FrankTrollman wrote:PL, what do you even want?
I'd like to see a little intellectual honesty. Without that all your vaunted design talk is worthless trash.
You know full well that segregation of abilities is meaningless here. An irrelevant cosmetic change.
You have a NPC. They have some amount of points to spend which may or may not be segregated into different categories. And they spend them, and they have some numbers and abilities and attributes on their character sheet.
Change bolded. That entire paragraph was you masturbating again Frank.
I have described in fucking detail where you are wrong on this, challenge it with some relevant meat, not some whining about how you think I'm rude for pointing out YOUR deficiencies and should be more constructive or bullshit.
Because if you pull that you aren't just transparently wrong, you are a fucking bald faced hypocrite.
Now if you
want to talk about solutions to the problems of variable specialisation and encounters that worsen it we could but it's been clear from the get go you were only pulling some vague distraction out of your ass to once again back one of your less inspired ideas.
And oddly I've already discussed it, in plain English. You are too busy defending your indefensible position to notice or care.
Edit: But HEY let it not be said that I'm not fully prepared to talk about irrelevant topics to assholes who are only pretending to care about it.
Good Design and Encounter Based Challenge Ratings
The demands of RPG encounters are wide and diverse. One encounter you are fighting elite guards or bounty hunters trained specifically against your weaknesses, the next you are fighting crippled orphans and Yeti with heat stroke.
It is simultaneously a major requirement that the game provide some degree of fairness, or at least transparent predictability, for the players involved.
Ideally you want to know how challenging various opponents are compared to the abilities of PCs. And how that varies in relation to different opponents, different PCs, and the different situations in which they may meet.
One of the simplest ways to help facilitate this is for NPCs and PCs to
use the same rules[/i], assuming you have in fact designed the rules so that characters of any given level(or equivalent) are basically of similar challenge to others of the same level (another reasonably good design goal to aspire to).
You could generate NPCs using a separate parallel rules set, and it could include a separate parallel level/challenge rating system, and you could have like, tables and shit to figure where it matches up to the PC level/power rating system.
But there is a fairly major problem. A common design goal is to have various powers or character options to be significantly inferior or superior in various contexts ranging from environments to specific match ups against opponents with other specific powers or options.
The thing is... implementing the separate system, developing its separate power rating scale, and applying the required translation between that and the PC power rating scale...
It doesn't eliminate this problem. This is unsurprising since really, it never even interacted with it. Hell, no one even sat down and said "what is the real problem here?"
To eliminate the problem a character generation system (NPC or PC) would need to not just conquer the age old "specialist vs generalist" problem but also effectively remove the very possibility that characters could actually be advantaged or disadvantaged in some way by the context of an encounter or the interaction of their specific "level appropriate" abilities with those of their opponents. And at that point you have not only removed a vast swathe of encounters from those the system might represent but you have also created a remarkably unpleasant RPG system in general.
Not only that you have probably at that point achieved the impossible. And if it IS possible, and desirable, one asks, why is somehow ONLY possible and desirable for the NPC generation system?
So then you start looking for real solutions, and it is a HARD problem. I mean fucking insane. It PROBABLY belongs in the too hard basket, but since the apparent argument here is "Well my solution doesn't work, but I'm not wrong until someone else gets it right!"...
So then a solution I've been considering
What you need is a system that determines the value of character abilities with some sort of conditional context sensitivity.
I would recommend a point based system (which may or may not be related to the basic character advancement/generation system).
Each ability has a points rating that contributes to your abstracted value of how bad ass a character is. And that points value has a simple description of situations in which it does or doesn't apply.
Of course the situations in which it does or doesn't apply would need to be as simple as possible. I would suggest that any such conditions never be more complex than "Always applies unless your opponent has Fire attacks" or "Only applies if you are under water"
Even with a relatively simple set of conditions this IS a complex solution. However, since it's rival is "we do an entire separate rules set that magically solves a bunch of complex problems in simple but entirely undefined ways" I'm prepared to go with it.
And when you consider the complexities of trying to determine how challenging any given encounter is for any set of PCs it IS a very complex problem, and this kind of short hand of a bunch of abstracted points values that transparently tell you when they are in or out is actually a remarkably simple way of being able to potentially add up all the character based factors in the situation and even account for their interaction with each other and the environment/context to some degree.
Throw in some scheme of challenge rating modifiers for ongoing status effects like injuries that already apply before combat and you have one of the potentially most useful and comprehensive challenge rating tools you could ask for.
At that point I would suggest the complexity cost might be very well worth it. Certainly if your stated goal is to solve the Sailors vs Farmers dillema (and indeed the Specialist vs Generalist and power variation by context problems that it is born from) then something like this is arguably the SIMPLEST possible solution.
There are two other important things to note about this approach.
1) It is independent of whether you use a separate or unified NPC/PC ability list. Like EVERYTHING, it is simpler if applied to a SHARED list but like many things irrelevant because in this situation (as with most others) separating the NPC abilities in no way addresses the underlying problem.
2) This is a true Encounter based challenge rating system. If your challenge rating system is simply "A level X PC party and a level Y NPC party" you are running a VERY vague hit and miss Character level based challenge rating system, and if your only bow to any variation in situational applicable character ability beyond that is as lame as "and eyeball some situational modifiers" then your system fails the fundamental Sailors and Farmers problem Frank seems oddly fascinated in all of a sudden.
An RPG toolkit for encounter design benefits from this sort of solution, it provides GMs the ability to determine how challenging a range of encounters on the Sailor/Farmer spectrum may be for any given party, and it doesn't simply prevent him from encountering Farmers at sea (or specialised Sailors at sea!) or Sailor-Farmer dual class opponents as Frank would have us do instead.
