Experimental System: Legendary Heroes, Discussion

[Aequitas]

Greetings everyone, this is the discussion thread for my  Legendary Heroes game system. Feel free to post any comments, question, etc. in this thread.

[LordVreeg]

we'll be talking soon.
Skill-based and I get along well.

[snakefing]

I'm all for skill-based, but classless isn't necessarily the same thing.

Anyway, what limits do you foresee on "banking" Stamina. I mean, in theory I could go all night "banking" my Stamina, and wake up with, say, 300 Stamina. Something tells me that's not really what you have in mind, but I'd be interested what you do have in mind.

[Aequitas]

Good point about classless vs. skill-based. The idea is that players can choose which ever skills they wish to concentrate on, no hard-wired sets of skills (aka classes). I was thinking the system could incorporate a kind of mentoring mechanism that allows players to find NPC's that have knowledge of skills to learn and train with.

Agreed there should be a limit on stamina banking, I was thinking it should be 50% of their maximum stamina. If they get 25 stamina per energy burst, they can carry over up to 12 stamina to the next burst. I'm basically trying to simulate a "reserving your strength for later" kind of action.

[Ra-Tiel]

An interesting approach. :D

However, I'm curious about the multiple ability skills. Why did you do that? It seems very "Das Schwarze Auge" ("The Dark Eye") -like. :)

[Superfluous Crow]

With you having a tinker skill to open locks, it seems that you have somewhat generalized skills?
Wouldn't you say that was somewhat of a problem in a skill-based system, as skills are the only choices the characters can make to define their "class" (to use standard terminology)? Generalized skills kind of cuts down the amount of choices you can make.  
Of course, this might be a completely obsolete point if the rest of your skill list is chuck-full of choices to make, but i just wanted to make the point in case you hadn't considered it. :)
Otherwise it looks interesting!

[Aequitas]

@Ra-Tiel, I've been play 2nd/3rd D&D for years and have occasionally been frustrated that most skills were based on only a single ability. It didn't matter that I had really great dexterity, I couldn't handle my sword any better than the muscle-bound oaf beside me :) yes, 3rd give feats for dexterity/weapons, but that pretty much just flips the problem :)

What I'm trying to simulate with the three-ability approach is that people generally can use their greater abilities to compensate for lesser ones. Take the sword example, the combination of Strength, Dexterity, Reason allows me to balance my ability to cleave at enemies (Strength), figure out where my enemy have a weak-point (Reason) and carefully manipulate my sword to take advantage of them (Dexterity).

@Crippled Crow, I guess this leads me to your question. Yes, for the most part I have generalized skills but several of them. My idea here is that I wanted to try to create a relatively simple system, but still have a lot of flexibility. I'm not sure if I've struck quite the right balance, but will try to post some more details on skills later today.

I hadn't really thought of it as players defining their own class, I was coming from the approach that characters just exist. Their experiences help them define who they are as a "person", not a "stereotype". Having said that, perhaps my original post should have described my system as "level-less" rather than "classless"; because in the end I can see a lot of benefits of offering some structure in the form of classes.

[Superfluous Crow]

Well, classes are in many ways just a pre-selected bundle of skills, so that's why i made that comparison :)
But I'll wait for your next post then.

[LordVreeg]

Good point about classless vs. skill-based. The idea is that players can choose which ever skills they wish to concentrate on, no hard-wired sets of skills (aka classes). I was thinking the system could incorporate a kind of mentoring mechanism that allows players to find NPC's that have knowledge of skills to learn and train with.

Agreed there should be a limit on stamina banking, I was thinking it should be 50% of their maximum stamina. If they get 25 stamina per energy burst, they can carry over up to 12 stamina to the next burst. I'm basically trying to simulate a "reserving your strength for later" kind of action.

You will definitely need a mentoring system to regulate how more esoteric skills are found and learned.  My whole game is based on interwoven factions, and one of their primary interactions with the PCs is when the PCs want to learn or get better at a skill.  While finding someone to teach swimming may be easy, and may be posible to learn by oneself, there are only 2 locations in all of Celtricia to learn the Magic of the Shade.
Similarly, in semi-common sklills, there needs to be a mechanism for how well different schools teach something.  Gnome Stew went on and on about the problems  of character identity here Gnoish fun without understanding that much of gtheir issues were in the systems the were talking about.  It's not bad if a guild of Assassins can teach Tracking, they just probably don't teach it as well as a knighthood of Rangers might (though they might teach urban tracking better).  

