to add depth to a character) so I am staying away from that. I want a skill based system (as opposed to class based) which in itself means stuff is going to get complex. This is inevitable though when you are trying to give players more freedom than class systems can give. I think I am stuck at the first step here. I am HORRIBLE with crunch and I don't know how to go about doing it. The only resources I have are my 3.5 core books, a couple online areas (like the SRD) and then you guys here. So any tips on how to build a skill based system would be of great help.

Well, you could just remove attributes, and then only write up different skills? So physical training would be a skill, conditioning would be a skill, calculation would be a skill, and so on. I'm not sure this is viable in any way, it was just an idea.

My advice is to look up new, different systems. If you get the chance, WoD has a decent system (or, at very least, had a decent system; I can't speak for their current system), but another good system to look at, I think, is GURPS. They have a free version, called GURPS Lite, so you might want to take a peek at that.

My own system is heavily GURPS influenced, along with a few other systems thrown in there, so maybe that might give you some ideas.

Ultimately, the more ways you see something handled, the more likely you'll find what works best for you.

How do you want people to improve in their skills?  This has a lot do do with how everything else will work.  I remember going through a lot of permutations trying to work that out.
I finally came up with one experience chart for all skills, but having an internal experience modifier adjusted by attributes and by how good the teaching source was.

I want it to be experience based really. You pick a lock, you get better at picking locks, etc...