Upcoming Possible Changes
This is a note about thoughts I’ve had lately about changing something in Nianze. This is just thoughts and suggestions that you MAY have something to say before I decide. So heed my advice and comment before I get annoyed, if you do care…
Training
To begin with I’m thinking about changing the gain from Daily Training. This is due to the fact that it goes a little to fast to raise ones skills and when one have maxed out there isn’t anything to use it on anymore. But I don’t want to do too complex rules like before. Just change the principle a little.
However, it needs to change a little. This is all due to the fact hat techniques and spells no longer needs FP. So these are the following suggestions in total;
Daily Training
With this I instead introduce the different modes of training. And to get your whole INF that day you need to train all day and not travel at all. And if you want to travel you have to train light, medium or hard instead of full training. This may be a little complex and hard to say but in whole you just reduce how much FP you can gain during a travel period. With this I may also say that your current environment is only suitable for light training. Like boats etcetera.
Weekly Training
With this, you can gain 1-4 times your INF a week instead. This is good when in “traveling” mode. You roll your INF and depending on your roll you get an amount of FP you can freely spend on your properties, skills or special skills. You still get FP even thou you get a disastrous roll. It’s also possible to change this to Monthly Training, which could be a suggestion for monthly stays at places. It’s easy to adjust anyway.
Successive Training
This is NOT what it sounds like. It’s rather than you decide to train a skill one day, and you then roll the skill, if you succed you’ll get your INF on that skill, property or special skill. If you fail, you’ll get a loss of 5 FP or something. And only allowing one roll a day with training possibilities makes it a little risky. Thou the flaw in this so far are that you will only raise your high skills higher while the low will stay low. If one inverts the roll on the other hand, making it easier to succced with the opposite number for success it may work better. Thou I don’t really know about this when you are all doing long traveling… think… just a week… the whole group doing a lot of rolls… I don’t like that idea… Thou this idea is adjustable if one likes it.
Teaching and Learning
One other thing is learning and teaching during the game. Shall this be possible for players or not? I’ve made it easy for me and said, nope, this is not possible… But lately I’ve been thinking about either rules or just special-cases permission to make this possible foremost when it comes to Knowledge’s and maybe languages.
I’ve also, when I thought of this, thought that it would be good to have the group training each other, good for the loyalty and bonds that SHOULD be made during their travels. But then again, some just forget about their loyalties and just play and then, maybe, look down on the formula and wonder if that is really correct… Whatever, back to the point!
My suggestion, and here I’ve only one suggestion, is that when it comes to knowledge it shall take about as many days as the FP-cost for the knowledge for the teacher to teach it to his comrade. But with one more criteria, either cannot train during this period and the teachers INF must be over 12 and the learners INF can’t be lower than 7, if it’s lower than 7, the teacher need to have as much more over 12 as the learner have under 7. So if the learner have 31 the teacher needs to have 16 INF. If the learner have higher than the teacher nothing happens.
The same suggestion applies to languages but in this case the FP-cost is 5 times more when speaking and 10 times more when reading and writing. One more rule for this is that is that for this to work, you need to study this every day with no training. If you want a break however, every day you don’t train this, you get a set back of one day.
Skills however, you can only learn out as secondary and you need to have advanced or more. You cannot help one raise their KN, just learn it to them. Here I’m not sure how long it will take but most likely it will take at least 1 week and up to 4 weeks depending on which skill we’re talking about. And here you need time and the right environment to make it possible. This is more suited for cool-downs, when the group have settled down on a place for a while.2
Phase Duration
Okies, I’ve thought of changing the whole phase idea. I’ve already tried battles on the mat without phases. The move, action, move phase system was a hindrance for a flowing battle. Therefore I’ve disbanded that idea. This is DONE already, something I thought you shall know. This suggestion however is about the new phases.
