Jorune: general discussion

Any questions, comments? Discuss them here.

We're going to use the Skyrealms of Jorune 3rd edition rules with little modification. If you have the Sholari Pack and/or back issues of the Sholari fanzine and want to play one of the variant occupations listed there, let me know.

The primary change to the base rules is about learning skills. As part of character generation, I'm going to ask each player to decide whether his/her character learns more by success or failure. Learning by success will improve a character's chances for improving established skills, but learning by failure improves a character's chances for improving lower skills.

Hi! Sorry, been AFK for the past couple of days. Time to play catch up! :-) Thanks!

Good to see you back! Let me know if you'd like any help or questions answered.

I have never seen such an in-depth character creation system. Loving it!

Also, what is the default way of improving skills?

Also, what are Iscin skills?

In a word? Science.

Improvement explained.

I don't know how to ask this: can you give us an idea what the numerical values of statistics and skills mean? Skills at least I sort of get because you have the descriptive unfamiliar/familiar/experienced/seasoned but the characteristics and the derived statistics are little bit more abstract. Is there a maximum value (the analog of 20 in a D&D game?). What numeric values would make one average/succeed most of the time/failure would be a fluke? I'm trying to form a basis for assigning points. :-) Thanks!

I think most things are a d20 roll, and you need to roll under your skill. Probably with situational modifiers for difficulty?

Another question,
This must mean that each skill is associated with a characteristic?
That being the case, what skills are associated with what? And do the characteristics have an effect on the skills themselves?

To address Jabes' questions: most actions don't require a roll against a rank, just a certain level of ability. A particular task might require someone trained in the task, for instance (they have at least a 1 in the skill). If the character is Familiar, it will be done faster. If the character is Experienced, it will be done particularly well.

But in combat (and certain other situations, such as trying to activate Earth-tec before a ship sinks beneath the waves), you often do need to roll. It's a d20 roll, trying to get equal or less than your skill number. You'll have noticed that a lot of skills - particularly the non-combat skills - have very low rank numbers, even in cases where the level of the skill is high. For very hard skills like Physics, for instance, someone is Seasoned in the skill with a rank of 9! What this means is that you should be avoiding using these skills under duress, but if you have to use them in dangerous situations, you should have others work to shield you from the danger so that you can work in peace. Imagine that you're on a ship that is being attacked by pirates. The ship has a complicated ancient artifact on board that must be activated for you all to escape. You have the Earth-tec skill and are confident that you can do it...but you would find it very difficult to decipher the ancient instructions and so on while pirates are swinging swords at you. You could try it (by rolling against the rank of the skill), but your chances of success wouldn't be great. On the other hand, you could appeal to your teammates: "Keep them off me for two minutes and I'll be able to get this activated and save us all!" and then the onus is on them to keep pirates from swinging swords at you for a few rounds, after which you would automatically succeed at your roll.

Rolls are typically against skills, and usually only when there is some pressure on the result: time pressure, opposition, threat, etc.

To speak to part of Naatkinson's question: Mostly the characteristics are there to determine your derived statistics. That's their primary purpose in the game mechanics. Your derived characteristics adjust as soon as your characteristics change. So your max isho or max lifting weight would change as soon as your ISHO or STRENGTH changed, for example.

That said, there are a few cases where a roll is made against a CHARACTERISTIC, rather than a skill:
* SPOT and LISTEN checks: you'll be rolling to notice stuff fairly frequently (as we've seen in the game thread already)
* STRENGTH checks: when something nasty grabs your character, this is the roll to break free.

To Qralloq: Absolutely. The game has almost-Rolemaster levels of situational modifiers. One of my jobs as GM is to shield you from those, because they are ridiculously granular. We can do it one of two ways:

1. You can describe what you're doing and roll, then I'll do the calculations, and tell you the result.

or

2. You can describe to me what you're doing, I'll respond by telling you the net modifier, you make a second post adding that modifier to your roll, and then you'll know immediately whether you succeeded or not, though I'll still describe the result.

I think I prefer the first option, because it would move the game faster. Tell me what you think, though.

Naatkinson: Different skills map to different characteristics, for the purposes of increasing the characteristics when the skills increase in level. Some characteristics do not map to any skills, and so cannot be improved by such means.

The following skills can increase by improving the level of skills: STRENGTH, SOCIAL, COLOR, AIM, LEARN, EDUCATION, and AGILITY.

- Interaction skills improve SOCIAL
- Dysha and moon skills improve COLOR
- athletic and melee combat skills improve either AGILITY or STRENGTH
- ranged combat skills improve AIM
- common/practical knowledge skills improve EDUCATION
- languages, sciences, and other skills improve LEARN

I'm assuming that increasing the ranks of a Skill at character creation doesn't give the chance to upgrade a Characteristic? That would start after game play has begun

Yes, that's my take on it, too. To do otherwise would take this into the realm of the really complicated character generation systems, like Traveller or Universe.

This is taken from Jabes Character Creation

This is why I asked, because it seems REALLY easy to game the system. Take all my skills, put them one step away from the next level and go to town increasing characteristics left and right.

Well, I'm adjusting the 3rd edition rules to make it easier, yes. So I'm fine with that. In the continuity of the story, you have been adventuring for some time, so it would make sense that you might (might) improve multiple skills in a session.

Remember that you have to specify whether your character learns by success or by failure. That decision is fueled by whether you want to develop a well-rounded character over time (got at least Familiar in everything), or have someone who is exceptional in skills that he started with.

(note: in 3rd edition played as a tabletop game, skill advancement is much more complicated - a bit of a minigame really, where you earn advancement points that are then spent in batches to make rolls to advance your character's skills. A given session's use of a skill would generate a random number of advancement points, which might or might not be enough to buy a single roll. For the purposes of our game here on GP, this seemed too complicated a load of bookkeeping. It also could end up being much slower skill advancement, depending on the quality of the rolls. Given that you still have to roll to improve a skill in my "simplification" of the system, I don't think we're losing too much by the change.)

So far I like the character creation. Not such a fan, but the sounds of it, of advancement, especially since you have to assign skills that you may or may not even use. I understand that it's part of the system, it just seems very unreliable and too reliant on luck. We will see how it plays out though :)

Looking forward to a good experiment. Never played anything outside of DnD or Pathfinder before.

Yeah, it forces the player to plan what he's going to try to use in the future, which is a little like Robo Rally or other "programming" board games, where you have to declare in advance what you're going to do. Of course, you don't have to use your foci skills, but it's pretty likely that the players are going to try to manipulate events to generate a situation where they will use the skills.

Playing it here on GP, how much depends on luck will vary depending on whether your character learns by success or failure. If success, you'll be trying to use skills where you already have a level and you will succeed automatically, unless opposed or there is some other difficulty requiring you to roll. In that case, the challenge is just, as I said above, trying to figure out a way to use that skill in the game. If you learn from failure, you'll have to try to use the skill in challenging situations, so that you can roll...or use skills where you are Unfamiliar.

Incidentally, you can join in on the game thread anytime; you don't need to wait.
Game thread