Okay, if you get a success against a foe with an attack, you can choose to do damage, or to force them to use a particular defense against you (dodge or parry) next round. Basically, you'd do this to force them to do something that they're bad at, like making a heavily armored foe use his dodge rating (armor penalizes dodge).
I kind of like the PV system where armor adds to your regular combat skills, but subtracts from your agility skill... of course, this means that sometimes you might have to say, "No, armor doesn't help when you're thwacking an unsuspecting foe."
Another option- armor gives a bonus only if you're losing... you have to lose by more than X or else the armor saves you.
Okay, with Sean gone, I've got no good reason not to run a Hybris playtest this weekend. What do I still need to do?
I'll definitely need a combat manuever that's basically the bull rush... a huge monster that just crashes into you and there's little you can do about it except dive for cover. With humans it won't be as accurate or effective, but with big critters... it should probably add your Size, maybe double your Size to the damage done. Or maybe it should just knock you down and only leave you prone and vulnerable to less accurate attacks? I'm thinking about a Devourer, here, forming itself into a giant, mouth-covered mass and running down hapless adventurers.
Can't be parried, obviously. Or maybe, more accurately, parries and blocks do damage to it, but it still hits you unless you give up your action and dive for cover.
I should look up how D20 does it.
Personal MP = INTU + Mana Gathering
Mana Recovery = DRV + Mana Rating per hour of meditation
Spell casting = KNO + Appropriate Magic Skill + 2d10
Another idea from tSoY is rote magic... in Hybris terms, these are spells that are carefully predefined and which reduce the MP cost by 1. You buy the spell as a Secret in order to get the -1 MP cost. I'm iffy on allowing you to take the secret multiple times and keep reducing the cost... tSoY would certainly allow you to make a Lina Inverse type who had a spell of ultimate destruction that she could cast cheaply.
To cast a spell, roll KNO + Magic skill + 2d10. You need a total of at least 10 to cast a spell successfully. A 10 gives you a level 1 result, while every additional 5 points gives you +1 level. The effect of your spell will be determined by the level.
The base mana cost of a spell is zero minus the mana level (if it's negative, the cost goes up... if the mana level is positive, it goes down). Mana can be spent to improve the outcome of your spell.
Here are some possible secrets/techniques:
Number of Targets:
Increased Effect: you can add +1 level to the result of any successful spell by spending 1 extra MP.
Reduced Effect: you can reduce the mana cost by giving up 1 level of effect per mana saved. This is mostly useful for powerful mages who want to cast complicated spells without spending mana.
Range:
Reduced Mana Cost: you can reduce the mana cost by 1 by taking an extra round to cast the spell.
Secret of Sympathetic Magic: you can cast a spell on someone you can't see, provided that you have an item of theirs. Costs extra 4 mana and uses the ritual magic casting times.
Duration:
Well, I don't think I like the Ritual = longer-lasting stuff.
Having a secret that lets you extend the duration sounds better.
I'm not sure on maintained spells, though... I mean, in Ironclaw, they balance that by saying that only specific spells can be delayed... whereas I was thinking more that any spell could be delayed... which might be overpowered. Certainly some of them are worse than others.
Perhaps it should be more like Bound Spells... ones that are delayed until needed. Very few spells should be able to have indefinite durations.
Balancing bound spells by...
Okay, I'm kind of inclined towards "invested" mana (probably 1 per spell, since most folks won't have many) with limited circumstances that the binding can be triggered by.
Stuff like "when hit with a spell resisted by Willpower", or "when critically wounded". The trigger has to be established when the spell is bound.
A normal spell takes 1 round to cast and lasts either one round or one hour, depending on the sort of effect desired. e.g.- a fireball lasts a round... a conjured light lasts an hour.
If you take an extra round to do it, you can reduce the MP cost by 1.
The local mana level is also subtracted from the MP cost... if it's a positive mana area, the spell costs fewer MP... if it's a negative mana area, the spell costs more MP.