One phase is now when all have acted. You have one action-moment each, where you spend actions which cost different amounts of HND. But you can only act once. But then, after your action, it’s the next persons initiative. This goes round and round until everyone is out of actions. Then the round ends. This is a phase.
So I’m just wondering if some effects should be put in phases instead of rounds. Like poison gas from the Tyniker or fire damage. So you take damage each phase and the duration is just phase. This will make some things VERY fast and other things VERY lasting. But I think some things should be better to say “four phases” which can be about two to four rounds depending on how much HND and such the ones in the battle spends before the next round.
Well that is it folks…
I hope for you good that you’ll give me response, thoughts, suggestions and your opinions or I’ll start to think that you don’t even WANT to have a part in Nianze development.
Best regards,
Herid Fel
Ok well.. here it goes, I agree that the FP gain at the moment is too much..even for the big group that rarely stays very long and one place and focus on training , because even with just the daily training you get too much.
Anyway I liked the idea with the new “Daily training” making it harder to travel and train at peak efficiency since this will give the group a choice kind of… either they travel slowly and train more or travel fast and hardly any training.. I guess that depends if youre in a hurry or not.
The weekly training , well.. dont think I really understood that one.. first you gain 1-4 times youre INF and then you roll INF for some sort of bonus FP aswell? Sounds easy and simple but I dont really know what kind of point it would bring to the game if you have daily training.
The Successive Training, this one I didnt really like since it sounds very messy and alot of rolls as you pointed out..which would just be a time sink to start rolling alot, so I dunno about this one. Maybe the idea can be tweaked but at the moment I really dont have a good suggestion for it.
Now to the most interesting part of the text in my oppinion..is the ability to learn others what you know, and I liked the limitation that the teacher needs 12 INF.. cause that will add another effect to INF.. and maybe INF will stop being so static(5,10,15,20).
However I think it should be very hard too learn some languages/knowledges/skills..maybe even as long as six months or so..for the harder ones , since it would be boring if it would be way to easy , cause then everyone will run around with tons of languages and knowledges..and that might take away some of the uniqueness of coming into a new country or having a character(maybe even a concept) that specializes in knowing alot. and if teaching , especially languages and knowledges is gonna be introduced then maybe it would be good to re-introduce grades of experience in the specific language/knowledge.. cause it feels abit weird if a Elf that has been speaking Ayum for almost its whole life and then teaches it to a human that learns it and becomes just as good as the Elf in a few months.. although this can be acted out between the players, its easy to forget. Also as an example.. “two elves are speaking to eachother and a human is listening.. then maybe the player says he has Ayum but the SL says that the elves speaks so fluent Ayum and pretty fast that the human cant understand everything”…(I remember some examples of that in the beginning of Jayde, while in Trizons Valley.) anyway.. I think its a neat idea to be able too teach eachother some skills and things like that.
About the phase duration I think it can work actually with just one action at a time… maybe its best to play around abit with some easy fights just too see how it works.. might be easier too give any thoughts and suggestions about it at that time.
Oh well.. enjoy the read and dont hurt youre eyes while ripping my text apart 😀
I see that someone actually heeded my words and took them seriously. Well, that’s good cause I’ll be very annoyed if I don’t get responses and who knows what may happen then?
However, to your answer.
The weekly training, which I actually like best myself, is that you get 1-4 times your INF a week in TOTAL, no bonus. But after just thinking for a few minutes I think that if I would introduce this it would look about this;
Each “training week” you roll INF to se how well it goes. The outcome can become one of the six following;
Disaster – 50% INF FP
Fumble – 100% INF FP
Failure – 150% INF FP
Success – 200% INF FP
Perfect – 250% INF FP
Critical – 300% INF FP
So one week can result in everything from 1 FP (If you have only 3 INF) to 60 FP (if you have 20 INF). Then consider that I also can make moods for this, or have other circumstances to add or draw to your roll.
As for the last training method, I think I’ll skip it in whole anyway.
