[freeroleplay] S cubed

[Jerry Stratton]

> This system does mean that new skills can drop your qualities, but
> this is actually a benefit of this system. If you take on a new skill
> it will take time and effort away from maintaining those qualities to
> develop the skill. For instance if your trying to learn a new martial
> art the lowering of your strength quality shows that your just not
> using your body as well as you do in the strength related skills you
> already know. However it also means that someone who is out exercising
> every day (I.e., has allot of other strength related skills) wont take
> much of a hit if he spends an hour a week learning something new.
>
> So what do you all think?

That's a very interesting design. From a gaming standpoint it means that
characters don't have any "qualities" that they don't use (or at least
that they don't have skills for).

What I'd worry about is that if qualities are important, there is going to
be a pressure towards having only one skill so as to keep the quality
high. Whereas what I suspect you'll want is that someone who sees their
character as being "strong" will have a lot of skills which affect the
"strength" quality.

You might want to add in a factor that gives them a boost if they have
lots of skills; perhaps in general (you get +1 if you have x strength
skills at 2 or greater), or as a one-time thing (let players "burn" skills
to get a boost to that skill's quality, but then the skill is burned out
for the rest of the session/adventure/day depending on the style of your
game).

If characters in this game will likely have lots of skills, the average is
going to be a bit of a pain (especially if skill numbers can change); you
might look at other options such as "your quality is whatever most of your
skills of that quality are at" or "you need at least one skill of 1 to
have a quality of 1; at least 2 skills of 2 to have a quality of 2".

You might want to identify what features you want out of this system; just
make a list of what you want your system to do. If, for example, you want
quality to drop whenever a character gets a new skill, you'll need to make
sure that your system keeps this feature. If that's just something you
noticed but don't care about, then you don't need to worry so much about
keeping it.

Jerry
-- 
http://www.ItIsntMurder.com/
"Give a man a fish, and you've fed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and
you've depleted the lake."--It Isn't Murder If They're Yankees