Thursday, October 20, 2011

I Woke Up With This In My Head


OK, what this means to me:

The assumption is a 4 stat set in the spirit of Amber. The 4 stats are Endurance, Discipline, Power and Expression, with 4 derived stats, Willpower (Discipline & Endurance), Precision (Discipline & Power), Force (Power & Expression) and Presence (Expression & Endurance).

The core model is a double-paired idea of internal/external and Active/Passive.

Power is external/active - it covers action. Action tempered by discipline is precision (a lot of stuff traditionally thought of as Dexterity) while Force is the expression of action (think Strength).

Endurance is External/Passive, though that's hopefully obvious. Presence is patient, long term interaction with others, while willpower is the combination of Endurance and Discipline. I am attached to willpower being derived because it tends to be a giant pain in the ass in play, though that's a whole other topic.

Discipline is Internal/Passive, and it's a whole topic in and of itself.

Expression is Internal/Active, which is a little weird on the surface of it, but works if you view Internal as including personality, then it becomes a nice middle-place for Charisma.


Anyway, that's the bones of it. Still chewing on it.

11 comments:

  1. How are you defining Presence so that it becomes a factor in Endurance?

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  2. It's actually the other way around: Presence is a function of Endurance and expression.

    But it's definitely a linguistic weak link.

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  3. It's interesting to think about these things in terms of being polar binaries with shared ancillary terms (if that's the intent). But as an experimental suggestion, Wouldn't "Force" be more opposed to "Precision"? Precision can have Force I suppose; I guess I'm just uncertain about the Presence/Precision dichotomy. Thanks!

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  4. Could we get a bit of clarification here? The way I'm reading it, based on the comment above, is that you plot out how far out your Endurance, Power, Expression, and Discipline fall on their given axes. You then connect each point to the adjacent quadrants via straight lines (creating a quadrangle whose intersections are the points from the first step) and your Presence, Force, Precision and Willpower are derived from where the lines cross the X- and Y-axes?

    How did you decide upon the eight characteristics? Why are the X- and Y-axis characteristics derivatives of the others?

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  5. What's Power & Endurance? Is there such an animal?

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  6. Interesting you bring this up, I was just talking with some friends about a mechanic (influenced by cortex+) where each ability as one of 2 abilities at opposite poles. A 1 on a roll for one of the poles grants a +1 to the next roll of the opposite skill.

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  7. I've been repeatedly removing and replacing a project on the back-burners to be able to uncouple the underlying system for A Dirty World with its genre. The game is stronger because of how they are so strongly linked, but I've wanted to link the system to other genres.

    This gives me some ideas. Hmmm.

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  8. I was thinking much the same way at one time, albeit from a different direction and in doing so accidentally derived two very similar sets of active (green) and passive (red) characteristics: http://reverancepavane.livejournal.com/329768.html

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  9. Reminds me quite a bit of the way stats work in Everway.

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  10. I recall an Amber system which tried to use a set of additional stats that were each half of two of the stats. That seemed to add needless complexity.

    Why did you put the primary stats on the diagonals and the derived ones on the standard orthogonal axes?

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