About languages… it’s already takes pretty long time to teach out languages. Languages such as Menarisch and Kemian takes at least one month to learn (6×5=30 days) and this is just speaking. If you want to read it takes 80 more days…
Now know that these languages are the worlds MOST easy languages. In total, to learn Menarisch (Read, Write, Speak) takes about 110 days which is about 3 months and a couple of weeks… Then we have Demonug… 16×5=80 to speak… 18×10=180 to write/read… 260 days to learn… which on Yurin is about 7½ months… The same applies for Ayum. And after that with barely 6 months we have Dvirkisch and Icenit. After that we have Okran, Tarzeit and Cecham… Needless to say… it takes quite a long time already, which actually is the ammount of days you even wanted it too… So you didn’t really thing that statement trough I think…
But one thing I want to add to languages, is that higher BIL AND INF is requierd. BIL above 14 for country languages and 16 for racial languages and 18 for Demonug. And Just 14 for all languages in INF. Languages shall not be easy… I must be able to be mystical without creating a complete new language…
As for knowledge’s… you can only know a limited amount of knowledge’s. But I think that you can easily replace them when you learn a new one with the one you have the least use of. We’ll see about that later…
I won’t have any grades on languages. I rather just have you add it on your character notes that this character may be fluent in this language, but not born with it. An elf is naturally better than a human. At least if that elf have grown upp with that language. That I leave to the social part of the game, as for the read/write… Almost every language have an ancient version of itself. The skill here is determined by SIN, BIL, INF and KRE. How well you can understand, know, learn and puzzle the text together, so no need for a skill level, only a note to self how you speak/read/write this language.
Yes, the duration must be tested, but it was a suggestion, and you answered that. I will know test to change some durations to phases, which may make some things more leathal than others. We need more “easy fights” in both groups with other words, hehehe…
Well, you see! You can make an relevant post with some good thoughts, suggestions and so. Was it really that hard? And in barely a day! It’s seven times better than on the other post where I wanted your opinions……..
Best regards,
Herid Fel
Hehe.. well.. just wanted to add about that language thing.. cause I really dont agree with the (“But one thing I want to add to languages, is that higher BIL AND INF is requierd.”) statement cause it it might look good but in reality almost none puts points on those 2 values(and yes this would make them more valuable) but , I would rather see some sort of “competence” check.. for example if demonug is a very hard language to understand well(18 like you said) and maybe I dont have 18(which is extremly high) but somehow I should still atleast have a chance too understand it.. atleast in my oppinion..else most ppl will only know their native language.. if even that..I mean 14 BIL for country languages sounds way too high. but the idea might work but with lower requirements.
And concering mystical languages to keep things mysterious I dont really agree there either..as I said in my earlier post you could simple say that(depening on the char’s BIL) that 1) you dont understand what they say/or what the sign says for example or 2) you get a sort of competence check(a roll of some sort) too see if you can understand what they say/or what the sign say , I like the idea of competence checks actually.. cause it would add more BIL rolls.. meaning more chances of raising BIL.
Firstly, the requirements are ment to teach an language between players. This doesn’t mean that you need to have this level on BIL and INF to learn the language from a teacher in the game who usually takes money or something else as an exchange. So I will most likely have that high standard, ESPECIALLY, for Demonug which is a language I want to have a VERY high value. So when crossteaching (teaching in the party between SLPs and players) it will be very hard to learn. While if you pay for it you may have it faster and even better than before.
As for the competence check, of course I’ll have it sometimes. I actually already have with BIL and sometimes SIN. I know I’ve let you roll these kinds of rolls quite often lately. But you don’t know that since I often just say… roll it.
And what I meant is that I can’t say that everytime. That gets dull, and makes the rules seem uncomplete when they don’t cover the most part of the world if everytime I want to be a little mysterious you don’t understand the language due to the lack of something… But I know my possibilites, I am the gamemaster after all, and if I want I can simply put it like this; “Nope, you don’t understand a fuck of what he’s saying and you have no chance to do so either. I don’t care if you have 20 in INF and Fast Adapt.”
