And not only does every Attribute have to have a valuable use, but they all have to have sufficiently important uses in actual game play that a PC can choose to specialize in them and still be viable.
The downside to that, of course, is that the more important a particular function is in gameplay, the less likely any given group is to be able to do without someone who's good at it. In D&D they used to call this the "Somebody's Gotta Play The Cleric" effect. And the plain truth is that some functions just are more important than others: nobody ever put together a D&D party without at least one fighter in it.
Quite true. That's why I suggested that Attributes could overlap in terms of applications: partly because Attributes are an arbitrary game convention no matter how you distinguish them, and partly to avoid the "somebody's gotta play the cleric" by making all attributes viable but not vital.
That's part of why I can't really decide whether mental and social combat should really be separate or not. I don't want Intelligence to be a dump stat, but I don't want all the characters to be combat spec'd if the adventures aren't about combat. I find the combat focus in S* system games to be obnoxious, especially given that the physical combat rules are used for spirits rather than a more thematic spiritual combat mechanic.
I like your idea of switching up the stat used by combat style, or even by round to round choice of manoeuvre: you could call the manoeuvres "Quick Strike" (pool = SNS + Melee), "Finesse Strike" (DEX + Melee), and "Power Strike" (STR + Melee), and then throw in a rule that repeating a single attack type too often gets predictable and thus easier to defend against.
Yes, although I'd leave the level of granularity up to the GM. The basic idea is to let characters specialize without handicapping them. If the campaign is combat focused, then this lets PCs develop more distinct dice pools.
However, I don't think S* Systems are particularly good for combat.
With regard to "Defense Values", I and many other players actually prefer the chance to make an active defense roll where possible; even if the probabilities amount to about the same, the illusion of being able to "DO something!" in our own defense is a valued part of the game. (Though I do appreciate that setting a static defense value does reduce handling time.) Had you thought about including this as an option?
I mentioned before in my analysis of the task resolution that different groups have different tastes and I would let them decide on stuff like this. So yes.
I didn't go into too much detail since I haven't actually addressed physical combat as its own subject, but I guess now's as good a time as any.
The physical combat in S* systems can essentially be broken down into the following steps:
- Roll to attack
- Roll to defend
- Roll to damage
- Roll to soak
The earliest editions used four rolls, though later editions started changing some to static values in order to streamline combat. STing 1e reduced it to a single roll. If you're going for a modular format like me, then it makes the most sense to explain how these work so that groups may decide what to abstract.
As another alternative to streamline combat, you could try mimicking the "players roll all dice" concept from
Unearthed Arcana. Only players would roll dice, whereas NPCs would rely on static values for attack and defense. So when a PC rolls to defend, they subtract that from the NPC's Static Attack Value to determine how much damage they receive.
And with regard to mental/social conflicts, I've always preferred the terminology of Influence Rolls, since the basic game object is a rule-based way to get one character to cooperate with another's wishes.
(One useful technique in such contests is that, if it's possible for PCs to lose them and thus have agency taken away from their character, there should be a compensatory reward or incentive to soften the sting -- perhaps players who cheerfully accept and roleplay the result of losing an Influence Contest get an extra XP for "Going With The Roll".)
The Sway rules address this in a section helpfully titled "don't tell me how to play my character." The concept of player control is way too big for me to broach here. In order for relationship mechanics to work, then the players need to actually care about them as otherwise they will complain about losing control.
[/HR]
Spirits and planesThe spirit rules in Opening the Dark are comparable to the various spirit rules used in the STer and STing games. Opening the Dark calls all bodiless entities "spirits," with subtypes including ghosts, animae, demons, etc. Spirits have only three attributes, are ranked by a general power level, have a "domain" trait that works like art/praxis, use essence as both hit points and power points, and have miscellaneous spirit powers for everything else.
In terms of rules, I would burrow a few things from other S* games. I'd distinguish manifestation powers (a la STing 2e), essence from hit points (or maybe distinguish peripheral and personal essence a la WitchCraft), and use the same potency ranking that PCs use (a la Exalted). (That last one is probably going to require reworking how super potency works for PCs too, given that since it was introduced in 2004 we've had characters introduced with scores of 0. By comparison, PCs in Exalted typically start around 4 or more.)
