Talents and Tiers

Today I want to discuss the heart of the character generation system—feats and other class abilities. Most of these will reflect training and skill growth in the character, and I want a name that reflects that. Feat doesn’t carry the right connotations at all. Skill makes some sense, but it already means something else. I think taking a cue from the Pathfinder rogue and calling them talents is best—it has a dual meaning of learned and inherent ability, and thus encompasses the widest range of potential talents.

Next, then, I must decide how to organize talents. To start, I’ll look at how Pathfinder handles feats and class features. Feats in Pathfinder are arranged haphazardly; some stand alone, others form short progressions, and some are arranged into complex interconnected trees. Some modify or enhance class features, while others are relatively generic. While flexible, this approach is inelegant and the vast selection of feats can be overwhelming to new players. Conversely, class features come in simple progressions, with the exception of occasional stand-alone abilities. They improve at regular intervals, anywhere from each level to every sixth level. Those that improve at every level are limited to simple numerical bonuses, such as base attack bonus and base saves; these are covered by the experience bonus. Spellcasters gains access to a new spell level every other level, but even in early versions of this rewrite I wanted to reduce the number of spell levels to seven or even fewer; this would slow spell level acquisition to every 3rd or 4th level, in line with the majority of other class abilities.

This then suggests to me a system where all abilities are scaled by either three- or four-level steps. The steps can be given a universal set of names, similar to the Pathfinder Basic/Improved/Greater feat naming convention, or the 4th edition D&D Heroic, Champion, and Epic tiers. Actually, I rather like the concept of tiers—the levels of talents will be identified by the tier names, and they can be used as a general measure of power level. A three-level tier system could start at level 0, and have seven tiers bringing it to level 20. A four-level tier system would start at level 1 and have five tiers to bring it to level 20. The first would give me seven spell levels, which I like, but I think would prove problematic for most other abilities; so I’m going to go with a four-level progression, and adjust spells as necessary.

So I have five tiers which need names and general descriptions. One of my main concerns in tier definition is making sure that non-player characters are well represented. Without classes, I need a way to build relatively unskilled NPCs—commoners, guards, craftsmen, and the like. My immediate thought is to reserve the first tier for these types of characters. Player characters could typically begin at the second tier, with their first-tier talents encompassing abilities such as weapon and armor proficiencies, good save progressions, and extra hit points. Next, I want to establish roughly where the limit of ‘real human ability’ is. This is very useful for calibrating skill DCs and in defining what abilities should be available in a given tier. In my opinion, real-world people can be sorted roughly into three groups—typical people, extraordinary people, and historic individuals—so I will use the first three tiers for ‘realistic’ characters. Now that I know where the boundary lies, I can go about naming my tiers.

To start, I’ll make a list of potential descriptors: apprentice, novice, journeyman, expert, master, heroic, mythic, legendary, champion, epic. Heroic stands out to me as a good name for the fourth tier, just past the limits of realistic human ability. Novice, expert, and master sound nice for the first three tiers. I think I like mythic for the fifth tier; legendary and epic could be good descriptors for a sixth and seventh tier, should I want to expand the progressions further.

To summarize, each talent will have a progression through the tiers. In order to select a talent, a character must have already taken the lower-tier versions of that talent, and must be of the appropriate tier themself; for example, a 5th-level (or higher) character with Novice Toughness could take Expert Toughness. The tiers are defined roughly as follows:

Novice: Typical people, such as farmers, craftsmen, and regular soldiers or guards.

Expert: Particularly well-trained or talented individuals, such as elite troops or master craftsmen. Characters of this tier typically influence a town or small region.

Master: Characters of this tier represent the peak of real human abilities. Such characters leave an impact on history. Real-world examples include Genghis Khan or Leonardo da Vinci.  

Heroic: Characters that bend the limits of possibility. Examples include ancient heroes such as Achilles or Hercules, or the protagonists of most action movies.

Mythic: Characters of this tier have the power to affect entire worlds. They perform the impossible on a regular basis.

Finally, I’ll leave you with a sample talent.

Precise Shot

Novice: When using the Focus action with a ranged weapon, you receive an additional +1 to hit.

Expert: You can make ranged attacks into melee with no penalty.

Master: You can attempt disarm, sunder, or trip maneuvers using your ranged attacks. Your attack bonus for such a maneuver is equal to your Awareness + experience bonus + size modifier - 4, plus any bonuses you receive with the weapon used to make the attack.

Heroic: Your ranged attacks ignore anything less than total cover or concealment.

Mythic: As a double action you can make a single ranged attack that ignores armor.

