Drunkard's Walk Forums

This is a collection of ideas that's been bouncing around my head for some time now.  Over the last couple days, they've been coalescing into part of a tabletop RPG.  I'm a lot better at worldbuilding and general design than I am at mechanics, so bear with me, please.Setting:  High fantasy.  Civilization exists, but is constantly under threat.  Monsters- stronger, faster, tougher than mortal man- roam the wild places of the world, striking out against towns and villages.  Magic is fairly common- maybe one in ten has the talent for it.Character System:  This is the core of what I'm going for.  The thought that prompted this whole thing was basically 'How do I make fighters and wizards feel distinct, badass and balanced?'  The answer was pretty simple.
There are three general character classes.  Casters are your wizardly sorts- inherently gifted with magic, focusing on casting spells in battle.  Clerics make pacts with supernatural entities- primarily gods, but demons and unaligned spirits are also options- who use magic on their behalf.  The magic they get is more refined, more complex than Caster magic, but also less flexible.  Finally, Combatants are, on their own, entirely mundane.  They compete with Casters, Clerics, and the superhuman monsters of the world through unparalleled martial skill, borrowing the magic of others (in the form of stat-boosting enchantments and magically empowered equipment), and finding non-magical ways to get things done.
Note that this isn't a class system.  Instead, character development is done more like the way White Wolf handles it- characters earn XP, which lets them buy skills, spells, proficiencies, martial arts, spirit pacts, enchantments... basically, every form of character development possible.  Certain purchases- the unique features of each class- tend to be mutually exclusive, but everything that isn't directly excluded (or dependent on an excluded purchase) is available.  The rub is that class features synergize.  Investing in a class gets you discounts on further purchases tied to that class, and investing in skill/spell/martial art trees gets you additional discounts on the rest of that tree.  The more you specialize, the more you get out of it.  Ironically enough, some class features can offer discounts on out-of-class features that synergize well.
I'm envisioning each class as being very wide- wider than any one- or three- characters can possibly master.  There's room to specialize, to play each class several different ways, even before you start to consider multiclassing.  The Combatant, for instance, can be played as a traditional thief, ninja, fighter, ranger... basically, as any mundane class.  Cleric encompasses the D&D cleric, (parts of the) warlock, druid, and artificer, just off the top of my head, and Caster can be played as a wizard, sorcerer, (the rest of) warlock, and many more.
Magic System:  Here's the other bit that really inspired what I have.  'Magic' is the ability to 'push' against the fabric of the world.  If you wanted to put it in sci-fi terms, think of it as an inherent ability to make 'waves' in the quantum foam.  Each wave has a limited- and incredibly blunt- impact on the world; useless on its own, but when you put enough waves together in the right positions... you get a spell.
'Spells' are four-dimensional patterns, drawn out of magic, whose creation has a useful effect.  This isn't easy to do; casting a spell is a lot like drawing a picture on the surface of a lake by running around the edge of it with a wave generator... only in 3D, instead of 2D.  Half the effort involved isn't even spent creating the pattern, but neutralizing the bits of the waves that aren't part of the pattern.  When you don't do that, you get the effect you want... plus a menagerie of other, random, side effects.
This is where the name comes from.  The people of this world think of it as, metaphysically, a tapestry.  Magic is the act of reweaving it into a new pattern.  Gods, demons, and spirits- technically all the same thing- are repeated motifs.  A god of fire, for instance, is the pattern of fire, shaped by belief into a sapient being.  This is why Clerics are different from Casters; instead of doing magic themselves, they have spirits (who, existing only as patterns, are not limited as mortal beings are) performing magic for them.  Spirits can shape patterns more complex than even a dozen Casters working in unison... but each Cleric can only get a fraction of their attention, and they don't quite understand the mortal mentality.  Clerical magic is less flexible than Caster magic because the Caster can cast what he wants at the time; the Cleric can only receive the precise boons their pacted spirits have agreed to provide.
More on this later, as I think of it... and as people ask questions.  Please, offer anything that comes to mind.  Questions about what I've written?  Elaborations?  Suggested game mechanics?  Quibbles?  Even suggestions on where to ask?  Post it!

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My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.

I've been writing a bit.

Interesting... I'm curious about the cultural ramifications of the class system, but that can come later. It's pretty obvious that Clerics are going to have a classic "spell list" to pick from -- but is the system going to allow them to determine the contents of the list at character creation as a part of determining the spirit(s) they deal with? And is Caster magic going to be improvisational rather than list-based?
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Then there are the "magical" artifacts. By the system you describe, most of them will effectively be bound, lesser, spirits.
You could have a class of Binders, (with subsets of Artificer, User, and/or Banisher) who seek out, and Bind loose or rogue spirits.
A 'painted mage' could do quite well, his familiar spirits bound to his skin. Or be on the verge of insanity as his 'Bound' Spirits whisper in his dreams.

