Showing posts from May, 2014

Using Verbs, Nouns, Adverbs and Adjectives as methods for defining character ability.

Maybe I need to rethink the whole notion of skills as verbs.

It made sense at first...describe your characters action with the verb they are using in the world.

"Jack will run to the car."
"Molly will sneak up on the guard."
"Lou will repair the generator."

It's simple, it's direct. A subject applies a verb to an object. But once I actually try to break it down and apply the fundamental concepts to play situations it gets tricky.

"Daniel will occult the room"
"Daniel will occult the prisoner"
"Daniel will occult the situation"

Is he appraising his target object from an occult perspective? Is he influencing it in an occult manner? These two would be better described as...

"Daniel will appraise the room"
"Daniel will enchant the room"

But even now, the concept of what Daniel is trying to achieve needs to be clarified. In his appraisal of the room, is he looking for something in particular. If he is e…

How reimagining things has given me a headache...

I mentioned recently that I was switching the basic FUBAR system to be something more gramatically correct. This has been an issue from a lot of perspectives, it's actually something that has been long entrenched in roleplaying games...probably because at their root they were concieved by mathematicians, statisticians and people interested in mechanical gameplay rather than grammatically correct storytelling. The recent generations of story based games have inhereted a lot of the baggage from the past, and generally haven't known, or haven't cared that this is an issue.

Someone on G+ pointed out recently that the "Divergent" movie (and books it's based on) divide people into factions with names that might be nouns or verbs, with no consistency in the naming scheme. That got me thinking about the skill listing that I generally apply to most of my game designs. The core list has about 40 skills in it, many derived from White Wolf's WoD, some drawn from D&am…