@BESW oh wait i think I just got on the right page. The mechanical keyword is "immortal", and the nonmechanical keyword is "mortal", and they appear to use the two in contrast with each other but we're never told what a mortal is?
My dad a while back got a couple of volumes of Star Trek Voyageur, out of the entire series he's only seen some of Next Generation and the First Contact Movie so he never know about Voyageur. During his holiday break he walked into my room while i was on the computer, he does this on occasion whe...
> voyageur (plural voyageurs): A trader, particularly in furs, who worked (and explored) in the area of Canada and the northern United States from the 16th to early 19th centuries.
We've played a brief flashback game last night, because 2 of the players were missing. One of the flashbacked players was thoroughly creeped out and may change the way their character views certain things now. I consider that to be a success.
Especially in a game all about challenging one's point of view :D
The strength is that it's got clear sections which can be expanded or consolidated to focus on whatever the group wants to be the important part of the story: the journey, acquiring the tribute, negotiating with the dragon...
"You have to make a hazardous journey to take an important thing to a dangerous being to keep it from destroying your home. Where's your home? What hazards are on the journey? What's the important thing and where do you get it? What is the being, why is it dangerous, and why is it threatening your home?"
At its simplest, race is part of your aspect and comes with whatever implications your setting has.
Just like in a real-world setting being human implies a certain number of certain kinds of limbs, being an elf might imply extra-long life and the ability to sneer down your nose at even the tallest orcs.
I'd ran this setting once where elves were the first race made by gods who didn't have a user manual for their own powers. They'd practiced with animals and monsters, of course, and when they settled down to make elves they thought they had everything settled out great.
And then it turned out that they didn't install a mechanism to deal with centuries's worth of memories and elves started going batshit insane after about a hundred and seventy years, give or take twenty.
With an average lifespan of 500 if they didn't otherwise die
But by then it was just the tiniest bit too late for take-backs
If you want more mechanics tied to your race, the Fate System Toolkit suggests treating it as a kind of extra.
For example, an elf has to choose at least one but no more than two of these aspects: The Experience of Centuries, ”I Know These Woods.”, The Long Game, Magic in the Blood, Perfection in Everything.
He also gets the Elf skill: You may use the Elf skill to recognize useful flora and fauna, know your way through the woods, or notice hidden dangers. In addition, pick one of the following flavors; you may pick more at the cost of one stunt or refresh each.
And he can take stunts to augment the Elf skill, like these:
Elven High Magic: You can use Elf to cast spells relating to nature or growth, even if you have no other magical ability.
Perfection in Battle: Choose Shoot or Fight. When you’re using the traditional armaments of your people, you can use Elf instead of the chosen skill.
In a game like that, everyone has a racial skill/aspect extra, so it doesn't cost anything because all the PCs are on the same power level.
And this concept is universally applicable? Like, if you have a campaign of Force users set in Star Wars, and one guy has his heart set on someone who can't use the Force...?
In DFRPG, pure mortals are unable to take any supernatural abilities at all. Since supernatural abilities get a bit more bang for their buck compared to pure mundane abilities in that setting, pure mortals get +2 Refresh.
@Lord_Gareth Han Solo's got more stunts and/or he's better at more mundane skills because he's not stuffing them into the "Force" skill.
Also the movies suggest that your statement is B.S. - Luke, among other things, invents an entirely new kind of lightsaber, repairs a starship, and evidently can build droids, moisture farm, do home engineering, etc, so forth
First: the key is that everyone starts with the same level of resources to spend.
Second: in a game where everyone has the same kind of thing (like a race), that's effectively a zero-sum benefit so there's no need to first abstract it as resources. Just give everybody the racial benefits.
But in a game where not everyone wants to be a Force-user, you don't hand out Force powers for free.
Instead, Han and Luke started with the same number of Refresh and skill points, but Han spent Refresh on the Falcon while Luke spent it on getting access to a new skill.
Then Luke had to put points into the Force skill, leaving fewer for mundane skills compared to Han.
Also, don't try to reconcile everything he does all at once.
In Fate, you can shuffle your skills around pretty easily.
For example, at the end of every session you can switch the rank values of any two skills or replace one +1 skill with a skill you didn't have any ranks in.
Anyway, going back to your original questions: if everyone's got the same kind of major features, they get them all for free; if everyone's got very different major features, they have to spend resource points individually to get them; if you don't want that to lower their access to more "normal" features, just give them all more resources at character creation.
And don't think of characters as static piles of features which get added to; they're dynamic and shifting, intended to change slowly over time so that the PC's sheet at the end of a campaign may not have much in common with its sheet at the start.
