Expertise: A new experimental Stat

homebrew
#21

I’m probably wrong, but it seems the recent addition of Abilities into the ME rules covers the general objective of this thread. Abilities have a lot of range in their mechanical application (similar to Stunts in Fate Core) and are class specific. Since ICRPG culture is largely about homebrewing, I don’t see why a homebrewed Ability couldn’t grant a bonus to a probability or effort roll.

To your point about effort bonuses, this also bothered me a little until I took BlazingPolyhedron’s perspective that equates skill proficiency with efficiency of effort application. It’s still gamey to have only 5 areas of skill proficiency, but it keeps things simple. An easy alternative is to use the five efforts as a means of determining loot effectiveness, but having custom effort bonuses as both BlazingPolyhedron and The_Merlitron have recommended or alluded to.

#22

As an ability, how much bonus would be provided? Right now it draws from the same pool as your stats, so it’s a matter of investment at character creation or milestone rewards. What would you see this looking like as an ability (which would mean not having something else as an ability, and this being kinda the focus of the character - maybe like a lucky fool type?)?

#23

Personally, I use the “pay for progression” method. I feel it gives my players more agency, and, once I’ve designed the economy, it takes a load off my shoulders.

As my players traverse the world, they acquire various loot or coin that can used or traded for more preferable loot at shops that exist in various places. Abilities could be learned in a similar fashion by paying a trainer at these locations. How much an Ability upgrade costs would depend on the overall benefit received.

As a simple example, and to make progression exponentially more difficult, an upgrade to a +1 Ability might cost 100 coin. A +2 ability might cost 300 coin. +3, 600 coin, etc. (Using a 1+2+3 progressive algorithm).

Alternately, you could make ability increases based on Effort expended. So a character could, during non-combat turns, expend effort toward a desired new ability or an increase to their existing class specific abilities.

In either case, conscious effort by the player is required in order to progress, which I always thought made them more invested in the game.

#24

So if someone picked this as a starting ability, it would begin at +1?

#25

Sure.

If the objective is to emulate the rags to riches experience of 5e, +1 with the option to grow the ability would be ideal. You could also start that ability much higher depending on the type of game you were looking to play.

#26

Well, that seems like a perfectly reasonable way to do it, but I’ll admit, I’m a little fuzzy on what is gained in terms of options by making it specifically an ability - as opposed to any other kind of milestone reward. Still, rock on with whatever makes sense in your head.

#27

For the students I’ve merged Wis and Int into “Smarts” ( I got tired of differentiating the two) so that may be a way to keep it at 6 slots without technically losing much. If a difference needs to be made on what you are “smart” in thats where the Exp dice/tags could come in- religion, medicine, arcane, science and so on.

#28

Similar to @Nivek’s suggestion, one thing you can do for progression/demonstrating expertise is to allow players to make Target rolls and Effort checks during down time to customize or even craft their loot to determine their progression in a more direct fashion. I’ve always been more for the Core edition’s focus of Loot being the power of the character, but also like players being able to customize their direction and tweak starting gear/milestone rewards to fit their character. Downtime customization Attempts were my solution, and the players really loved it in my Warp Shell campaign.

Basically, the players can each make X Attempts for anything they want during their downtime, and depending what it is you as the GM can set the Effort accordingly. For example:

“The party arrives back in town after a successful mission! Things are peaceful for now, meaning you’ll have about a week of downtime to recover. You get to make 3 Attempts worth of downtime activities.”

  • Player 1 wants to add a STR +1 effect to their magical vampiric sword. I tell them they can make a TARGET attempt to complete 2 hearts of basic effort to grant this effect. This can represent training their muscles, adding magic enhancements, or learning more effective techniques with the gear, but the end result is their sword gets the trait “While equipped: STR +1.”

  • Player 2 wants to make a new magic staff imbued with a Levitate spell. They can make a TARGET to complete 2 hearts of basic effort to craft the gear. With the completion done, player obtains the loot item “Staff of Levitation.”

  • Player 3 wants to raise their INT by 2. They can either follow Player 1’s example and add the effect to a piece of loot (4 hearts effort for +2 instead of 2 hearts for +1), or you can change it and make the attempt a VERY HARD check and/or double the EFFORT if they want to make it innate. On completion, the player gains 2 attribute points in INT.

  • Player 4 wants to learn how to treat wounds in case they run out of magical potions. For each heart of effort they complete, they can choose 1 specific type of injury to become an EASY check to patch up with a first aid kit (i.e. stabilizing/healing burns, cuts, stabs, broken bones, etc. becomes easier)

Any effort made against their effort objective is tracked, meaning if Player 1 only passes 2 attempts and completes 1 heart of effort to enhance his sword this time, next downtime he still only needs 1 heart to finish. This also allows for 2 other major changes: first, since effort persists, multiple different downtime goals can run simultaneously so that the players can make Attempts for 1 or more each downtime they get. Second, more niche and focused growth can be made easier while more ambitious goals can be given higher effort to simulate difficulty, time, and resource requirements.