Easy… but not funny… One part of the fun for me is to reveal my secrets, just like in my real life.
And as for Raising BIL, I’ve thought of this too. I have a suggestion that is rather more like awards, which is a unfinished suggestion that is a substitute for training… more about this when I’ve thought it through…
Best regards,
Herid Fel
It is true that the training is quite a bit too fast right now and a change is necessary. Rolling for success every day is just as you said way too cumbersome. But your suggestions for daily and weekly training seem better. Rolling for the amount each week seem rather balanced.
Requirements for the area used for training is a good thing. Maybe not only decide what is possible and what is not, it might be interesting to experiment with the idea of giving bonuses for things more suitable to train.
Like for example, you are the only person in the group not speaking Kemian. Everybody else knows it, but normally you converse in Menarisch.
If everybody decides to talk that language in conversation it should boost your ability to learn. You still need them to teach you, but it is a good learning environment.
This is just an example, it should be applicable for pretty much everything.
One thing that strikes me as a bit strange is the requirement of INF for the teacher. Shouldn’t it be KRE or something? Seems more appropriate. INF is about learning and technique of learning, so it is not all that misplaced. But isn’t it more about absorbing knowledge? KRE is more about thinking up ways of doing things. This would undeniably also create another use for KRE…
But anyway, I like the idea of making training more of something the game master is in control over rather than “you get this much FP to place anywhere you like every day/week/whatever”.
And now the phase duration stuff. (Is it only me, or does the English term really sound like sci-fi?)
We haven’t used the phase-system for quite some time now, but I liked the way movement and support was split from offensive actions. It added a lot of strategy to the game. But I don’t really know. Might be better this way.
My addition to the discussion on this point would be that adding another measurement of duration would be rather confusing. I think that having two different measurement of duration of spells and such would be rather cumbersome during battle since they are asynchronous.
Round measurement are good for things that last a while and are constant during that time.
I like the idea of using something that resembles phase measurement for things that occur every now and then. Like for example fire damage or poison damage. Make it a really small amount, but really often, instead of quite a lot of damage each round.
But I don’t really like the idea of damage each phase. That would be rather unfair for slow but powerful characters. Something would occur for each phase the others react even though you are done for the round. If the others really want to take advantage of the situation they could spend one HND and wait for next phase, where the slow character takes damage. Then they do this until they are out of HND.
This is a bit of a waste of HND, but you get the point.
This is something that can occur several times in a row after the character is finnished. I don’t like that.
I got the impression that the things that were going to utilize phase duration was things that “occur every X”. Why not instead let it occur every time a character get the possibility to act? Or for poison it could be something like, every time the character acts it recieves damage…
Just a thought…
Just to begin with, when I changed the techniques, some of you thought that training would become to much, I then said that it may be so, but I should test it anyway. It turned out that it infact were to fast, A LOT to fast, and even when I made it possible to train skills and not only special skills this were way to fast. Just a note.
Most likely I will use the weekly system for training. It have gotten good responses this far and I think that it’s the best choice to make things easier. One more benefit of a weekly system is that you can’t do it everyday, which in many cases make the game a little dull.
“What do you do the rest of the day?”
“Eh… I’ll train.” (Not good)
For druids, it’s good, due to the fact that they must train their Animal, and most likely the training for Druids will remain. Their animal have FV on it’s skills and the Druids Animaltraining skill is as the Animals INF, and this shall be used to raise both it’s properties as well as it’s skills… it’s quite a lot for the animal. Thou according to the existing rules, it takes about 8 hours to get the full out of the training. So I don’t think I’ll change that. In other words, Druids will be able to daily train their animals.
