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