You're my (Arche)type

That... that's a bad joke. I'm sorry.

Today, I'll elaborate on Archetypes, their use in character creation, and just how broad they are.

As I've stated before, I decided to remove ability scores from the Forbidden Skies game to free up some design space and make more character options valid at all levels of play. Because it's not impossible to roll up a strong, but dumb rogue in any edition of D&D and play him for a while, but the game tends to punish players from straying from the "norm" on the long term. What I strove to do with Archetypes is allow for wizard character to be a physically impressive individual, for a rogue character to be a charming swindler or for a fighter to be a clever tactician without mechanically crippling any of those ideas.

The Mighty, Dauntless, Clever Ones

At the heart of the Archetype concept lies the idea of associating rolls or checks. I like the idea of keywords, and this system allows me to make the connection between skills, and other assorted checks, with keywords relating to the Archetype of a character.

For exemple, right now, the Dauntless Archetype is the one most closely related to dextrous, sneaky stuff. Players who pick it know this from reading the first line in its description. At the bottom of the section that details what the Dauntless hero is, there's a line that basically states : "Whenever you make an [Agility] roll, you get X bonus." [Agility] is what I'm calling an Attribute.

Most of the rolls in Forbidden Skies have an Attribute, and most of these Attributes (well, right now all of them, though I can't be sure what the future holds) relate to at least one Archetype. They are, essentially, the main keywords of the game. Sneaking past a guard is a Stealth [Agility] check, decyphering some arcane hieroglyphs is an Arcana [Cunning] check, breaking down a door is a simple [Might] check, etc.


An unforeseen consequence of working with the concept of Attributes, has been that I started associating them to other, seemingly unrelated, roll types. For exemple, some fighter abilities have Attributes that alter them significantly; either allowing a re-roll to the attack or increasing the potency of a specific rider-effect. This applies to most Attributes, and to all classes. So it's possible for a wizard's spell to have the "Might" attribute, making a "Mighty" wizard a valid, and rewarding concept.

(it also allows me to post up this awesome picture)

Racism

But what about the standard fantasy races? What if I want to play an elf or a dwarf? Those have become Archetypes too! They get similar abilities (yes, there is an [Elf] keyword)

Can't I play a [Mighty] Elf? Sure, but the Archetype you pick is what defines your character the most, so while you might pick the "Mighty" Archetype, you could still write in "Elf" as your race.

The Perks of Being, say, a Dwarf

 Every Archetype offers a set of bonuses that relate to what they represent. Mighty heroes are strong, cunning heroes are smart, mystic heroes are good at magic, etc. Your character also gets access to a suite of talents. Contrary to class talents, these don't range all the way to the end game, instead tapering off at around the middle of the level scale. Finally, your character's Archetype grants you a method of gaining Action Dice, the currency that powers a lot of class (and some Archetypes') abilities. Contrary to Action Dice gained from class abilities (like, say, the wizard's Arcane Meditation), the dices gained from your character's Archetype are untyped, allowing you to power any class abilities you may have gotten from Forbidden Skies' take on multiclassing.

The Weird Ones

There are other, weirder, Archetypes I have in mind. In fact, one came to me as I watered my garden this morning. Perhaps owning a unique magic item could be an Archetype? Or having a faithful companion? I'll probably talk about at least a few of these ideas in a future post, though next time (I can make no promises, but I'll try and get something up by Tuesday), it's going to be Action (Dice) time.

Thank you for reading, have a great day/evening/night,

E.L.F AKA The Choice

P.S. : I don't know the name of the artist behind the picture I posted above, but, whoever it is are, she/he is awesome! Thanks!

A Quick Note

Yesterday, I posted a reply to a message board thread on ENWorld that relates to gender/race/sexual orientation representation in RPGs (specifically in D&D). In one of my postings I included a reference to a webcomic dealing with gender representation in comics. At the time, I could neither find the picture or add it to my post, so, for the sake of completeness, here it is:

This image comes from the Shortpacked! webcomic.

Back...

I don't have an excuse.

Really, I could say that getting flooded stopped me from writing (yeah, we literally had the roof cave in on us at our last apartment. Fun times), or that my day-job or schoolwork got in the way of me working on this blog, but that would be making excuses. The truth is, I got lazy; I planned too far ahead and, when I missed a week's worth of posts, I felt like I was getting buried in a backlog of stuff, and it got overwhelming.

But I'm back...

... in Black

I'll start by saying my favourite ACDC (can't do the lightning bolt, sorry) song is "Highway to Hell", but the whole Back in Black album is probably among the best hard rock records of all time. As an LP, it's pretty much Bon Scott's funeral march, and a promise to keep on rocking after his untimely passing. This post will serve a similar purpose.