[Aequitas]

That's a lot like what I was thinking, having mentours scattered throughout the campaign world invites the players to explore their environment more, maybe even make pacts with certain organizations in order to gain some special skills. Definitely agree with the idea that certain mentours would teach certain skills better than others.

[Superfluous Crow]

So, now that you have a skill list i can comment some more.
First, a basic question about the basic skills: can you train in those?
Secondly, I personally think that some of your skill groupings are a bit... odd.
The craft/forge skills are odd mostly because they can be used to make absolutely anything; its probably a good deal more useful for a player character, and is by no means gamebreaking, but it's slightly strange when the expert carpenter also just happens to be a talented glassblower (or basket-weaver etc.)
Also... Armor skills? Of course always funnier when you can make some extra rolls, but i personally find even armor proficiency odd, and the idea of someone being vastly better at wearing something baffles me.  
Can't come up with anything more to say for now :)
Keep up the good work! :D

[LordVreeg]

[blockquote=CC]Also... Armor skills? Of course always funnier when you can make some extra rolls, but i personally find even armor proficiency odd, and the idea of someone being vastly better at wearing something baffles me. [/blockquote]
Hey, I resemble that remark...
Seriously, even before I created Celtricia, one of the first permutaions I made when I still played D&D was reducing the HP gain and instead instituted an armor class reduction at certain levels.  (A year or so after the DMG came out)
And so when we went skill based a few years later, we wanted to keep it a low HP thing, and so Basic Defence skills (with sub skills) has been one of the most favored rules.

My SCA friends have had a lot to do with the evolution of Guildschool's Avoid/Protect.  There is a huge amount of skill and training that goes along with Shield use, and as such, Shields should gain more from skills than regular armor.  (and there are very good reasons that shields are always the first type of armor a culture uses...they are damn effective...but more on that piece o game design some other thread ;) )
And the heavier the armor, the more training comes into it's use.  Knowing the planes of the armor, where you can actually absorb more damage versus less damage, practising to carry it long term in a combat, My SCA guys say this improves drastically with practice.

[Superfluous Crow]

I admit my martial experience isn't that big, and i think defense rolls are superb; that's a good mechanic. But i still don't think armor should work as a skill (or that's my personal opinion anyway). I don't whether you're going to use feats or anything similar, but i think armor is best left as a minor ability, and not as a stand-alone skill. It seems a bit too much.
But that might just be me stuck in the last gaming paradigm :-p
(something you won't find me admitting too often :))

[khyron1144]

I kind of like what I see so far.  I especially like the keying skills to more than one stat concept.


Small random nitpicky thought:
You might want to think more about titles for the system.  Legendary Heroes reminds me of Legendary Lives, a system I never played but have heard of through a review in Dragon back when Dragon did reviews and was an actual print publication.

[Aequitas]

@Crippled Crow:

Yes you can train in basic skills to improve upon them. The only difference between basic skills and all the others is that you inherently know them and don't need to spend time on learning them before they can be used.

Excellent point about the Craft/Forge skills. What I'm thinking now is that perhaps the Craft skill should as a generic template for all crafting actions. So basically combine (yes more grouping, but bear with me) the Brew Potion, Craft Item and Forge Item skills into a single Craft skill. You would then learn skills such as Craft Item (basket), Craft Weapon (long sword), Craft Potion (healing), etc. Each "sub-type" of the Craft skill would actually be treated as it's a skill and trained in separately from the others. I guess I'm just trying to keep a consistent set of rules for crafting items overall.

I'm glad you like the idea of defensive rolls. However, I respectively disagree with your opinion on not having Armour as skills. Like LordVreeg mentioned there is an aspect of training for knowing how best to use a particular piece of armour. What are it's weak points? How do you go about protecting those areas in combat? etc. Out of curiosity though, any thoughts on how would I incorporate armour as a minor ability instead of as a full skill.

@Khyron, great to hear you like it so far, I'll keep plugging away :) Agreed, the Legendary Heroes title may have to change to avoid confusion with other systems, I'm open to suggestions :)