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Post by Falconer on Jan 6, 2010 15:05:19 GMT -5
Page three states “There are three classes—Blue Shirt, Red Shirt, and Yellow Shirt” and “There are six skills: Communication, Engineering, Knowledge, Medicine, Physical and Subterfuge.”
I was just curious why the two layers. Instead of 3 classes and 6 skills, it could just as easily have been 6 classes, no? Are you simply following a Microlite20 convention? (I admit I am not really familiar with Microlite20.)
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Post by slortar on Jan 6, 2010 15:40:49 GMT -5
Well, the idea is that there's a separation there to give players flexibility in creating characters that are unique without adding a whole lot of clutter to the game system (and creation). I wanted to retain the red/blue/yellow* split because it's iconic--that's what it looks like on-screen after all. The way it works now is you choose a class...which are mostly identical to each other. The only real difference between them is it determines which list of class Talents you can choose from. Every class starts out with one skill of their choice Trained. If you want more skills, you can choose a Talent to add to your list--the first one's a freebie. Within that framework, there's a lot of flexibility. You could make a Blue Shirt with a Trained skill in Communications...and then choose Talents from the Blue Shirt list to make them better at psychology. You now have a TOS version of Deanna Troi. Give your Blue Shirt a Trained skill in Science, pick up lots of research type Talents and then you have Spock. Heck, if a player wants their Blue Shirt to be Trained in Subterfuge and then go off on a strange criminal tangent, I'd let them. They'd be terrible at everything a Blue Shirt should be good at, but probably pretty useful on shore leave in the rougher parts of the planet. In stock M20, skills are limited to class. Fighters are always good at Physical, Thieves are always good at Subterfuge. I thought it'd be more interesting in a character-building sense to uncouple the connection. * Not my idea originally, by the way. A fellow named Gorillacus on rpg.net came up with it first.
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Post by Falconer on Jan 7, 2010 14:56:18 GMT -5
That is a very good explanation. I admit I still find it a little confusing that there are classes and skills and talents--it just seems like one of those layers could be cut out. But that part of me that wants to keep things as simple and class-based as possible is moderated by that part of me that is intrigued by the idea of tinkering around to make a non-conventional character. So I really can not disagree very strongly with your method.
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Post by slortar on Jan 7, 2010 15:34:08 GMT -5
You know, when I was writing 2.0, I was mostly shooting for a Mentzer-era D&D level of complexity and tone while pulling in stuff I thought would be useful/cool from current RPG's.
I'm occasionally tempted to cut it down myself to a fully old school level,* but, as you pointed out, I'd lose all those weird alternate character types that players like to make.
I don't think it'd actually be all that hard to homerule that sort of thing in, though. You could just make a class for each specialty lock it into one or two skills trained, then have predetermined Talents show up every few levels.
So, you'd have a Security Red Shirt class that always had Physical trained at 1st level and started out with "Brawling" and "Durable". They'd eventually get specialization in brawling attacks, maybe Intuition or Luck, upgraded Brawling, Power Attack, etc, as they leveled up.
* Three iconic classes or so with pre-defined abilities you get every few levels, for example.
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Post by Falconer on Jan 7, 2010 15:56:43 GMT -5
By the way, have you thought of including Alignments?
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Post by slortar on Jan 8, 2010 8:59:41 GMT -5
I'm not against it, but it seems in a game that focuses mostly around Star Fleet that it boils down to White Hat vs Black Hat vs Civilian. I do have something of a mechanical alignment system in that the GM rewards players for behaving like Star Fleet personnel rather than an adventuring party.
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