Kingdoms of Amalur - What did you think of the system?

[Ferret]

https://www.polygon.com/2020/6/4/212802 ... price-leak

Polygon is reporting Kingdoms of Amalur is getting a remaster, which reminded me how neat I thought the character system was.

Rather than determining stats, then choosing a class and then buying skills, you would pick skills from a tree, which gave you stat bonuses to help you succeed at the thing, and depending on what your distribution of skills and stats looked like you got a 'class' card that gave additional stats, bonuses, skill evolutions, etc.

I thought it was really neat, and a good way of solving the characters sucking at their shtick thing.

Anybody else remember this game/system? Do you think it could be viable for TTRPG?

[OgreBattle]

That sounds like a pointbuy system, what Shadowrun is like, so it could work and it can also be bad based on what the skills do.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I remember it being one of the most boring action RPGs I've ever played. I really wanted to like it, but it just wasn't fun to play and the setting wasn't terribly interesting to me. The actual character building, though? I liked it well enough. The game is a good reminder of why you shouldn't include a crafting system unless you've thought it out so that it isn't stupidly fucking overpowered, because I made a weapon that was better than everything else I could possibly find after playing for about 2 hours.

[hogarth]

It was mildly interesting, but in my experience it was more beneficial to focus on one ability tree (fighter/rogue/mage) to unlock higher tier abilities, with maybe a little dabbling in a second tree. I think I played it twice: once with a mostly-fighter dipping into rogue, and the second time with a 100% mage.

(EDIT: Actually, maybe it was a more-or-less 50/50 split of fighter and rogue; it was quite a while ago. But I seem to remember that it wasn't worth dipping into another class as a mage.)

Mass Effect: Andromeda also had a similar system where you picked from three ability trees and it assigned you a "class" based on how many points you had in each tree. Again, it was mildly interesting but it suffered from the aspect where you were picking from maybe 20 skills but you could only map 3 of them to your video game controller. Of course, there were way bigger problems with Andromeda, in the grand scheme of things.

[Stubbazubba]

I quite liked the system, it's got some features the Den quite likes (e.g. skill points unlock what are basically skill feats, IIRC).

I like the idea of that bottom-up "skill specialization leads to class title/abilities," just because it's novel, but I can't really see how that isn't just inviting trap choices all over the place. I suppose with a TTRPG, all the class cards would be in the book so you know how to get the best one you want up front, but that feels like it's just the feat tree/prereq problem all over again, but on an entire character level.

I do agree that determining stats and skills independently from class is ridiculous: choosing your class should give you the core of your stats and skills, with race and anything else customizing the margins.

[JigokuBosatsu]

There's always something appealing about breaking stuff up into groups of three. I've been playing Dead Cells a lot lately and I really like their trinity: Brutality, Tactics, and Survival. These are functionally Melee, Ranged, and Shields, but a little more nuanced and lots of combinations and interactions between the various weapons and mutations (functionally feats).