If you are talking about languages with the learning environment, I may agree. If a group that travels (and get along well) one day at camp declare;
“Let’s all talk Menarisch, so this poor bastard finally can learn the fu**ing tung! Leon, you teach her today, and from here on we won’t speak to you in any other languages than Menarisch!”
*Luaghs at the ‘poor bastard’ and smiles widely*
Then I’ll agree, but in situations like that, I prefer you act it out first, and then ask for the bonus from me. I’m not always giving away bonuses on rolls automaticly, hehe…
But it’s a high possibility that I’ll do if you play it out, and even award the social part with some SP.
And INF. Well, in some sense you are right, but it’s not my thinking in this situation. INF, as well as BIL, SIN and KRE (which were mentioned) are all the properties for learning, remembering, understanding and constructing. INF in this case mostly are for the simple way to say that you have learned it well enough to teach. It’s almost like your level of understanding (along with SIN). KRE is more like ways to compensating your lack of skill in teaching. These are still suggestions, but I will mainly focus on BIL and INF, due to their nature of being both greatly unfavored by the players as well as having a role in how much you understand of what you can. It’s more like INF also becomes your understanding of your own knowledge. Cognitive knowledge or inverted learning. And one other thing to think about is NOT making it to advanced.
Well, it sounds a little bit sci-fi if you think of it in that way. Phase is often used in Star Trek mainly, and in military terms. One plan have different phases and outcomes, strategy. But in the end the word phase is actually the right one, both in meaning as well as in the word. So let’s try to focus on the right thing here…
The phases before; Movement, Action, Support (Förfas, Aktivfas, Slutfas), were completely unneccessary. I found it out while playing a couple of fights with the kids. It may have put a little more strategy into the game than now (which, I beg to differ) but it made the battles a little longer and very messy, which once again took the fun out of the fight.
Right now I have two battle system that seems to work. The social battles, which is actually quite tearing for me – when I need to translate everything that happends in my head and try to describe and encourage everyone to suggest an action and not think too much on what to do, and the phase battles. With stances and phases where your moves aren’t determined by the phase, this actually makes it possible for all classes and types to act in every turn. It makes the battle more flowing and esier, especially big battles.
The phase system is now more focused with stances and action-saving or reduction. For Fast Strikers this system makes them a little advantegous, but the stances Pending makes it still difficult.
Rounds are still good, yes, for things like berserk and support spells like stoneskin etcetra. And I won’t take that away.
Yes, I see your point when a character that runs out of HND is left in a round that still have phases and then takes damage just because of that..
Hmm, just thinking and reflecting on what you said I think I may have a possible sollution to the problem. In the beginning of one phase you act, that’s also when you take the damage. Let’s just take fire and poison right now.
In the event of an fire (hehe, sounds funny), you take damage every phase until you’re out of actions for that many phases. That means that if an fire have phase duration 3, and you act up your actions on two, you don’t take the third damage untill the next phase you are active in, which will take place in the next round. But you may also in the beginning of that phase put out the fire instead, and nullifying the fire, but losing that phase. AS for poison, that have a duration untill the battle is over or the poison is cured, it can have a duration just like you said, you take damage every phase you move in. I know that I have applied this before, that if you lay down you don’t take damage from the poison. This is the same, if you are still, the poison won’t hurt you.
So in other words, one round can for one character be five phases, while for others, it’s just three… A phase is only a phase if you act in it. If you wait, you’ll lose an action automatically, so noone can wait forever, but those who are fast and wait and keeps away for the other phases may be fast enough to run forward and attack after the rest have lost all their actions, once again stances like pending will be VERY usefull when it makes it possible to act on others action, even if you’re out of actions. Not to mention Warriors retreat…
Just a note, today the blog have had two times the visitors as it have had the best day before today. And I don’t think I’ve seen this much usefull comments ever on the same day.
Best regards,
Herid Fel
PS: This post were two pages long in word, so I don’t think I’ve commented this much on a day before this either :DS