Well, the cultural ramifications, I realized after coming up with as much as I did, aren't all that huge.  Everybody has their part to play, so it's not like there's any dishonor involved in not being magical.  Consider that Combatants scale upward from 'utterly mundane' to 'Exalted-lite', depending on how much kit they get; they get to be physically more capable than anybody else, and I want their abilities to reflect that.  Faster movement, significantly higher strength, the ability to tank hits that'd reduce an unaugmented mortal to jelly... a top-end Combatant is very much a force to be reckoned with, and not just in the sense that they have 'bigger numbers' than anybody else, like the D&D Fighter tries to.
Speaking of 'not being magical', one cultural tidbit I did come up with is that magic only weakly follows family lines.  The child of two people with Caster-talent has only a somewhat higher chance of having the talent than the child of a Caster and a mundane, and their chances are only slightly higher than two mundanes.  Since only about one in ten has the potential, this means that every village- and almost every family of sufficient size- has a potential Caster somewhere in it.  The only way you're getting a thaumocracy out of that is if Casters go around stealing babies, and that's likely to lead to a whole tide of irritated everybody else coming down on you.
The way Clerics work isn't that they have a spell list to level off of.  They have a list of pacts, each of which is essentially a multi-level spell list of its own.  So if you pacted with, say, a god of healing, you'd get three casts of a basic healing spell, two casts of a basic 'cure status ailment' spell, and one shot of a more powerful healing spell per day.  Raise the level of the pact- basically, increasing your closeness with the spirit in question- and you get more of its trust and more of its attention.  This translates into more casts per day, and access to more spells.
This is in contrast with Casters, whose limiting factor is internal.  Basically, their brand of magic is incredibly taxing- I'm currently tossing around the idea that they technically could keep casting forever, but have to make progressively harder skill checks each time they do so- to simulate the exhaustion and pounding headache that casting too much/too fast generates.
Character creation, at the moment, is basically 'roll your stats, pick your race, take this XP and gold, buy character features and items, and go'.  You can technically start the game with no abilities at all... but I wouldn't recommend it.  Also, the system is set up to encourage everybody to take a bit of Combatant at the very least- the class lists are fairly focused, so if a Caster or Cleric wants sword skills, they need to grab them out-of-class.
Caster magic isn't strictly improvisational.  It can't be- the patterns involved are too complex for that.  What it is is scalable, adjustable, and potentially collaborative.  A Cleric's spells will always do the same thing, every time... but a Caster can make theirs stronger or weaker as necessary.  Or area-effect.  Or maybe combine two patterns to make a hybrid spell.  I haven't decided too much about how they work, per se, but I'm currently leaning towards 'spell list, but with really flexible metamagic baked in'.  Also, out-of-battle ritual magic actually has a place, unlike in 4e- it lets a Caster achieve more complex (not quite Cleric-level) effects easier, and even allows multiple Casters to work together.  Clerics can't do that.
To give you an idea, healing moderate wounds is a ritual Caster working, requiring either one very skilled Caster or as many as three apprentice Casters to work.  Clerics can do it in battle.
Oh, and Manytales?  Spirits are repeated patterns plus belief.  A weapon enchantment, for example, wouldn't be a spirit unless enough people believed it was- and even then, it wouldn't be sapient unless enough people believed it to be.  A sapient enchantment, as opposed to a spirit of a whole category of enchantments, is really freaking rare.  In fact, that's what distinguishes a legendary weapon from the rest- enough people know of it, tell stories about it, and imitate it that it gains its own spirit from all the belief.
Even then, you're not binding a spirit into a weapon.  The pattern you bound into it is becoming a spirit after the fact.  With mass-produced enchantments, you're more likely to get a primal spirit- basically a mass of mystical energy with a few basic instincts- than an actual conscious being, anyway.
That said, binding preexisting spirits into things would be potentially possible, and I could see it being its own line of abilities.  It just isn't quite what I was already doing.  Congratulations- you've added a new skill tree!

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My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.

I've been writing a bit.