Ritual Magic: if you take one minute per level of the spell desired, (with an extra minute if you want to reduce the MP cost by 1), you can make it a ritual spell. This extends the duration to 1 day. Ritual magic is tightly constrained... if you roll a higher level spell than the one you were aiming for, the extra MoS is wasted. If you roll a lower level spell, it fails.
Ritual Magic can also create maintained spells. These last as long as the mage still has a connection to them. Maintaining a spell imposes a cumulative -1 penalty on all additional spellcasting for the duration. Furthermore, the MP spent on that spell can't be recovered while the spell is in effect. If the mage leaves the same realm or perishes, a maintained spell will become a regular ritual spell and end 1 day later. Getting rid of a maintained spell requires reversing the ritual and basically casting the spell again... it's not impossible for a mage to end up with a maintained spell that he just can't manage to get rid of.
Note that if a mage creates a maintained spell with an MP cost greater than 1/2 of his maximum MP, he's liable to be stuck with it.
Finally, there are Enchantments. These drain the caster's life force as he puts part of his will into the spell permanently. These require the use of Ritual Magic and cost the mage XP equal to their level to create. It's basically a maintained spell that is given its own lifeforce to power it and thus can maintain itself.
There are items which can power enchantments as well (so that the mage doesn't need to spend XP). Soulstones can sustain an enchantment of up to level X, where X is determined by the size and quality of the soulstone.
Now... do I like Ritual Magic or do I want to use the tSoY method and say that you can extend the duration by spending extra MP if you have the right Secret?
Hm... well, Ritual makes boost spells more potent by letting you increase the duration to a day without blowing extra MP. And I kind of like the "targetted" difficulty, where you have to get level X or fail and extra MoS is wasted. Perhaps I could come up with a better benefit than just extended duration?
So it's not a happy time in the multiverse. Metaphorically, the realms are often described as spheres floating in a boiling ocean. Sometimes they float to the surface and become accessible to magical transport... other times they sink and are hidden away. Powerful magics can keep them in one place, but need to be maintained regularly.
Worse, teleporting into a realm generally involves weakening the barriers that keep it separate from the other realms. If a lot of teleporting is going on, spontaneous portals and rifts in reality will tend to show up. If things get too bad, the entire realm can be broken up into chunks and break up. Things that fall into a spontaneous portal are normally lost forever.
Hybris, however, is special. Something about the city acts as a funnel of sorts... anything lost to the Void has a small chance of landing in Hybris instead. It also interferes with normal inter-realm teleportation... Ravagers that end up in Hybris, for example, are often very confused since they keep calling for their pack but only a tiny portion of them will actually show up. Folks kill Ravagers on sight, of course, since they're vicious predators that get more and more dangerous as they grow in numbers.
The major armies are vaguely aware of Hybris's existence, but can't open portals there. So they mostly try to insert the occasional spy or seize anyone who has come from there for interrogation.
Arkaes the Merciful founded the Arkaites (sometimes known as the Sanctuary). They're an almost religious order that helps out people who find themselves teleported to Hybris. They teach them the local language, help them find jobs, et cetera.
If you're up for dangerous work, there's always Portal Fishing. Semi-stable portals appear in Hybris from time to time... the Gray Man generally sends some scouts through to check out the other side. If there's anything valuable, they bring it back... if it's dangerous, they come back and tell the mages to disrupt the portal and close it. If it leads somewhere safe, they might see if any refugees want to go through. You can't send very many people at once through a transient portal without it shutting down, so they're limited to sending small groups.
Some refugees are waiting for a portal to open to their homeland. Others are hoping to find a safe paradise to evacuate to... but folks know that even if a realm seems peaceful now, it could fall prey to the demon hordes at any moment. Hybris itself, for all its flaws, at least seems to be safe from invasion.