(Also, I suspect that later-films Luke's melee and ranged abilities are keyed off the Force skill, which he can do by adding stunts to his Force extra which gives him access to the skill.)
Frees up more skill points for things he can't key off Force.
Even with Expanded Universe content he only makes black holes with his mind and has a cloning fetish.
Meanwhile, way back in the day, if Darth Nihilus wasn't on a strict regimen of self-control he'd annihilate all life within a freakin' galactic sector of himself. With strict self-control, he only eats entire worlds.
Well there's an easy one for Star Wars too, but "Bioware contains 100% of the authors from this universe that know a pen from a rabid gerbil," isn't something you can say in-universe.
We have never-ending struggles with the VA for my dad.
They refer him to a civilian doctor 'cause they don't have a specialist on island, but then his primary care doc doesn't like the civ doc, so the approval for the referral drags out for months, and then they ignore or decline the meds and tests the civ doc requests because "He doesn't know what he's doing."
My wife had her gall bladder removed in September. In October we got bills for the surgeon, the hospital, and the anesthesiologist equalling about $750. Then I got a check from my insurance company for about $750, so I was like "yay, this balances out."
Then, MONTHS later, I get this bill from the ASSISTANT surgeon for $870, and it claims that the $750 check I got before was for THAT. Why wouldn't the insurance have just paid directly, instead of sending me an enigmatic check, I'll never know...
I need some info to complete an A: Can any of you recall which D&D 3.5e manual has that "use Perform to influence people's attitude like if it was Diplomacy" option?
I've been pondering lately about how the name "role playing games" contains several unspoken assumptions that don't really hold true for all games.
It places the role playing, the playing of the character, as the essence of the game, while the the rest - the world building and the story telling - being "support roles" around that central activity.
While I find myself playing to tell a story, when the role playing is the means to that end.
Interestingly, while White Wolf's old system used in the WoD games was called "The Storyteller system", it wasn't any different than other systems of the time with regards to the role of the story in the game.
It is still the paradigm. In almost all RPGs the expectation is that you'll behave as is 'realistic' for your character - that their motivations, thoughts, and beliefs will be what you consider.
> You can choose anything you want as a quality. The point of this game is to let your imagination run wild. So, if you want to pick “I can move things with my mind” or “I can talk to animals” as qualities, go for it! > When you do this, though, remember that you’re helping to create a shared vision of the world that you are going to play in. This is one reason making characters together is fun. By bringing up the qualities you are going to take, you get input from everyone else about whether your ideas fit with theirs, and your ideas may inspire them!
@BESW A friend of mine recently ran an introductory game to a bunch of first-time roleplayers. Since they weren't familiar with many of the settings and tropes that we're familiar with, he just asked them what they wanted to play.
One said "A steampunkish inventor thingie". Another said "A necromancer". A third wanted to be a courtesan, and the fourth a street urchin with a pet monkey.
@BESW I'd be willing to bet fifty bucks stone-cold cash that all on their own they define a generic-ass fantasy setting. Which, since the world of the Belgariad is the generic-ass fantasy setting...
@lisardggY My PCs actually seem to build their mental images based on whatever voice I use for the character. I had a girl with a Harley Quinn accent, and the only describing characteristic I gave them was "white hair", and they all came up with pretty much the same idea of what she looked like.
After she got what she wanted out of them, she sent a video of herself gloating about it. She got them to help her by acting like she was an incompotent member of the French Resistance. They thought she was failing badly at a stealth roll, but she was just striving to be noticed.
Eventually, my players WILL stop trusting random NPCs.
They recently discovered that the "mole" in their organization was the psychic they've been trusting with ALL THE THINGS! "Oh, Katrina says it's there, so it must be!"
I should have come to expect it. One of these players, in my Scion game, somehow made this amazing leap of logic that their main antagonist was the personified spirit of a car.
@BESW Well, to be FAIR... he was half right. She was a personified spirit, but not of the inconsequential car that he was so attached to.
But I'd given no hints about the "personified spirit" bit. He thought she avoided contact with people because she had no substance; she just didn't want her enemies touching her (imagine that)!
I played a bard a couple of years back, which tended to take creative liberties with things. We would talk to some NPCs and I would outline what I thought was going on. Usually presented as unalienable truths. Much to the surprise of the GM and fellow players.
Bah. There was a question a while back which had the perfect example of a campaign where the GM insisted that he had sole discretion to choose what was and wasn't important.
@BESW it's an option. Like "hey, you can also use it this way". Like the way the devs said how to use hide to hide in a crowd or how you can use Sleight of Hand to gain money as if it was Perform
