Sunday, March 3, 2013

Open RPG system Update

Going into a little more Detail.

Entity Creation

this is pretty much a set of rules for creating Economic Entities that can be used to model Governments, Holdings, Cities, Villages, Businesses of various Sizes etc... This allows the GM and Players to try to manage them as part of the game challenge or drama; sum up all the resources of the Player's patron; and foundation for Adversarial Entities.  What is important is that this is scientific, and thus can translate to various eras with key notes on the economic, technology, and demographic conditions. 

Background and Skills

I am pretty meticulous when it comes to skills, I try to identify all the skills I learn and those I deal with at work. I've come to appreciate techniques, maneuvers  sub-skills, and specializations but these all are a stronger argument for broader groups of skills. I've always wondered how can a person, like the great people in news and history, have so many skills and the key is really maximizing some core skills that have applications or familiarization with other things in one's life. This deserves its own post, but suffice to say - skills are broad in definition and scope, and dynamic.

Skill Design. 

Holy Crap the amount of skills. I may be meticulous and can handle skill load, but I just spent 3 hours  making a character. I had to reference MA and LT to make my character and read up DF benchmarks. Reading other game systems, there is a tendency for skills to Explode in number as a game develops and in a New version there is consolidation.
I realize that a character should be doable in 7-10 skills. 7 skills maybe the character's Professional core competence, and about 3 skills allowance for flavor.
There is something that is hinting me of another way to model skills that would allow me. Its it falls very similar to Language-based or Descriptor-Based Mechanics like in FATE but with tweaks that allow such a Skill Mechanic to be richly detailed and specific.  
If you can sum up all your work related skills is 7 core skills, and all your other skills in 3 is actually possible, its just that its filled with caveats. I guess where this is going is Broad Skills, that is free to be detailed. The deails work in a way that it rewards incorporation to story, and this story telling aspect narrows down the scope of the skill while allowing for specializations ( a kind of trade-off system: famliarity vs specialization). 

Professions and Work

I've simplified professions to Industry/Field and Role. Role being Officers, Commanders, Administrators, and Leaders; Field Ops and Specialists; and Support. Basically the persons who manages the resource; the resource; and the support for the resource. This methodology has the advantage of condensing templates and roles, being modular where roles are concerned but homogeneous where Industry or field is concerned.

Trappings

All equipment, food, clothes, shelter, assets, and material, animal and human resources of the character, save for entities which is covered in Entity Creation and entity meta-rules. Most important contribution would be the sample load outs and doctrines, the sample load out can be modified based on doctrine or is ready for player and GM use. What i find exciting is having a checklist template that is usable in both real life, derived from real-life material (Small wars manual) applicable in various eras. 


  

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