Qraekuul wrote:One thing I'm playing around with is reducing the greatest effect of the Racial Skills sheet (since anything on the RS sheet gets added to the character at generation). For example, the Dragon race has a 3 for their Dragon Ability, meaning they (1) start with the Dragon Ability Skill if I create them at chargen, and (2) may, in the absence of being the Dragon class, Master their Dragon Abilities.Templayer wrote:Then tell me how to balance it better, racial skills-wise. Please remember that the Racial Skills are a first version. I can make a V2, if the idea is sound.
I am also modifying the class skills chart to adjust for this. As an example, the promoted Dragon class (I believe it's called Great Wyrm?) gets Basic Dragon Ability - this ends up giving the same net effect that the original game did, which is "you have to be a promoted Dragon to use Wing Buffet".
Unfortunately, as it works right now there is no way to retain this lockout if the plan is to remove the classes in favor of using the races. Either the system would need to be rewritten to use the greater of the two-to-six potential race and class and promotion class tables, or else just have each grandmaster teacher explicitly check to see if the character in question is fully promoted before offering to train grandmastery.
So in short: my idea from a while back was to slightly modify each race so that they have a) minimal guaranteed skill levels regardless of class b) bonuses to one or two skills c) penalties to one or two skills to balance these out. This could let the races have their own idiosyncracies even when combined with classes. For example the mino could have a guaranteed expert in axe regardless of class, so that even classes like mino druids or clerics could use it. But classes that get Axe by default would receive +1 to their mastery cap, so that Knights who are by default limited to master could get GM. Same with Perception, due to the minos' large eyes - all classes could get +1 to their mastery cap. Then this could be compensated for by reducing one or two of their other skill level caps by -1 each. Determine all these skills for every race, rinse and repeat.
I think that if implemented right it could give different race/class combos more personality, giving the player an incentive to try them all out (or at least min-max for optimal race/class combos for their party members). I personally feel this would give the game even more replay value than it already has. What do you think about this?
Here's my table of proposed changes from before. Probaby haven't gotten around to making any adjustments yet:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f7znEE ... sp=sharing
Templayer refused to add this to the suggestion tracker as he decided on his own that it can't be anything other than optional, but I still think it deserves a discussion at least, Rodril might actually like this idea after some toning down. I've been hoping to get this discussed and iterated on with the help of y'all so we could possibly arrive at a version that would feel fair and an objective design improvement to everyone. Please share your feedback!