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Character Options: Ancestry
🕑 Added 2023-05-17 18:47:34 +0000 UTCHey Folks, Matt reporting in. It’s been a little while since we’ve had an update, mostly because we’ve been focusing on dialing in the round-to-round experience of Fighting Monsters and that (so far) hasn’t changed that much from week to week.
But this week we have the entire design team in-house here at MCDM and so this is the time when we talk about really high-level design nonsense. Including! Today’s meeting! Character Options! We should have some!
When you finish making a 1st-level character, what choices have you made? What do you expect to get for those choices? We know your character has an Ancestry and a Class. Do you have a subclass? If so, do you choose it at level 1? Do you use feats to customize your character? Themes? Prestige Classes? What are those?
Good question! Let’s find out!
Some of these things, we may discover we don’t need them? Some might get rolled into others, and we might discover there’s a need for some new option we haven’t accounted for here. But this is our current thinking. We’re only going to cover your character’s ancestry right now. We talked about a lot more today, but writing these posts takes time and sleep has to happen sometime.
Ancestry
We know your character has an Ancestry and a Class. We spent a little time after the meeting talking about the Ancestry design space because I wanted to make sure we were confident that we could balance humans against Something Way Cooler. If we want to make a Hakaan (Half-giant) ancestry, could we do that and make sure humans are equally cool? Let’s find out!
We started with the Hakaan, aka the Barrowmen. A community of stone giants who, generations ago, made a pact with [sufficiently powerful probably extraplanar entity who might be a demigod or maybe a famous lich or something, I dunno] to trade some of their fabulous strength in exchange for oracular vision.
But they were betrayed and after giving up some of their size and strength, they found that the only future they could see was their own death. What on earth might this be a reference to? No one knows, impossible to say.
Ok so we got this cool mix of Half-giant and this high weirdness involving some kind of doomsight. Neat! That’s a pretty well-defined box to start with and it’s sufficiently beefy that I think it’s a good benchmark for “how powerful can an ancestry be?”
Starting with the beefiest ancestry we could think of, we will then go back and see if we can make humans equally cool (spoilers, we think so!) But first we need to know what a Hakaan’s abilities look like.
This led to all sorts of discussions like, how big is big? How many bigs are there? Are all bigs large or are some bigs larger than others?
In other words, do all character sizes equate to a unique grid shape? if a Human is medium, and medium means you take up a 1x1 square, and the Hakaan are larger than medium, does that mean they take up a 2x2 square? We don’t think so, we think you can be Bigger Than Medium and still be 1x1. Just like you can be smaller than medium and still be 1x1 since our game doesn’t have divisions of the grid smaller than that. Maybe Large is 2x2 and the Hakaan are Big, which is one size category bigger than Large, but still only 1x1.
The Hakaan are “strong” although we really don’t want to say “Hakaan are the best ancestry for these might-based classes.” And I don’t think we need to!
First of all, part of their Big And Strong shtick is that they’re harder to move. Knockback resistance! Easy! But also we want something that represents their tremendous strength without giving them a bonus to physical combat that means no one bothers playing a Hakaan Mage. Letting these demigiants ignore some degree of encumbrance seems reasonable.
We don’t really know how Encumbrance works in our game? We know you’re probably not going to be tracking the weight of every item, but if you decide to pick up a bear we all expect it should slow you down some. Does that mean we don’t track weight but you can be Encumbered and it’s a condition the GM applies? Or maybe we only worry about broad weight categories and then you have different levels of Encumbered in which case the Hakaan could ignore some of them.
Maybe, if we come up with a handful of weight categories, and everything you might ever pick up falls into one of those categories, then we could say encumbrance is more about…Endurance which we already have a stat for, and it’s just a normal Athletics test where the target number is determined by the weight category?
This would also help with stuff like the Talent’s telekinesis when used on normal objects out of combat. Having broad (like, maybe only five?) weight categories makes it easy for us to calibrate the Talent’s telekinesis “strength.”
In that case it’s super easy to imagine how a Hakaan PC might be able to ignore some amount of Encumbrance, or be immune to the Encumbered condition? We don’t actually need to know how Encumbrance works for this exercise, we only need to believe that we can give the Hakaan some cool benefit there. Given that we have several ideas, all of them pretty easy to implement, it’s safe to assume we can make the Hakaan “strong” without actually giving them a bonus to Might. This means Might is not literally just Strength.
