Quote from: MelinglorWhat I'm really looking for is: given a desire for X design feature, in this case "Baseline action hero competency built in," how do various games address that or not? Especially games that claim to.

I can only think of one - Hong Kong Action Theatre!. All the other games which come to mind have got one of several approaches,

• Ordinary person with extraordinary skills (Millenium's End)
• Superhero (Champions, etc)
• Ordinary person (Recon)
• Universal point-buy, so that by increasing the pool of points to spend and making sure they choose the right abilities, they can be action heroes (GURPS, Hero, d4-d4)
• Zero to hero - begin pretty useless advance to demigod (D&D)

Hong Kong Action Theatre! specifically aims to reproduce Hong Kong action kung-fu movies. These sometimes, but not always, differ a bit from Western action movies in that their characters do fail at things, but their failure is funny and part of the plot.

In HKAT!, a player has a character who's an actor. They have certain basic physical abilities. Then that actor takes a role in a movie, and for that role they get skills - whether or not the actor has any knowledge of, say, nuclear physics, is irrelevant to what their role knows. I don't really recall exactly how they handled skills. What I do remember was that the difficulty of hitting a character was nothing to do with their speed or dodge, but how important they were to the plot! So some nameless goon you can hit firing one-handed submachinegun with your eyes closed from a hundred yards; the chief villain you can't hit even at point blank range with aiming... You have to work up to it!

So there you have an assumption of the action movie genre - the importance of characters to the plot determining how hard they are to kill. When players talk about wanting characters who can do things like in action movies, I don't think that's the sort of thing they mean. I think they want the PCs to be extremely capable.

I think we're really talking here about assumptions, and types of players. As mentioned above, players and GMs both bring into each campaign certain assumptions about how the game world works. "But anyone can shoot someone dead without hesitation! I totally could! I do it in Halo all the time!" So this just shows that the GM and players ought to talk about what sort of game world they're going to have. Still sometimes people will get nasty surprises, but you can minimise it.

The types of players are those who curse character failure, and those who embrace it. When the dice roll and come up badly, some players are pissed off and disappointed, other players welcome the failure as a plot complication. You can usually spot which is which during character generation. Two players at my game table: "Mate, why do you always choose flawed characters?" "Because they're more interesting. Why else?"

The player who hates character failure will be more likely to complain about game systems during play, but also be suspicious of new systems - the guy at my game table does it, I do it when playing - and the one who embraces it, more likely to be indifferent to systems, and ready to try new ones.

Quote from: MelinglorThere are some patches for this. Action Points come to mind. And as i've suggested, you could do something like reduce cross-class skill cost. But these are just patches. It'd be nice if the system delivered without them.

I don't think Hero Points (or whatever you want to call them) are "patches". You could as well call a point-buy system a "patch" for random-attribute, class-level-based systems. One of the basic splits you can make in game play style preferences is between a "realistic" game in which you let the dice fall where they may (randomness is often thought to be "realistic"), and a "cinematic" game in which the player has some control over the results of individual dice rolls. Hero Points are just a tool to let the player, rather than the system decide when and where to be "cinematic" or "realistic."

Quote from: SpikeMel: Good thread, just wish you'd shorten your posts, you're worse than Jimbob and I often find I don't care to read his entire post more often than not.

Thanks, Spike! I'll, uh, work on that. Not an easy skill for me.

Quote from: SpikeWhere the default attribute was zero, or heroes always succeed at a task unless opposed by another 'heroic level' character.

Wow, that's a great approach. Simple and easy to implement. Cool.

Quote from: SpikeThe only game that I ever saw that handled it halfway well was Champions. (Don't sue me if there is some great, popular game with lots of 'everyman skills' and base competencies that I've forgotten or never heard of. Maybe Tunnels and Trolls, if not having a skill system counts....)

Hmm, I've read through Champs, but never gotten to play it. How does it handle it well?

Oh, and I won't sue you, but I did mention Heroquest upthread. "No Self-respecting Hero" sounds pretty similar to your "heroic level" idea.

Peace,
-Joel

You want heroic? Start with a high level character. Use a heroic point buy for abilities. There are options.

I don't have my books handy, but if I'm not mistaken, there are rules in the DMG for advancing characters - I think to provide the mechanism for creating a high level NPC.

Multiclass helps with the flexibility; not as much as GURPS, but quite a bit. Want your street urchin to be able to track like a ranger and cast arcane spells and pick locks? Ranger/Sorcerer/Rogue. I'm still re-learning the rules on multiclassing, so there's probably a specific order you should take them and such. And if I recall correctly, that character can now "buy" skills at the 1-to-1 rate for any skill that's a class skill for Ranger, Sorcerer, and Rogue.

So advance your "starting" character a total of 12 levels (say 4 each in the three clases) in a setting the GM has already set up as a heroic campaign using a point buy for abilities that puts the average at 16 and, therefore, the average bonus to skill checks at +3 (or an additional 15% chance for any skill check based on the ability). This also provides an extra three skill points per level to use to increase ranks.  The only hard limit of which I am aware is the fact the you can only have class skill ranks equal to level + 3.

If I had the books and lacked the apathy to convince you, I'd give you a heroic character straight from the existing rules.

It's not common.  For some reason, D&D players seem to like the part of growing into the heroic. JimBob called it zero-to-hero. I start out playing a cleric fresh from the seminary and grow to be the head of the council of abbotts. So it's not heroic from the get go.

But it's not impossible to use the existing rules to create a high-level campaign that's more heroic than your average 1st level adventuring party.

If that doesn't suffice, or if the counter is "well, OK, it can be done but it's a lot of work," well, then, I'd suggest that this is about taste and not about a design issue at all.