There are at least six different "factions" involved in the Endless War, tearing up the realms. When a particular realm becomes "open" to inter-realm transport, it tends to get attacked by at least one faction... and often several of them. The relationship between the realms is complicated and obscure, making it almost impossible to predict when a realm will be open to transit, but you can scan for currently open realms.
Here's a thought suggested by Travis Casey on rpg-create. Enchanted objects are just spells that must be maintained like any other. However, you can transfer the "cost" of maintaining the enchantment to another person.
So, let's say that maintaining a spell costs you X mp and X drive. You can transfer it to another person if you want... then they lose X mp and X drive. Without a "host", a spell goes dormant or even breaks down entirely (there could be a Secret of Dormancy or something).
So, using a magical artifact is going to require you to attune it to yourself. Thus, an innate balancing act, of sorts. If we allow for a Maintenance skill, then it would counteract the DRV penalty, so it would be useful even for non-mages.
Some items just cost you MP to use, like wands. Non-mages will have an MP equal to their DRV (or possibly Will, which would be Knowledge + Drive, but that would be a lot... if that's the case, then X should usually be more than 1).
Hm... actually, since I include DRV in calculating your MP, losing DRV would be basically the same as losing MP, plus penalties to skills.
So, basically, this adds a new kind of balancing... any given person can only use a certain number of magic items before the cumulative penalties make it not worth their while. But a single mage could make innumerable items with this system, which probably means that there should be a secondary limit.
Also, you can have stuff like Soulstones, which count as living beings and can maintain spells on their own. Very rare and expensive and no one knows how to make more. Most of them are already grafted onto existing magic items, including sentient ones like golems.
I need to think about the cosmology behind mana in this setting, and whether or not this makes sense.
Addendum: a minor note from Travis is the idea of spells that actively attune themselves to hosts on contact. Or when their current host dies.
I kind of like the idea of a simple magical art based entirely around breaking things down into dust and occasionally putting them back together.
Art of Unmaking: does lots of damage, but if the target isn't killed, then it only does 1/4 normal. If they are killed, they are disintegrated. Alternately, it could do, say, double-damage, but it only works against your full HP... if it fails, you still take some damage (1/4) from internal shock.
Secret of Reconstitution: you can restore a disintegrated object. Difficulty equal to the spell that unmade them, plus 1 per minute afterwards. Can be taken multiple times. The next one changes the penalty to 1 per hour, then 1 per day, then 1 per week, etc.
Secret of Partial Disintegration: you can disintegrate just part of an object. This allows you to use this art to inflict regular damage.
Okay, with my recent thoughts about magic and using the Shadow of Yesterday as inspiration...
Roll KNO+Magic Skill+2d10.
The effect of your spell is largely determined by the level. For example, a damaging spell does the level in d6 of damage. A stat-boosting spell gives the level in boost. Et cetera.
Casting a spell like this costs 1 mana or no mana if you take an extra turn. Secrets will add to the cost.
Optional: you can sacrifice success for mana cost... so you can take a -5 penalty per mana point you want to drop.
Secret of Raw Power: add +1 to the final level per MP spent. Max of DRV? Max of current level? Or just make sure the target gets a resistance roll so that a 10d6 attack still might miss outright? Probably max of current level, so that you have to be a really good mage to see the full benefit.
Secret of Distance Compression: double the base range of 5 yards for every MP spent. I didn't like the idea of restricting folks to touch spells as a default.
Secret of Mana Conservation: reduce the MP cost by 1 per level you give up. If the spell is reduced to level 0, it produces a noticable effect (e.g.- a spark of light) but no game effects. So you could light a candle with a level 0 spell, but not do even 1 point of real damage. You can't reduce the level to a negative number. Note that this means that a caster who rolls a level 4 effect could spend, say, 2 mana to boost the range and still cast it for free at level 1.
Secret of Rote Casting: you can automatically produce a level 1 effect without rolling.
