Quote from: Omnifray;620936In the intro edition of my forthcoming fantasy RPG Soul's Calling, I'm going to be using Templates for CharGen. They're not character classes, as they don't affect character advancement

That's not the only thing that defines a class.

Quote from: Omnifray;620936and in the advanced edition of the game Templates won't be used at all, but basic characters are 100% portable into the advanced game.

I've got a bad feeling about this.

Quote from: Omnifray;620936Here's the list I'm going with for the moment

Instead of this list, how about you come up with 20 or so pregenerated characters which can be modified slightly like WEG Star Wars did? It's still the easiest method I've seen to get players started and it shocks the shit out of me that it's not more common.

Quote from: Omnifray;621002I had to change Trader to Merchant when it became apparent that this Template was going to include literacy.

No, you didn't. They're synonymous (see links in quote) as far as the rest of the English speaking world is concerned, and certainly not differentiated by lack of literacy. Adding meaning to words like these will make the game less penetrable to players.

Quote from: Omnifray;621124If you want to play a starting character who's, say, a knight who can read and write, you could either (i) gen up a Cultist or Merchant, have him be wealthy gentry and style himself as a warrior or (ii) use the rules in the advanced edition.

Sounds complicated.

Quote from: Omnifray;621124The reason for this as with many of the other restrictive aspects of CharGen in the basic edition is simplicity.

HOLY...

No really, it's good to hear you're working on your next game, but it doesn't seem like you've changed the way you approach things from your original Omnifray RPG, and you seem unwilling to change it, constructing complicated justifications to preserve your current methods. And honestly after reading some of your recent posts I have serious doubts in your current willingness (ability?) to write anything for simplicity, let alone clarity.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;622436That's not the only thing that defines a class.

I think it's the fundamental thing:- a character class is not just a starting point but a ladder for progression through the game. My templates are just starting points. It's the ladder aspect that I've always found most restrictive about character classes.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;622436I've got a bad feeling about this.

Thank you for your feedback. Please explain!

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;622436Instead of this list, how about you come up with 20 or so pregenerated characters which can be modified slightly like WEG Star Wars did? It's still the easiest method I've seen to get players started and it shocks the shit out of me that it's not more common.

You can generate some really very different characters from the same template. I think the method I'm using is flexible enough to be able to call it a substantially comprehensive RPG even with just the basic edition.

However, I may well include pregens at the back of the book. Maybe not 20, but maybe 6. Thing is though, because of the way CharGen works [to serve a variety of purposes, mainly game-balance], if you start tinkering with stats on the character sheet, you really have to do it by following the CharGen method. Plus, people often whinge about page-count being taken up by pregens.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;622436No, you didn't. They're synonymous (see links in quote) as far as the rest of the English speaking world is concerned, and certainly not differentiated by lack of literacy. Adding meaning to words like these will make the game less penetrable to players.

"Merchant", to me, in its most common usage, suggests someone who has considerable money, whereas "trader" is far less specific. A trader at a local market, for instance, would come from a humbler background, and in the Enshrouded Lands, would be unlikely to know how to read and write. Forgive the classist language; I'm talking about a different era here. I wanted to communicate as immediately as possible, in the name of the template, the fact that the trader in question is from the upper echelons of society.

Anyway I've changed it to "Merchant-Adventurer" now, which to me suggests someone wealthy enough to fund a trip abroad on a venture with commercial ends but considerable risk. And that will probably be the case, though I haven't yet gotten to the starting wealth section of basic edition CharGen. But I have the concepts planned out in my head.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;622436Sounds complicated.

It's really not complicated (the bit about make a literate knight, anyway). The templates mainly give you a basic set of stats and abilities for your character. It's up to you and your ref how you interpret those when you write up your character's background and how they got those abilities. The flavour is just fluff for the non-spellcasters and can be trivially disregarded. Spellcasters' flavour (halpfae / cultist) is more than just fluff but doesn't stop your character from having any mundane occupation your stats would suit.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;622436HOLY...

No really, it's good to hear you're working on your next game, but it doesn't seem like you've changed the way you approach things from your original Omnifray RPG, and you seem unwilling to change it, constructing complicated justifications to preserve your current methods. And honestly after reading some of your recent posts I have serious doubts in your current willingness (ability?) to write anything for simplicity, let alone clarity.

All the properly written-up materials for my new game were previously organised (in Word .docx files) for inclusion in a single Core Guide. What I'm currently doing is separating out the stuff that's suitable for inclusion in the basic edition of the game (which will be a reasonably comprehensive RPG though with a very small selection of magic for PCs).

In the process of this, yesterday I was checking through the chapter on Persuasion before porting it over to the draft basic book. [And that's the most important actual chapter in the book, by the way, though not as important as the Introduction. VERY different to Omnifray in this respect, full-fat or lite.]

I spent an age moving text around, rewriting some of it, just with a view to making it more immediate for the reader. So that as soon as you open the Persuasion chapter, the first page of it gives you the very basic idea of how Persuasion works in most cases. Which, as you can presumably well believe, was not the case previously. Due, I think, to the fact that I tried to give a comprehensive explanation from the beginning of the chapter, working through it systematically as if it were a textbook. But it was so comprehensive that the reader would have been wondering where it was heading or how it all tied together before he/she had found out how the basic mechanic operated. Not good.

So, in my current drafts (though not so much in the Persuasion chapter any more), there are, no doubt, still problems in terms of clarity and in terms of giving the reader immediate confidence that they have the gist of what's going on as soon as they start reading a section. But my biggest task at the moment is to turn lots of sections of this draft into chapters for the basic edition book. In other words, my biggest focus at the moment is on making sure that the chapters I'm porting over fit into the basic edition, both mechanically and presentationally.

The thought that I can get people to easily understand and operate the templates-based CharGen system is a great motivator for me to bring the same sort of clarity and simplicity to other aspects of the basic edition text as I have now tried to bring to the Persuasion chapter.

It's going to be painful for me to do it but do it I must and do it I shall!

As for this specific example of literacy, the situation is this. I want the characters in the basic edition to be advanced edition characters, generated more easily. In the advanced edition, the main (though not the only) way of getting literacy at CharGen comes from a simple two-page flow-chart for "critical capabilities", which you navigate according to the flavour of character you want. [BTW, this is in 12-point font.] I don't want that flow-chart in the basic edition. The abilities you would get from that flow-chart, I have instead incorporated the equivalent of in each template, according to its flavour. This helps keep the page-count down, and speeds up any arithmetic because where the advanced edition might give you two or three bonuses to the same stat, the basic edition just gives you one large lumpy bonus. But the basic edition method also helps make sure that the templates do what they say on the tin. For instance, the Warrior template gives you a suitable Courage bonus. The Cultist can read his scriptures (among other things).