Additionally, I like to have the players do a bit of role-play during their turns doing these: it can be full on conversations with the blacksmith NPC, a quick blurb about getting the materials from the apothecary, or a brief summary of the books they’re reading in the royal library during their Attempts. That also helps me flavor their success/failures and injects some life into it beyond a simple succeed/fail roll.

#29

That is exactly the same struggle I had with Wis/Int in general, and with a survival game I am prepping for my players in particular. And this is the same solution I decided to use to keep the 6 stats.
For simplicity, I will keep the tag INT and WIS that people are more familiar with, but giving this Expertise role and mechanics to Wis.

#30

I am definitely encouraging my players to do this. Awesome!

#31

It’s a bit off the main topic, but considering it is still a system that can be used to implement an “expertise” type growth mechanic, I might as well expound a bit on how it ran in practice. As if a GM needs and excuse to ramble on about their old games, haha!

Anyways, I introduced this in my custom Warp Shell campaign and found it highly engaging to the players, to the point it could probably help build your games based purely on player goals. If you have a “home base” to work from, it actually works really well as you can have NPCs that request items, give quests, or even make it a mission to recruit more specialists. Here’s an example of how it went from my game:

After a hard mission, it was going to be several weeks of deep-space travel before they reached the next spaceport, meaning the party had 7 Attempts to work with. Each Attempt would play out as a turn for the player, letting them decide how much (or how little) they wanted to role-play their efforts: a Timer 7 worked well to track this.

The first player in the turn order really wanted to use a 2-handed blade, so he decided he was going to the on-ship blacksmiths so he could learn about what he needed and roll his Attempt to craft a hard-light great sword. He ended up role-playing heavily with the smiths, which drew the other players in as the loud and “friendly” hill giants Mull and Grull forged crude but powerful gear to bellowing hymns about eating and killing foes. Everyone got in on the role-playing, making it by far the longest turn of the Downime Attempts, but the party was engaged and eventually all decided they would start questing to get better forge materials, ancient enchantments, and high-tech gear to help the smiths grow and eventually make them and the crew formidable futuristic enchanted armaments.

Anyways, in regards to the original player’s specific goal; when he got around to making the rolls on his turns, he kept botching his Attempts. Each subsequent turn involved the smiths learning from and giving short advice for his next Attempt, giving a bit of role-play to flavor it up but still keep things moving to the next player’s turn. He ultimately finished it after several tries, but because he failed so many times, I gave it an additional trait as well.

  • Refractable: This blade of light is relatively solid, but when striking reflective surfaces the light will scatter wildly (and dangerously), making an Attack against all CLOSE characters including the wielder.
    (Fun Fact: He found out what that trait did by attacking a polished shield in the smithy…)

The next player wanted to customize her room to a workshop then change her Titan’s “Drain Star” class loot to be a ranged heal: after a couple hearts of effort, she was able to spend its charges to heal an Ally in NEAR range, not just herself. She did this solo in her room, mixing a role play of meditation and tinkering. It was much less immersive/engaging, but also faster and more focused. Because it was a simple mechanics change, it worked out and it didn’t bog down the game. It also let her quickly establish that her next Downtime Activity goals were to modify her Drain Star to do extra healing and boost its range to FAR allies.

Another spent their attempts also altering their room, but they made it into a tropical beach paradise for relaxing. Oh yeah, I should probably explain that whole “room customization” thing. That’s actually another Downtime Activity I had in this Warp Shell game: the ship had fully customizable subspace living quarters for each crew member. You could exchange an Attempt to automatically change yours however you saw fit to match your character. It became a very popular choice, even for customizations that gave minimal or even no mechanical benefits, as players were given free reign to unleash their creativity and leave a bit of themselves in the ship. Anywho, after customizing it like so this player did, they could exchange 1 Attempt per downtime to get a temporary (non-recoverable) heart on future missions. This sort of thing was flavored as a player purely relaxing during their downtime; they could be sipping margaritas in a hammock while listening to the waves lapping at the shore, immersing that sore and achy dragonhide in soothing magma, taking off that EVA suit and letting some fresh mercury wash over the gills, etc.

The last two combined their turns and went to the onboard medic together to start learning basic medical training, which is where the bonuses to specific injuries came from and the “expertise” options got fleshed out. They also found out that getting specific materials could help expand what she could give them in their medkits for missions as well as expand what things she could teach them (and operations she could perform).

#32

To expand a bit on what @The_Merlitron said about effort, my first thought on GUN applications for non-combat would look something like this, the example being trying to interact with some ancient tech:
BASIC- You try to push some buttons to find the right one. 1d4
WEAPON- You use a reasonably appropriate tool to try to cross some wires. 1d6
GUN- You use a set of “advanced” tools or maybe you got a translation of symbols from an alien ally. 1d8
ENERGY: You use a spell or ability to activate some glowing runes. 1d10
At least, that’s what first crossed my mind.