I may have gotten over-ambitious with Hybris again. Really, the original goal was to produce a very simple fantasy RPG and throw together a simple setting for it to work in. Getting bogged down in detailing dozens of different realms and such is probably counter-productive.
First, I need the basic system down pat. And it needs to be generic enough that it's not hard to drop a new or unique race into it.
Second, the setting might ought to be simplified and made starker... make the Endless War grander and more terrible, with Hybris being an isolated refuge in the midst of this realm-destroying conflict. Then almost everything would be an internal conflict inside the city itself, with the occasional foray into one of the more accessible realms. The existence of nice, "safe" realms might only be a rumor... the safest ones are probably horrific tyrranies where you have no rights or privacy and outsiders will always be second class citizens at best.
The war between the demon armies is endless... and they tend to attack out of rifts. Folks who are nearby when a rift opens may be able to escape into it. Also, major teleports (like sending in a big army) tends to open smaller portals at random, so people sometimes fall into them, too. Normally they'd be lost forever (possibly landing in a random realm somewhere), but Hybris has a weird funneling effect that causes a few folks to make it there safely.
The city is something of a grim oddity. It's a harsh life, but it could be so much worse. The Gray Man keeps order and keeps would be dictators from taking over. They were subjugated once, after a godlike being came through from a destroyed realm, but he was slain mysteriously.
One of the major factions is a group of mage/priests who create/nurture food with their magic. No one dares touch them for fear of being denied the free food that they distribute... not unless they have access to food of their own, of course.
The occasional demon-thing makes it to Hybris... whereupon folks kill it. Unlike most other realms, they can't summon their kinfolk here, so it's possible to survive. In other realms, the arrival of the first demon is a sign that more are coming.
SweeneyTodd on RPG.net just posted about a really simple magic system... it was for FATE, but it amounted to you had a skill with a particular kind of magic and one or more aspects (Edges, basically) in that magic. To perform a minor spell, you'd just roll your skill. To do something really impressive and/or plot affecting, you'd also have to check off an aspect. Run out of aspects and you couldn't pull impressive magic anymore.
That's too simple for my taste, but it does match up with what I want... minor magic is free or almost free, major spells cost you something. It's got the best parts of both worlds... mages who've exhausted themselves aren't useless, magic can be used as often as you like, but we don't have to cripple it because the really impressive spells can only be used occasionally. That's basically what I liked about The Shadow of Yesterday. I have to think about how my system could be changed to reflect that better.
This is kind of an important design decision. Basically, how do you keep mages equivalent to other PC types?
Well, you gather and channel mana from your environment. I could see making it slow. Some sort of MP system is probably necessary, too. Spells start at a cost of zero, but zero-cost spells are pretty wussy and restricted. Applying a Secret pumps up the energy cost accordingly. Subtract the mana level from the cost... if the mana level is negative, all spells cost more (and there's no such thing as a zero-cost spell anymore). If it's higher, you can apply some secrets and not spend MP.
MP is your INTU + Mana Gathering rating. Most spells roll KNO + Spell Skill. Spell effects generally add DRV to the final result (e.g., damage done, points transfered, etc.). Ongoing spells "tie up" some of your personal mana. Gods can maintain additional ongoing spells with their innate mana... equal to their (INTU + Mana Gathering) x Mana Rating.
I kind of need some "standard" rules for determining spell damage. Something like...
If they go up linearly, then magic starts to hit a limit pretty quickly... but that's not necessarily bad. My damage system is similar to CoC... 3d6 is a lot of pain and suffering and 6d6 will kill pretty much any PC.
I like adding Drive to the damage roll, though... I could copy the Spycraft idea of using each mental stat for something separate... say KNO for actually casting the spell, PER for targetting spell-throwing effects, INTU for sensing/countermagicking stuff, and DRV for boosting the effects. I'm not sure I want to go to the trouble of doing separate casting/targetting checks, though.
