Exoworld is a semi-lite tabletop roleplaying game that I'm working on. It's set in a relatively dark sci-fi world, and that's fairly literal since it takes place on a planet called Exile that is several light years away from the nearest star.
A tricky design element here is just figuring out how I want to implement a feature in relationship to others. While the product that I'm aiming at is probably not going to be very lightweight compared to my original design vision, I do want to create a game that meets a few criteria.
One of these criteria is making the game accessible to beginners, but other considerations go into play.
The three major mechanical pillars in Exoworld are the characters' Attributes, their Traits, and their Resources.
But I want to have an element that centers on the skills and aptitudes of characters in a way that Attributes can't, and that's going to take the form of Expertise.
Expertise is a semi-Trait, in the sense that it's handled identically to Traits, but it's not considered a Trait for certain purposes. The only exceptions here are that Expertise is specialized (so you have something like "Expertise: Medicine" whereas traits are always going to just be themselves), and that any Trait that says that it doesn't stack with other Trait bonuses still stacks with Expertise bonuses.
Expertise is a simple bonus, maximum +5, bought at a 1:1 rate with Trait points.
This makes it relatively powerful, but it's also boring. I might switch the ratio so that it's 2 Trait points per Expertise, given how often an Expertise could theoretically come into play and how underwhelming some Traits might wind up being once they come into practice, but a cost rebalance like that is fairly simple.
There are a couple reasons I wanted to make this as a sub-branch of the Trait system, and one of them is that it serves as a Trait point sink.
I mentioned yesterday that one of the factions has a lot more in the way of obvious unique Traits than the others. Of course, that's because they're caste-based and have rampant genetic modification, so they really would count for something like seven or eight unique factions if I really wanted to detail them.
The way character creation works in this early draft is as follows:
- Pick a faction. This gives you a unique special attribute.
- Pick a background. This might give you a unique special attribute, might have pre-requisites, and gives a couple areas of expertise.
- Spend X attribute points across your default and special attributes. Default attributes start at Y, but special attributes start at 0.
- Spend Z trait points on traits and expertise.
One upside of the Expertise system as it currently stands is that it's a Trait sink, so I can start play-testing with characters getting some tangible benefit for that fourth stage of character creation even before the trait lists are finalized (and if I break a Trait or remove a Trait they're an easy temporary placeholder for those points until the players can choose a new one).
This also means that factions with lots of unique Traits have viable competition to their unique abilities, since the Exemplars are definitely getting cool stuff right off the bat and the other factions (especially the original colonists!) are not yet.
The second reason I want it to be a sub-branch of the Trait system is that it doesn't confuse the Attribute process. You always choose two Attributes to add, and then add any relevant Traits. Having the Expertise elsewhere might confuse the process, though that might just be me over-thinking it.
Once playtesting begins that'll become a potential place to look at.
I deviated from my norm and actually wrote out descriptions for something like a dozen different areas of expertise. They're deliberately formulaic, but probably need a good polish pass before they go out to the wild even with some degree of tolerable boredom baked in.
This doesn't mean that I expect to cover all options for an Expertise, but it should both align players with the setting when they're making their choices and do something that I always found people bothered by with the skill system in Hammercalled and lead by example in setting boundaries.
The interesting thing there is that I found players were very good at making Hammercalled's entirely free-form system work for them, but it was always the thing that got the most "but how do you actually bring that into practice?" responses from people who thought it would be a problem.
Because I'm making some changes to the core of the design, I'm entirely rewriting the ruleset from what I had back in January, though the real purpose of this is more to prevent myself from making silly mistakes and winding up with inconsistent terminology. I'm probably not going to do rule updates for a couple days at least as I go over stuff, but I might post some setting details.