Now, to take a crack at a few of the types that will be available to players. These may be chosen as a Primary Type, or Secondary Type
-Strong: These characters are good at lifting heavy things, or hitting really hard, or looking muscular. Levels up by becoming more muscular. Think body builder, or early days Arnold.
-Fast: A fast person can run like the wind! After time, they learn to run even faster. Gump didn't start running that fast, but when he started running, he became awesome at it!
-Nimble: Good at doing dexterous tasks, like running through those tire things, or freerunning. Not as fast as a fast character, but less likely to faceplant. Experience gained allows them to become even more nimble, eventually rivalling that Faith chick from Mirror's Edge.
-Tough: Good at taking a beating. We might want to add rules about shrugging off blows. The more experience, the tougher they are, until they are like the guys in the Demolition Men reality show, smashing through walls with their face.
-Hot: A hot character is...well...hot. This goes both ways, male and female. It might be strange to think that you can level up your hotness, but hotness goes beyond the physical, it is a state of mind, a state of dress. Think of the sexy librarian, who gets contacts and lets down her hair, or Anne Hathaway in a bunch of her movies, or Olivia Newton John in Grease.
-Social: Good at mingling in crowds, or talking to new people. Levelling up makes the character even more of a social butterfly. Um...think of...yeah, I'm drawing a blank. A social person. Any jock in one of those teeny movies.
-Sly: This character excels at trickery, or plays on words to get what they want. As they gain experience, they learn more about how to play people. This would be your stereotypical fantasy thief, good at talking himself into, and then back out of, trouble.
-Smart: Reads a lot, knows a lot, these characters have obtained a lot of book knowledge, and know how to piece it together to get new ideas. Through their travels, they learn more and gain additional information for their ideas. Tolkien's Wormtongue knew exactly what to say to get himself into a position of power.
-Wise: While they may not have a lot of book knowledge, these characters are aware of the world, and generally apply good judgement when acting. As they gain levels, their experience in the world increases, and they can make even better choices. Think of Gandalf, or Allanon.
So...those are the core types I can think of, right now. There might be more in the starter set, and we'll add additional ones that are specific to the different Genre books, later.
I meant to put the Wormtongue reference under Sly...
ReplyDelete@MyrddinWyllt
ReplyDeleteThat's why there's an edit button!
Those seem to cover the basics, are you looking to go really big umbrella and have just a few Types or are you going for more like "skills" from, say WoD or Palladium, just not as many.
So, say I want to be good at shooting, are we going to have a Marksman Type (still broad cause it would cover everything from pistols to missiles, even though training would be different for all of them) or is that just Nimble.
Say I want to be a techie/mechanic, I can pull apart computers, hot wires cars, is that Gear Head and Techie Types or is that just Smart?
I suppose the question is, how little Types do you want available, the less you have, the broader elements they cover.
Hmm...good point.
ReplyDeleteWe could keep this list (or thereabouts) for the main book, and genre books could cover more specific. No need to put "Techie" in the main book, since taking it in ExplorerMan! in the Dungeon! would be silly.
We could refine this list as "umbrella" types, and then whip out subsets of each type for the specific genres.
Random thought.
ReplyDeleteWhat if those given above were Type categories and within them we put down actual types?
So Strong would be a category that people wanting to make a strong type character could go to find Types related to strength, this would make it easier for someone with a general idea in mind (I want my character to be good at something Strong) to find specific Types related to it.
So Strength could then have types like Brawl and Lifting/Throwing, Nimble could have Marksman and Jumping, Smart could have History and Mathematics.
Each of these are still broad, History means you'd always get to add the Type to your roll when doing anything related to calling up History when in real life someone may only be really knowledge in a specific part of history and Marksman would include everything from bows to assault rifles, even though each has specialized training. But in Action/Pulp films people are just specialized in general (the bookworm knows all about everyone's ancient culture, the Gunman can pick up any firearm for the first time and fire it like a pro, the pilot who flew helicopter in 'nam can bring in that 747 no problem), and that keeps this spirit alive.
This also makes it so if we did add something like Computer Nerd as a Type in a genre book someone would actually pick it, because why limit yourself to a Computer related bonus only when you could pick Smart as a Type and get a bonus for not only computers but anything to do with smarts.
Not only does that make things easily organized (and future genre books would then add Types within the category, so Computer Nerd would be added in a genre book under Smart), but then things can affect broad Categories without listing every Type, so the BBEG's evil weakening ray gun would, say, eliminate the bonus to every Type under the Strength Category.
Again, just a random thought I had.