I could also go with the first set and increase the boost from DRV... 1d6+DRV, then 2d6+DRVx2, then 3d6+DRVx3, etc.. 5d6+DRVx5 would average 27.5 instead of 19.5. Dunno. I'd like for the calculations to be super-quick and simple. I might even just use Diff/5 in d6... then it would start at 2d6+DRV and go up to 6d6+DRV.
tSoY effectively uses an MP system, since you have to spend from your pools to do stuff. It's interesting that it drains from a different pool depending on what Secret you're using. So you could exhaust yourself throwing divination magic but be fully charged for throwing destructive magic still.
It's got a few nifty effects, though... it looks like regular spell-casting is free but requires you to touch a single target. Casting at range costs 1 mp. Affecting a group costs 1 mp for up to 5 targets, 3 mp for 25, 6 mp for 100, and 10 mp for "everyone the caster can see". Since pools max out around 10, I doubt anybody could manage that last one. The duration starts at an hour and can be extended by spending points, too.
So the difficulty doesn't go up... but the MP cost does. There aren't many ways to increase the effectiveness, though... so if you need a minimum of X to produce an effect, you have to have the appropriate skill or you're hosed. Most powers don't have a minimum, though...
Also, there's the Massive Damage secret, which is pretty gross... you multiply the damage done by the amount of Vigor you spend (minimum 2).
You can go "all out" on any action, which gives you a +2 bonus but means that any failure is considered a botch.
For magic I might even allow a +4 bonus, but if you take it then you suffer a cumulative -2 penalty to use that kind of magic. The penalty goes away at the rate of 1 point per day.
Strength, Endurance, Agility, Perception, Charm, Intuition, Knowledge, Drive.
Sandili: +1 Agility, -1 Intuition. Secret of the Sandili Tongue: +1 to Charm when performing in Sandili.
Human: no stat adjustments. No special abilities.
Salamander:
Wow, I ground out quick on that.
Perhaps it would be worthwile to try and write up a Shadows of Yesterday version of Hybris, mostly as an exercise/idea mine. Certainly there are some elements of the system that I could steal pretty easily for my own use if I wanted to.
The various magical arts would be Secrets... you'd always use the same magic skill, but which stat it would pair with would depend on the action taken. There'd be a primary Secret for each art (which represents basic training with it) then sub-Secrets which require the first one.
Secret of Thought (resisted with Willpower): you can use magic to send and receive thoughts with other people. Just sending doesn't normally involve a resistance check unless they try to block you out; reading thoughts always requires one, even if they're willing.
Secret of Emotion (resisted with Insight): you can use magic to sense the emotional state of other people.
Secret of the Inferno (resisted with Reaction): you can use magic to create fire out of nothing.
Secret of the Many Oceans (resisted with Toughness): you can use magic to control and shape water.
Secret of the Black Art (resisted with Willpower): you can summon Devourers, bodiless extradimensional entities that feed on mana and the life-force of living creatures. They will perform a single task, which they must be dedicated to as part of the summoning. Once the task is done, they'll do as they wish. This art is flexible, but rather slow and always takes 1 extra round to use.
Secret of the Flesh (resisted with Endurance + Drive): you can boost or reduce someone's physical stats and other natural abilities (including their healing rate) temporarily.
Secret of the Storms (resisted with Toughness): you can predict the weather and speed up or delay it in minor ways (e.g.- making fog linger or rain start early).
Secret of the Natural Order (resisted with Willpower): you can command animals to obey you or make them feel friendly towards you.
Secret of Portals: you can sense the presence of portals. If they are inactive, you can activate them, although you still won't be able to use them if they require a key.
Secret of Metamagic: you can concentrate and store mana within yourself, providing you with extra magical energy to work magic with. You can also detect nearby mana fonts and barriers.
Been looking over the rules for The Shadow of Yesterday. A fairly nice ruleset, very rules-light and very "all areas of expertise are equal", much like Dogs in the Vineyard. A few thoughts...