In a recent rewrite of the base rules of Forbidden Skies, I've had to say goodbye to a key part of the traditionnal fantasy roleplaying game genre: ability scores. Yeah, they're gone. The reason behind this decision is that, in a game that includes skills, ability scores add a layer of unnecessary complexity. The way traditionnal Dungeons & Dragons does this is even more problematic, with ability scores not equalling their modifier, etc.

This idea came to me as I was reading some articles on mountain climbing I had saved up back when my father went to climb a mountain in South America a few years back. The very act of climbing builds up strength, so tying a "strength" score to a skill that already demands physical power is kind of redundant. It also makes certain character concepts less effective than they ought to be; the rogue (well, thief in editions prior to 3rd) had a "climb" skill that he could increase as he gained levels, and he started out fairly good at it. Post-3rd edition though, he's a fairly poor climber unless he bumps his Strength (which is unlikely considering he still has a Dexterity score to keep up, and his Intelligence dictates how many skill points he gets, so it's important too. And maybe he wants to be a little Charismatic too, so...).

So, Death to Ability Scores. And death to races too...

My thinking went like this: what defines your character the most? And I felt that races and ability scores muddled the picture a bit. So I'm replacing them with what I'm calling "Archetypes" right now.

In the current draft, your Archetype is a key element to describing your character: is he physically powerful? a mystic? an agile daredevil? a sturdy dwarf, or a cunning elf? Your Archetype defines that, and provides your character with some abilities independant from his or her class. Also, different skill uses and basic rolls key off those Archetypes: a Dwarf gets a bonus to a check made against being poisoned, a Mighty hero has an easier time lifting a heavy gate, etc. The "Attributes" (as I call the keywords system for checks in Forbidden Skies) of each roll allows for the same flexibility I wanted from decoupling skills from an asigned ability score, but I feel it will also encourage players to attempt checks they normally would not have tried with a character's weaker ability score modifier.

Along side these archetypes are smaller bonuses currently called Traits that define other areas where your character excels (but that don't define them as precisely). Having elven blood running in your veins or having a slightly better level of education could be considered Traits. I'll write more about this in a future installment.

So, in a sense, I might be burying a part of the original design, but in doing so, I feel I have brought new and interesting concepts to this little project of mine.

... to the Future

And by "future", I mean the past. And by "past" I mean modern... D20 Modern. That came out all wrong.

The D20 Modern experiment proved that the d20 framework developped for D&D did not work when directly ported to a modern, action-oriented setting. It was a valiant effort, but, ultimately, the D&D ruleset of 3rd Edition is not flexible enough to accomodate a wide variety of game genres.

That having been said, D20 Modern had a few interesting elements in its design, namely talents. Talents were abilities your character unlocked as he progressed through his base class. There were few of them, and their use was often limited or downright redundant, but the core mechanic (i.e. choosing among a set of abilities built in a chain or chain-like structure) made sense and it had room to grow.

So talent "trees" (right now, they're more like "bushes" to be honest) are where most of a character's customization will happen. Fighters will get to pick from "weapon mastery" trees, "wizards will have talents that relate to both their spell selection and to how they cast them, rogues will get "skill tricks" that will emphasize skill use in combat, etc. There will also be talents related to your Archetype.

This setup also helps with a problem I had been running into with regards to "multiclass" character concepts. Now, a player may simply pick a talent tree he or she hasn't learned yet and add it to his or her repertoire. Sadly this development also led to me ditching the very (some would say overly) specific ways characters used their abilities.

... in Action

Enter the "Action Dice", a generic term for the resource each character draws upon to use abilities. I feel it deserves its own article, so I won't go into too much detail right now, but I will say that it is just that, a resource for characters. Fighters spend them to hit harder, block incoming attacks or power weapon attacks, wizards burn through them to cast spells, and clerics can use them to cure their comrades of wounds.

While the resource is generic in the sense that all characters use it, there are some variations to it. Wizards gain dice by doing wizard-y things, fighters gain them by doing stuff fighters are famous for, and you can't use a fighter's action dice to power a cleric's prayer or a wizard's cantrip. As I said before, I'll elaborate further in a future blog post.

So that's it. I'm just going to apologize to the three or four people reading this blog who wondered where I had gone to. I won't promise to write up a storm in the next few weeks to make up for it, but at the very least, I'll try to be more regular with the updates.

Thank you for reading, and have a nice day,

E.L.F. AKA The Choice