@bad-at-lurking said in Wheel of Time mechanics:
One thing that I think might help with character diversity, if you ever get the point of having a population that sustains it, is making crafting, trading and lore specialties as demanding as the One Power or earning a Blademaster reputation.
Yes, that'd be great. But (and this isn't WoT-specific), what makes it worth it for them? What can they do, in practical terms?
Crafting is easier in a way - they can make cool swords and staves. Trading requires an economy, and we haven't discussed that at all, but I'd very much like to. Finally... lore.. I don't have anything here. What's going to come in as handy as the stuff we've been discussing already?
It would be interesting to see these very powerful characters who basically have to build up their networks of merchants and tradespeople if they want to be able to maintain a Great House or build (and sustain) an army. Or have to consult scholars to get clues as to where McGuffin X might be, etc.
Resource management is where that's at. But it's hard. We'd need a robust system from the ground up.
If all those specialties come out of the same base pool of points and count against some theoretical maximum, (which may be absolute or slowly lifted over time), you have characters who have to make meaningful trade-offs. Sure, it's great to be best in breed at something, but if that's ALL you are, you need a support network.
I don't like maximums, I prefer... choices. If you over-invest in one thing you won't be as good in others - and then the challenge is making sure what you don't buy is as significant as what you do. You'll never get it quite right - ultimately a 'build' will be the 'best one' compared to the rest - but as long as the power gap isn't too large I think I'd rather have that, than everyone having to be cardboard copies of each other.
Thoughts?
@seraphim73 said in Wheel of Time mechanics:
I'd like PCs to purchase overall potency, individual Powers or weaves directly, with each purchase becoming more narrow but more impactful.
I'm trying to figure out a system that allows PCs to buy sword forms directly to improve their fightingNeither of these sound easy in the slightest, and they both sound like they would result in a great many "filler" skills/weaves/forms that very few people take (and some that everyone takes).
Yeah, after some thought I don't like the early take of actually buying up individual forms. If not for the reasons you listed but because it's a headache from a design point of view to balance out all those dozens of forms, and from a player's perspective to even know what to use at any given time.
I think that your idea of "second-tier" skills is an interesting one, however. Say you've got specializations in Air, Water, Earth, Fire, and Spirit for Channeling; Offensive, Defensive, One-on-One, and Group for weapon skills; Charm, Convince, Intimidate, and Bargain for Persuasion; Quality, Decoration, Speed, and Cost for Crafting (I'm making these up as I go along, you would want to change the details, of course), etc... it might work. But again, you're no longer anywhere near as simple or easy as you might be otherwise.
The design challenge here won't be to keep the system simple since I think as long as we keep it consistent it will work; the social equivalent of a channeling build means you just pick different Tier 2 skills ("Military Logistics" instead of "Fire" for example to greatly cut down the costs of maintaining troops).
It's making sure every single choice on the tier is, at least roughly and within thematic reason, equivalent to the other. I'd love social skills to be a real thing since it's such a strong trope in fantasy, but can I provide players with returns for those purchases that can compete with stabbing people really well? I'm not saying I can't, or that it can't be done, but we're missing the other piece of the puzzle - the economic and military resource management.
What if we broke things down into three distinct ... let's call them templates? Then we can see what each can do. And if we can add a forth then let's do it.
- Channelers.
- Non-channeling combatants.
- Military and social prodigies. Let's merge these from a design perspective although they are separate skillsets IC, to keep things simple and not add too many skills - remember, the more selection of useful skills we offer the less power these archetypes will have, since they will need to spread out their spends compared to a physical character who can specialize better.
Then we can go into resource management - namely skills which modify how much gold it takes to keep an army, what it's generated by, etc.
There are a lot of games that do the Heroes Journey well, all it really takes is a high amount of XP given out, and a logarithmic(ish) cost scale to increase your skills.
One obvious way to curtail this - which we'll definitely need to for channelers else we'll have powerhouses on our hands no matter what - is to have XP tiers which can be increased as the game goes by. It's not that radical a notion, and it should work fine.
So at first (I'll use arbitrary numbers here) you might have 50 XPs as your cap, then in six months change it to 75, then... so newbies can always catch up - and we can speed up their progress until they do - up to the current cap before they proceed at the same pace as their oldbie-r peers.
This sounds very interesting, but also really hard to balance. What about something where you have a Channeling stat, with Elemental specializations, and then can just note where your character has particular strengths/weaknesses with individual weaves? Like Edges and Flaws-style? Then you don't have to have a full list of ratings for individual weaves (since there are likely dozens), but you can still have people who have advanced expertise (or weakness) in a given weave.
Hrm, so you're saying that instead of spending XP the 'interesting choice' we are asking players to make is to pick a flaw and edge? Be stronger in Water but weaker in Fire at the same time?
I guess I liked XP because it promotes the 'interesting choice' motif. You don't have to buy Fireball up but it looks attractive if you can spend that last XP to buy it up some more, doesn't it? Shame you can't use it then to purchase some lands of your own, or a military commission or... whatever.
That's the kind of MUSH I'd like to run. If players are always second-guessing themselves about what they could have bought instead of what they did, and we keep the system as simple as possible - easy to understand but hard to master, if you wish - then it'll be good.