Attributes: Application

Last time I talked about the mathematical side of attributes; now I want to discuss the descriptive side. Attributes or ability scores are featured in many RPGs, both on the computer and tabletop. An ideal set of attributes should encompass all aspects of a character that are relevant to the game in question. That said, some amount of restraint is also required for the sake of playability. A system with a large number of very specific attributes has added a great deal of complexity with relatively little benefit to the play experience. For comparison, I’m going to summarize the attribute system of several RPGs:

D&D: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma

GURPS: Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Health

Elder Scrolls: Strength, Agility, Speed, Endurance, Intelligence, Willpower, Personality, Luck

Diablo II: Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, Energy

Fallout: Strength, Agility, Endurance, Intelligence, Perception, Charisma, Luck

So it appears four to eight attributes are typically considered suitable to define a character. However, it should be noted that of the two four-attribute systems, one is based entirely on combat (Diablo) while GURPS allows detailed fine-tuning of ‘secondary attributes’. I only want one set of attributes and Telharis will include non-combat situations, so I’m probably looking at six to eight attributes.

What then should these attributes be? I find it helpful to think in terms of physical and mental attributes, so I’ll start with physical. All of the systems I’ve listed share similar physical attributes: Strength, Dexterity or Agility, and Constitution or Endurance. Elder Scrolls makes the additional distinction of speed, but I’m going to stick with the Pathfinder treatment and have speed be something inherent to your race. An argument could be made for separate Dexterity (fine motor skills) and Agility (reflexes and coordination), but I think that might be getting too detailed. I’ll return to it later.

Mental attributes are where things get more complicated. Intelligence works well; I don’t feel any need to make changes there. Representing other mental traits is more difficult. In D&D, the exact meaning and application of the Wisdom and Charisma scores has long been problematic. The best suggestion I’ve seen has been to define Charisma as both force of will and personality, making it the key attribute for Will saves, while moving ranged attack bonuses from Dexterity to Wisdom, since Wisdom includes senses and intuition. This equalizes the relative importance of the attributes, but introduces new problems—why should clerics be good at archery, and what makes the fast-talking rogue so resistant to enchantment? My solution is to divide Pathfinder’s Wisdom and Charisma into three new attributes: Willpower, Charisma, and Awareness. Willpower is the character’s force of will and mental resilience—a mental equivalent to Constitution. Charisma describes personality and leadership skills. Awareness, meanwhile, is sort of a hybrid mental-physical attribute. It incorporates all aspects of a character’s senses and situational awareness.

Thus, we come to the following definitions:

Strength: physical strength and knowledge of how to use it.

Dexterity: agility, reflexes, and fine motor skills.

Constitution: physical resilience.

Intelligence: memory, learning ability, cleverness.

Willpower: mental resilience.

Charisma: personality, leadership potential.

Awareness: senses and intuition.

And an approximate list of what each applies to:

Strength: melee attacks, carrying capacity, skills (Climb, Swim)

Dexterity: combat defense, Reflex saves, initiative, skills (Acrobatics, Escape Artist, Ride, Sleight of Hand, Stealth)

Constitution: hit points, Fortitude saves, skills (Endurance), combat abilities (e.g. rage)

Intelligence: skills (Heal, Lore, Profession, Security, Spellcraft), some types of magic, possibly influences feat/talent acquisition

Willpower: Will saves, skills (Use Magic Device), all types of magic

Charisma: skills (Deception, Handle Animal, Intimidate, Persuasion, Streetwise), leadership abilities, some types of magic

Awareness: ranged attacks, Insight saves, initiative, skills (Perception, Sense Motive, Survival)

There are still some minor issues here; the three mental scores are now spread a little thin, particularly Willpower. However, they are each critical for characters pursuing certain skill sets, such as magic or leadership abilities, so that might be okay. As with my original rewrite attempt, my ultimate goal is an elegant and intuitive ruleset. If something doesn’t make sense, please let me know and I’ll try to explain and/or fix it. 

Attributes: Scale

In this installment I’m going to talk about attributes. Telharis attributes are the same as Pathfinder ability scores in their purpose and use, but differ in several key ways. First of all, there will be no separate score and modifier; you simply have an attribute and add it directly to any relevant rolls. The odd ability scores in Pathfinder were basically empty space; why use two numbers when you can use one? There are then two choices to make—what is considered the base or average score and what is the minimum score?

Basing the system around 0 as the average has the obvious advantage that it’s fairly intuitive; someone who’s bad at something gets penalties and someone who’s good gets bonuses. However, the worst possible score is then some arbitrary negative number, and that seems rather inelegant. The alternative is that the scale starts at 0 and only goes up: everyone gets bonuses, but those who are good get bigger bonuses. This has some potentially problematic implications for some of the system math (particularly damage and hit points), but I think those can be dealt with.