Otherwise, I have a beef with how S* games have presented spirits in general. They're basically running under D&D's ethereal plane logic. Fighting spirits consists of finding a ghost touch weapon and hitting them repeatedly with it until they die. I don't find this very thematic.
If you watch movies about ghosts and ghost-like creatures, then you may notice that it is very common for these spirits not to be limited by spacetime like humans are. It makes no thematic sense to assume all spirits have ethereal bodies that can be hit with ethereal weapons.
I'd take that into account and allow spirits to be treated as hazards/terrain rather than para-physical creatures. How do you fight something that you can't punch in the face? Spiritual combat. Remember when I mentioned mental/social combat? That can be retrofitted to represent other conflicts like psychic combat and spiritual combat.
I'll use an example from the IT movies. When the losers are fighting it, they aren't really fighting it physically because it doesn't have a physical form. It can cause physical harm and warp reality, but this is due to its psychic powers. When the losers fight it, they are pitting their wills against it in psychic/spiritual combat.
On a related note, the STing 1e rules mentioned that ghosts had variable appearances based on their Power Attribute. They didn't all look like humans but could appear as ghostly orbs or other spooky SFX (presumably representing how much of their life they remember informing their residual self-image). The STing 2e rules completely ignored this and in general avoided any kind of evocative fluff in that vein. (While I never liked the weird underworld cosmology, I always found
Wraith and
Orpheus' attempts to include ghosts of variable potency and non-human ghosts fascinating.)
Anyway, this sort of stuff can be represented in game terms through manifestation powers (including not just
STing's manifestation numina but also
CtL's manifestations). Basically, spirits can't interact with the world until they "manifest" and how they manifest is highly variable.
That brings me to the types of spirits and the planes of existence. I detest the planes of existence, or at least the idiosyncratic way the S* games typically presented it. Which is why I decided to take cues from
Everlasting,
WitchCraft, and personal fiat.
I decided to jettison the concepts of Spirit World and Underworld completely. I don't see any need for them (other planes are a different matter). Ghosts and Animae exist on Earth and are tied to earthly things. Ghosts are tied to their anchors/fetters/mementos/heirlooms/whatever; if those are destroyed or resolved, they cross over. Animae are similarly connected to their physical counterparts.
Per animism
everything can be said to have a soul. For humans (and possibly other things), their souls or echoes thereof may linger on Earth as ghosts after death. For natural phenomena, inanimate objects, and such, there are animae (literally the Latin word for soul). Most of the time an anima is unconscious and may never wake. Animae only become concerns of the PCs if the PCs either need the assistance of one or an anima is the monster of the week. For example, animated inanimate objects are the result of the object's anima awakening and animating its physical counterpart.
OtD mentions demons as your generic beings from hell. An idea that occurred to me was to adopt the
original Greek definition of demons as the spirits of abstract concepts.
Eudemons are benevolent,
cacodemons are malevolent. Given the inherently transient nature of most abstract concepts, demons must continually hunt for essence. Naturally, this means they are likely to attract the attention of the PCs. (From an OOC POV, my "demons" cover the various quasi-spiritual stuff in STing games like passion shades, emotion spirits, demons, angels, goetia, chimeras, and so forth that have accumulated over the years.)
(PC angels, demons, and ghosts wouldn't operate by these rules. STing has this vague design philosophy in which every splat would have an antagonistic spirit and/or monster counterpart, which I'd lay out as explicit here for simplicity and reference.)
I'm not opposed to other planes, but if you include them as more than just a few lines of fluff than there needs to be a very good reason to have them. Don't have them just because earlier editions of S* did. If you do add other planes, then don't feel the need to force them into a pop-Christian worldview either. (The problem I have with STer/STing's "underworld" is that it's limbo/purgatory and not the afterlife of pre-Christian religions; Disney's
Once Upon A Time show did the same thing and I still find it grating. When it comes to urban fantasy specifically, I prefer to leave the nature of the afterlife ambiguous rather than definitively prove or disprove any particular real world religion.)
[/HR]
If anyone has requests for me to touch or go into more detail on a particular topic, then feel free to ask.