Quote:Bluemage wrote:

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Oh, and Manytales?  Spirits are repeated patterns plus belief.  A weapon enchantment, for example, wouldn't be a spirit unless enough people believed it was- and even then, it wouldn't be sapient unless enough people believed it to be.  A sapient enchantment, as opposed to a spirit of a whole category of enchantments, is really freaking rare.  In fact, that's what distinguishes a legendary weapon from the rest- enough people know of it, tell stories about it, and imitate it that it gains its own spirit from all the belief.
Even then, you're not binding a spirit into a weapon.  The pattern you bound into it is becoming a spirit after the fact.  With mass-produced enchantments, you're more likely to get a primal spirit- basically a mass of mystical energy with a few basic instincts- than an actual conscious being, anyway.
That said, binding preexisting spirits into things would be potentially possible, and I could see it being its own line of abilities.  It just isn't quite what I was already doing.  Congratulations- you've added a new skill tree!

O.k.I was wasn't even thinking of sapient spirits here (Except perhaps the painted mage bit). 

Sapient Artifacts (which are not always weapons by nature), are usually older than remembered history.  
They are more of something you go Adventuring to find.  The rumored items are about 99% mcguffin anyways.

Most of the Simple Artefact Bindings are the size of buildings, or end up having a building built around them. 
One started out as a simple set of hot&cold boxes, and ended up as a Bakery, and Ice House.

But hey!

Had a few more ideas for this recently.  A skill and stat system, mostly.
Stats:-There are eight stats, organized into four pairs.-Each stat pair represents a paradigm- roughly put (as in, the names of the paradigms are not final, and probably unnecessary), they represent Brute Force, Finesse, Mind, and Spirit.  For any roll made using one stat of a pair, there's at least one action that can be made to oppose it... and the roll for it probably uses the other stat.  They also tend to fit an active/passive dichotomy.
Brute Force is composed of Strength and Fortitude.  Finesse is composed of Dexterity and Reflexes.  Mind is made up of Intelligence (think academic knowledge, logic... ivory-tower sort of things) and Wisdom (common sense, street smarts, intuition, creativity).  Finally, Spirit is composed of Spirit (the strength of one's soul, the force of their presence, how magical they are/could be) and Will (the strength/resilience of their sense of self, their spirit, and their ability to negate or withstand magic).
Skills:
Basically, with skills, I wanted to find a way to make the D&D 3.x skill system stop being broken.  Turns out, it's actually pretty easy to do.  I call it the ATTrEB system... though I'm open to a better name. ^^
Skill rolls are still a 1d20 with modifiers attached, but I've done some streamlining on the modifiers.  That's actually where the name 'ATTrEB' came from; it's an accurate summary of a skill roll.  To break it down, a skill roll is:A d20 roll;the character's Talent bonus.  This is basically the character's ability score modifier- but keep in mind that raising ability scores is harder/nigh-impossible than in D&D.  It's effectively near-static;the character's Training bonus.  This one covers education in the use of the skill.  Unlike D&D, this isn't a simple binary thing- it starts at +0, for 'nobody ever showed me anything', and goes up from there.the character's Experience bonus.  When a character spends XP to buy skills in mid-session/mid-campaign, they're just upping their Experience bonus.  At the end of- or between- campaigns/sessions, they can spend XP on upping Training, potentially.any Bonuses that may apply, depending on the situation.
The thing is that the sum of Talent, Training, and Experience cannot exceed 20, and bonuses are both transitory and typed.  This represents the limitations of being human, and/or logical sense.Think about it.  What made 3.x skills so broken was that it was comparatively easy to raise a skill to absurd levels- getting Diplomacy high enough to turn bitter enemies to fanatical allies in two actions, or raising Bluff high enough that you could convince a male troll that it was, in fact, a young halfling girl, despite all the evidence to the contrary.  Put a cap on what can be reached through purely mundane means, get a better handle on what bonuses can be acquired, and the rest of the system actually makes some good sense.
"But what about characters that are beyond mundane limits?", you might ask.  There's actually a fifth modifier spot for that.  Any enchantment, spell, enchanted item, or other form of character enhancement that allows a character to exceed mortal/logical/human limits goes there, stacks with the other four categories, and doesn't count towards the +20 modifier limit.
Oh, and here's the clever bit.  Combat can be modeled as a skill roll.  Talent for whatever stat your attack is keyed to.  Training is how well you've been educated in whatever martial art/style you're using, Experience represents itself, and Bonuses include things like flanking, attacking a surprised enemy, and the like, and anything that makes a character able to hit in defiance of their own skill goes in the Superhuman box.
So that's what I've come up recently.  Thoughts?  Suggestions?  Quibbles?

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My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.

I've been writing a bit.