With the minimum score established as 0, we must now determine what constitutes an average human score. Two options jump out at me: 5, which maintains the status quo, or 10, which increases the distance between the minimum score and the human average. In the context of skill checks, a difference of 10 is the difference between reliable success (while taking 10) and complete incapability. This seems about right for the difference between an average person (10) and someone with a crippling disability (0-2). For a reality check, let’s look at some actual skills. Based on the Pathfinder rules, the average person should be able to climb “a surface with ledges to hold onto and stand on, such as a very rough wall or a ship’s rigging”. That sounds like something that someone with minimal strength (the key attribute for Climb) would not be capable of doing. According to Pathfinder, an average person should also be able to hear a creature walking within 10 feet. Someone with severely impaired senses would probably struggle to do this. Finally, I want to compare the effect of starting attributes vs. bonuses gained from leveling and training. Characters gain between +1 and +2 to skills per level depending on how heavily they focus on them. This means that, using 10 as a base, a level 6 or 7 character with a crippling attribute can perform actions based on that attribute as well as an average level 1 character. For comparison, in a base 5 system this would happen around 3rd or 4th level, which feels a little too early to me.

So, to clean all that up: Attributes range from 0 (crippling), to 10 (average human), and technically have no upper limit, though scores above 20 should be highly unusual. The vast majority of humans have scores in the range 5-15, with typical scores maybe even more tightly constrained.

More on attributes next time.

Core Framework

To start, I’ll discuss the broad framework of the game. This consists of two key parts in my opinion; the first being how you define characters, and the second being action resolution, both in and out of combat. Finally, I’ll discuss some more tangential rule subsystems that I hope to implement.

In Telharis, a character is defined by four things: their level, their attributes, their traits, and their feats/talents. Levels are quite similar to Pathfinder; the core rules will include roughly 20, and they are a general measure of the character’s power level. Attributes are simply a new name for ability scores in an attempt to reduce words that have multiple meanings within the rules. Traits are relatively basic options that reflect inherent aspects of a character, such as racial features and attribute growth at higher levels. Finally, the feat/talent system encompasses all aspects of a character’s training or learned abilities.

Action resolution is based on the d20 system, but much of the underlying math has changed. The greatest changes are in the combat system. Characters receive two equivalent actions each turn, and the concept of iterative attacks is gone entirely. This should significantly accelerate combat resolution, though damage output and capacity will have to be adjusted to compensate. Perhaps the most important change in this part of the rules, however, is the incorporation of a level-based experience bonus that applies to almost everything: skill rolls, attacks, and defense. This effectively replaces base attack bonus, base save bonuses, caster level, and to some degree skill ranks from the Pathfinder rules.  

There are several other rules that I’d like to implement in Telharis. First is some kind of leadership or influence system. Another is a more abstracted wealth system such as that used in d20 Modern, which could reduce bookkeeping as well as representing the various forms wealth can take in a feudal society. I would also like to include some system for complex skill usage—skill situations that are basically equivalent to a combat, such as chase scenes or diplomatic negotiations. These, however, are all non-critical to the core rules and so I won’t be working on them immediately.   

The History of Vilfinder

Like most GMs, I’ve always had a propensity for tinkering with the rules of the game. About two years ago, I started playing a fair bit of Pathfinder. As most people who have played it will tell you, Pathfinder makes huge improvements over the 3.0 and 3.5 rulesets it’s based on. Quite a few of those same people will also note that the Pathfinder rules are significantly harder to learn if you never played 3rd edition D&D. Vilfinder began as an attempt to address this problem. I took a two-pronged approach to the problem; a major part of the project was to simply reword and reorganize the rules to be more easily accessible. The only significant change I planned to make was to rework the combat action system. As a GM, I had noticed that even veteran players often struggled with the many combinations of full-round, standard, move, swift, and free actions. My intention was to basically merge the standard and move actions, giving the player two equivalent actions on their turn. As I soon realized, this change has far-reaching implications, and the project rapidly expanded.

Around the same time, I became increasingly active on the Paizo forums, where I was exposed to many issues with the existing rules as well as many excellent house rules. Most influential at that time was a comprehensive set of house rules known as Kirthfinder, named after one of the creators. The main goal in these rules was to equalize the casting and non-casting classes, and it featured near-complete rewrites of most classes. A key feature of these rewrites was that all classes received a pool of abilities they could choose from much like the Pathfinder rogue, vastly increasing customization potential. In fact, it increased it so much that I began toying with the idea of a classless system, which would be important later.

As I was developing pools of class talents for my Kirthfinder-inspired version, I began to feel that the implementation was not ideal. The distinction between feats and talents was extremely blurry, and forcing a player to pick x feats and y talents seemed unnecessarily restrictive. Multiclassing was (as it always has been) an ugly mess. Additionally, I realized around this point that these had passed beyond the point of just being house rules. These issues, as well as a desire for simpler character design, led to the merging of feats, talents, other class features, and skill ranks into a single system. This is the current implementation, and I will discuss it at more length in a future post.