Either you are generically strong and healthy, or you are generically weak and sickly. I've decided that it is not important to have those kinds of variations. In the real world, you can have someone who is very muscular but has very poor endurance, or someone who is not capable of hitting very hard but who can take a mighty beating. I think that it is easier to tune and balance a game that consists of a handfull of interesting and compimentary attributes and rules than it is to do so with a game that has enormous lists of skills, attributes, and rules for handling different situations.įor example, I've decided that characters will have an attribute "strength" which includes raw physical strength, the ability to apply strength efficiently, physical toughness (resistance to damage), and endurance. Don't be afraid to completely remove any element that you don't think is going to have a significant effect on the overall strategy or play of the game. Make sure that each attribute and rule is meaningful in its own right. Use different mechanics where needed, but don't introduce too many different ways of doing things or you'll make the game harder to learn and play. Games are not simulations and while the rules should map to a plausible set of imaginary events, they don't have to stand up to in-depth examiniation for realism. You need to avoid adding rules solely because it adds realism any rule that does not accomplish a specific goal should be revised or eliminated. I think it's a lot easier when you know what you want the mechanics to actually do. The goal was to permit PC to influence their society advancement in a tangible manner through new discovery, revolution, politics, etc. The concept is to describe some kinds of civilization attributes (in terms of social, environmental, spiritual, martial, science, mechanical, economical technologies), and to derive the character basic skills and cost with it. A kind of meta-system similar to the technological tree in Civilization(TM), the video game. Bad if you like details and hard to combine skills easily. Can be enough for simple system with not lot of progression.
You are either neophyte, apprentice, companion, master or genius. For example, you will have a 8+3D, which mean 8 success plus 3 dice pool. Use an amount of fixed success and a certain amount of dice for the pool.
By skills, I include both usage (how to use it), representation (# of dice, bonus, adjective?) and definitions (what they supposed to represent). from the most simple to the most complicate. I always ended unsatisfied, whatever I do, use, choose.