So, continuing from where I left off on the latest draft of the rules (which can be found here if you need a link). I spend a good while rambling about why I decided to make Fighting Styles and Backgrounds in place of regular Traits. Well, I mostly talked about Fighting Styles but the division of non-combat Traits into Backgrounds was pretty darn helpful too.
First and foremost, I decided that I didn't need as many Traits as before. In different versions I've shuffled between 5 to 6 Traits of varying intensity, now we've got 4 (including the default Fighting Style everyone starts with) but I'm encouraging bigger and broader Backgrounds in place of more traditional Traits. No-one should have a Trait like "tracking prey" or "picking locks"...we're looking at Traits that are more like entire character concepts in miniature, like "Under-King Of the Mole People" or a cyborg who is a "Walking Swiss Army Knife". Since Backgrounds have been made explicitly non-combat, that gives more freedom without having to worry about whether or not it balances with a combat Trait or whether or the crossover with an ability that has utility in both a Clash and a non-combat situation.
That also helped me to resolve a particular niggle involving magical combat. Having hyper-powered wizards, psychics, nano-warlocks or other wielders of vast cosmic powers was always part of the goal for the system. But by their nature those powers imply a variety of combat and non-combat utility. The division between Backgrounds and Fighting Style means that such characters would take an Arcane Fighting Style to represent their ability to tear things up and separate Backgrounds to represent the stuff they can pull off when they aren't tearing things up.
Knacks
Knacks and Styles were never a huge factor in the system, but when working on this draft I realized just how annoying it is to change even a relatively small thing. I had just finished working on the draft, needing only to give it a bit of cleaning up to get things like page markers pointing the right way, when I had a mini-epiphany. It happened just as I was falling asleep too and so I had to go downstairs and write it down before it got lost...then I had to go through the whole friggin document and adjust so much little stuff to match it.
Knacks are a pretty familiar concept from other games...PDQ has Techniques which serve a similar role, White Wolf games have specialties and I bet with a bit more thought I could think up another dozen or so examples. Basically a little "bump" when using an ability in a particular way. Want to be a good swordfighter but be even better as a one-on-one duelist...take a Knack for it. Bam, done. Styles were inspired by PDQ's "unchained" techniques, basically the same thing but applying globally to a character's abilities. Styles are a great way to represent little advantages (like a lucky hat) or idiomatic quirks of a character (such as making them better at everything when not wearing a shirt).
Well, as I was thinking about the system that night I began to ponder if there were just too many bonuses in the game. I like the core system, but I also recognize that no one wants a dice pool system where you've got to roll buckets of dice...especially if you're already using different die-types. Anything calling for more than a handful of d8s or d12s is a problem, if not necessarily a disaster. So I start to ponder places the fat could be trimmed. Obviously 2 dice needs to be the minimum, 1 die is just too random. Bonuses from things like Powers or boosts from Strikes need to be significant to remain balanced with other options so they've got to stay and I'm far, far too enamored with the Fighting Spirit rules to ditch those. That kind of left Knacks and Styles, which are also the reason that most characters are going to be rolling 3-5 dice at minimum anyway, since it's easy to invest in a couple of reliable Knacks and your Style is meant to apply at almost all times anyway.
But I really liked knacks and styles, Styles especially because I think it's important to be able to say "my character gets a bonus to everything when they're drunk/covered in blood/being the loudest in the room". But then some gears snapped into place and started turning and I came to my current solution...basically merging the two. Rather than a selection of Knacks and a single Style, now everyone just has two Knacks that operate much like Styles did...providing a global bonus to all rolls when acting in line with the Style. To keep bonuses from climbing too high they don't stack (this also means buying up tons of cheap Knacks won't be incentivized) and it gets rid of the issue with whether to invest Knacks into Fighting Styles or Backgrounds (because, being honest, they're a lot more useful in fighting styles).
Well, I liked the idea but that meant I had to go through the entire document getting rid of every reference to styles, reformatting all the example characters and generally nitpicking to try and fix this one little rule.
That's probably enough whining about that, so I'll go ahead and post more about the other changes later.
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