Quote from: MelinglorSpeaking of Star Wars, I really like what SAGA edition is doing with their skills:

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=starwars/article/SagaPreview2

A *very* interesting link! My first thought: I like it!

My second thought: this isn't going to bring back non-weapon proficiencies, is it?

Quote from: JimBobOzI can only think of one - Hong Kong Action Theatre!. All the other games which come to mind have got one of several approaches,

• Ordinary person with extraordinary skills (Millenium's End)
• Superhero (Champions, etc)
• Ordinary person (Recon)
• Universal point-buy, so that by increasing the pool of points to spend and making sure they choose the right abilities, they can be action heroes (GURPS, Hero, d4-d4)
• Zero to hero - begin pretty useless advance to demigod (D&D)

I've always wanted to check out HKAT! Sounds like lots of fun.

I recall from my reading of Champions (I got it just as my high school group was drifting apart; I never got to play it) that it was also geared for power levels below "superhero;" that at a lower point total you could do Indiana Jones just fine. My issue in that case would be if you still had to delineate a bunch of skills at chargen to be able to do a broad range stuff decently, where I'd rather have that just be automatic, or at least easy to delineate. Probably depends on the granularity of the skill system.

Quote from: JimBobOzThe types of players are those who curse character failure, and those who embrace it. When the dice roll and come up badly, some players are pissed off and disappointed, other players welcome the failure as a plot complication. You can usually spot which is which during character generation. Two players at my game table: "Mate, why do you always choose flawed characters?" "Because they're more interesting. Why else?"

I love flawed characters. Flawed doesn't mean "buffoon" though (or doesn't have to ). I find my feeling about character failure has a lot to do with the system used and how it's handled. If my sword flies out of my hand and into my buddy's eye when I roll a "1", that's not "exploring flaws," that's just "undermining my guy's badassitude." It's not that my guy has to be totally cool and successful at everything he does, but his failures as well as his successes should reinforce and highlight interesting things about his character, including his flaws.

Quote from: JimBobOzI don't think Hero Points (or whatever you want to call them) are "patches".

Actually, in this case I was only referring to Action Points specifically as a patch to D&D; a rules tweak that I find desirable for my present goal, but which only shows up in a couple of supplements. I wouldn't have had access to them if one of my players didn't have the Ebberon book.

Quote from: James J SkachYou want heroic? Start with a high level character. Use a heroic point buy for abilities. There are options.

I'm aware that you can start at a higher level, obviously. And sure, multiclassing can help round out a character. My issue is more that D&D promises "heroic" right from the ground up and doesn't completely deliver. Personally, I want to be "heroic" (that is, broadly competent and capable of impressive feats) before tackling Beholders and Red Dragons, thank you very much. That way I can have my "growing in power" arc AND be  a badass at Level 1.

Peace,
-Joel

And then I read the first preview.

My third thought: Star Wars d20 is getting more and more like Star Wars d6.

I really need to pick up that book next month!

Mel:

Its been a few years since I made a Champions character, long enough that two new editions have come out but:

The game lists a bunch of skills as 'everyman' skills. This list is not set in stone (the GM can change them to fit the setting), but every player had those skills at the basic level.  Thus, every player could drive a car, knew his home neighborhood and so on. There were a rough dozen of them, as I recall. A player could, obviously, chose to NOT be able to drive a car, but he didn't have to pay for the priviledge of using the skill system to actually, you know, do something car related in game.

Obviously a wizard at car driving would sink points into that one skill to improve it beyond the basic level... but I don't think he needed to buy that basic level over again.

Its just so simple that I'm shocked I never saw it again. (wait.. Brave new world??? Lemme get back to you on that one).

GURPS, with their 'default' skills comes a close second, where almost every normal skill is possible, if difficult, regardless of training.  But as has been pointed out elsewhere, GURPS runs on a different assumption: namely that players will want to define just how expirenced their character is in driving cars and throwing rocks in addition to whatever else they want to do.

Quote from: SpikeThe game lists a bunch of skills as 'everyman' skills. This list is not set in stone (the GM can change them to fit the setting), but every player had those skills at the basic level.  Thus, every player could drive a car, knew his home neighborhood and so on. There were a rough dozen of them, as I recall. A player could, obviously, chose to NOT be able to drive a car, but he didn't have to pay for the priviledge of using the skill system to actually, you know, do something car related in game.

Heh. That reminds me by way of contrast of Heroes Unlimited, where you did indeed have to track your level of e.g. Pilot Automobile (82%) or whatever. I hated it. Champions was what I was trying to switch out HE for, but alas, I bought the book too late.

Peace,
-Joel

EDIT: Hey, that was a short post, wasn't it? Cool! You like?

Much easier to follow.  Esp. from work, where I don't have twenty minutes to get bleary eyed reading posts on a screen.  

strangely I've rarely had a complaint about Palladium's skill system. Ususally you have more than enough skills, and plenty given to you, that getting Pilot:whatever isn't too much a hassel, but I never did like the Heros Unlimited method compared to the others.

In HU's case it wasn't so much a matter of being hard to get as being trivial to track. The whole "lots and lots of skills to cover every possible area of competency" approach, as opposed to the "well, of coiurse you know how to do all the baseline cultural stuff" approach.

That's all, just a "not my taste" thing.

Peace,
-Joel

Well, checking my copy of Spirit of the Century, player characters get every skill in the book at Mediocre and then decide what they are GREAT at.  And they are great at a fair bit a little over half the skills in the skill list will be allocated at average and higher.

For our Traveller re-set we're pegging the baseline just below Mediocre as they are a little less "heroic".