Being Big, or at least Bigger Than Medium also should mean you’re easier to hit at range than a smaller person? So like, medium characters gain a boon die on ranged attacks targeting you? Well, that might work, but isn’t that really just one specific instance of a broader rule? Whereby anyone gets a boon die on ranged attacks against targets larger than them?
You know, we’re not very far into this document and it feels like all sorts of stuff is falling into place. We wanted to know what kinds of abilities a really cool ancestry would give you, so we can then go see if we can make humans equally cool (no spoilers!)? But just picking the demigiants means we’re talking about Encumbrance and size. Which we needed to figure out anyway!
And we have a lot of ideas for Encumbrance, but one of them, where everything has a weight category and Encumbrance is just an Athletics check modified by that category, means we know how telekinesis works. And really any supernatural spell or prayer that might hurl things around. So the weight category idea seems more useful than the others, because it tells us how other things work as well.
Then we wondered, should being Big mean you’re a bigger target for ranged attacks? Therefore ranged attacks are more effective? So we imagined, maybe the Hakaan being Big means they’re easier to hit at range, and that is just a boon die, then I think we know how ALL ranged attacks against targets larger than you work! That’s…it’s really nice! Means we’re on the right track. Pulling at this one thread meant we’re learning a lot about how our game works.
We can let them ignore the effects of extreme weather and environment, that’s easy. And we can say that they can ignore the Heavy trait and use two-handed weapons one handed? That’s cool!
Finally we have this Doomsight. We think we can give players good ideas of how to implement this in a roleplaying context so “I know my fate” is fun but doesn’t shoehorn them into anything, but really we’d like to see some minor oracular ability useful in combat here. Like a reroll once a day? Glimpse of the Future or whatever?
Yeah that all seems reasonable. It’s a LOT! But we’d rather start with “a lot” and see if we can get humans into parity, than start with humans and then get frustrated when we can’t make the Hakaan “cool” and have to nerf them into oblivion.
So! How do humans work? We have some ideas from Orden. In Orden, humans are “of the world” in a way the other Speaking Peoples are not, for reasons concerning Deep Lore. No, they didn’t evolve naturally, but it’s kinda like that sorta thing.
Because humans are natural, in a way magic and undeath are not, we can give human PCs the ability to detect stuff like magic or undead or really anything sufficiently supernatural. We could even give them resistance against supernatural effects, including magic!
That’s already sorta beefy, we can dial that in as much as we need to. But less is more here, we don’t want humans to become explicitly anti-magic. So let’s keep thinking.
Humans could be better at dealing with animals! Since they’re both “of the world” and this may mean humans are better with pets! Better animal handling? We could probably come up with an ability that reflects that, although it feels like a minor ability. It’s a neat idea though; that humans are better with animals than other ancestries.
This led us to a discussion about classic human tropes like…humans have some nebulous ability like Courage that explains why they’re so successful compared to “cooler” ancestries like the Hakaan. Or maybe they’re Adaptable and so get more skill proficiencies, more skill stunts? That seemed promising.
Then we started talking about humans here in the real world and how homo sapiens are really good endurance runners. S-tier endurance runners. So…maybe…humans in our game get the Supernatural detection/resistance, some animal handling coolness AND…some bonus stamina?
Yeah. Yeah! Bonus stamina! Stamina is a resource that acts like hit points, but it’s deplenished first, before you start losing health, and it automatically replenishes at the end of the encounter. Also! You can spend stamina to gain more movement and maneuvers. Stamina is cool and we like it and if we imagine that humans get more of it than anyone else, you can sort of understand why they’ve been so successful as a species! “I’m not necessarily a better smith than you, I can just do it way longer before I get tired.”
And, like “supernatural resistances,” we can dial in how much bonus stamina you get to bring you into parity with the Hakaan. Might only need a little? We’ll see!
But at this point we all felt confident that we could have some Really Cool Ancestral Abilities without humans feeling basically useless by comparison and that was a good place to be.
More To Come….
We talked about a TON of stuff so far, but I wanted to get at least one update out asap, so we’ll have to stop here and all look forward to the next one. Subclasses AND Prestige Classes?! Surely not! Unless….
Until next time, peace! Out!
