Ramble XXXVIII

Since I got home from Piteå I’ve been thinking about this and that when it comes to role-playing and I have some thoughts I will share with the rest of you. I’ve been drinking tea and watching anime to get into the right mood and to be more energized so I can work on the adventure for the Outsider’s too.

One idea I’ve been working on for some time is this with stamina and its increased use in battle as well as for usual physically tiring activities. All to somehow make it more useful but also important. You’ve seen me try some new appliances of it lately, like to simulate how tired your characters are and also to limit how fast one could be moving during one day. Not to mention how you won’t recover if you are in a situation where your body don’t get rest enough to save up your strength.

First my thoughts about regeneration and recovering of stamina and corporeal capacity, they are both closely linked and will somehow reflect on each other. Note that both CC and SC affect PHY and temporary modifications on PHY are one of the few ways for me to make your characters tired. Well, in a situation where you aren’t eating, drinking or feeling well in general, like when Keisuke and Hibiki was in the passage near the volcano, then you’ll probably regenerate one thing at a time. CC is always first priority for the body to regenerate and SC is secondary, you can be tired but your body needs to recover. As you also might have noticed negative CC is often recovered a lot faster than usual CC. But as long as you have negative CC you won’t recover anything else, not AC, MC or SC.

But say you are in a better situation; you will use SC to move, act, and do physical activities all in all. You will not recover much, but you will recover some of your SC, if you aren’t poisoned or anything, depending on what you do when you aren’t active. Say you are walking in the desert and you mostly just walk and walk with minimal water and almost no food other than necessary and you are trying to keep a good pace, you’ll probably not recover much at all, but depending on how fast your pace you probably won’t loose anything either.

But if you emphasize that you drink a lot of water, take one ration of water and take an easy pace (assuming you have the equipment to do this) and you make sure to eat and stuff, then you’ll probably recover in a much quicker pace. Maybe not your full Stamina Recovery, but part of it. This, of course, is not something you can do if you don’t have a lot of water and food, which would definitely need a camel, or any other pack animal. If you hasten your speed or tries to push it or maybe even run and shit to catch someone you’re chasing then you’ll probably loose stamina, often in levels (a complete row). Or something like that, so in activities such as running, pursing, chasing and so on will most likely affect your SC when it comes to more extensive uses or longer pursuits in terrain or the like.

But I can’t take too much SC in small situations so therefore a number of actions depending on the outcome will take SC. So depending on what you do, and how it goes and your level in the included skills you’ll loose SC accordingly. What I’ve also thought about here is an option to ‘safe acting’ so to speak. This is actually something I plan to apply to all skills actually since I don’t like rolls for some shit. Basically it means that you use energies like AC, MC, SC or CC instead of rolling rolls in some certain situations.

Like you are in a fight, the opponent is described and you’ve rated this opponent as quite good, but more of an equal in skill and expertise and you’re fighting on top of a Bura in Kaaba. Jumping from roof to roof, trying to kill each other. Well, some things like hitting the person with a kunai would still require a roll, but let’s say you come into close battle with this dude and you are swinging your swords or kamas or whatever, at each other. Then it would in a situation such as this be better to have an equal exchange with as little randomness as possible in your moves.

He swings at you, and you decides to block this (at best with the tech block) you block and both decreases their dub and you takes away some SC too, your character decides to counter, and if you have the skill, you counter and say that this cost you 1 SC if you have counter and 2 if you don’t. The other dude decides that he can’t parry this so his only option is to avoid. This is good to have in mind that you aren’t fast as lightning if you attack and the other person blocks and counters you seldom have the time to block again if you are equal. You could now choose to avoid and lose SC, but you don’t want to loose SC and decide that you want to roll about this instead, since your character is now taking a risk instead. You then decide to avoid by a roll. You succeed and the fight continues.

So in other words, you either pay or you roll, or sometimes you do both, even though I think that a situation that would require you to roll too, would be rated a roll only situation for me if you aren’t using techniques or something. This was what I was referred to earlier. This is mostly meant for half-social and social fights since the regular fights often are against opponents who you often need to beat in this way to be able to beat them.

When applying AC and MC in the same manner I think more to do something stimulating mental fatigue and magical fatigue. The lesser is harder to associate to since we don’t have magic in the real world, but think that it’s very much the same, but almost like when you aren’t awake and things seems hard to grasp. Reality is far away and you feel a little like you’re floating or can’t really say if you’re dreaming or not, only that you know you’re not dreaming. That’s the feeling I best associate with magical fatigue when you aren’t a mage.

AC would be applied in situations when it comes to solving stuff which takes a lot of thinking, or when trying to learn something or when trying to meditate for a different reason other than to recover AC. Like meditating over a problem, or trying to remember something, or trying to get insight in something. The later though I need to explain how it should work since people are trying to use it quite a lot lately and they are using it in a weird way and according to me, using it wrong. MC would be used to Multitrance, which is the more magical way of meditating, even though meditate also concerns the magical part. MC would also be used when you’re trying to do stuff magically like before, when people tries to “think away” illusions and the like. Or to resist magical stuff without rolls and such.

When it comes to the skill focus I think I will also make it possible to use MC instead. Focus is actually a highly magical skill. It’s not magical per se but it’s developed and mostly used by magicians since it’s them and other mystiques that uses it mostly. Ki users are more for Meditate; even though they can apply focus on their skills to, it’s not their style or the way they do it, at least not right now.

Hum, I think that’s it on this subject, I have another, which is related to this, but not the same. I think I’ll make another post with that one.

Best regards,
Herid Fel