My New System Post 2 of Part 1: The Message from Dr. Light (Design Goals of Subsequent Parts)

Though I said I'd be moving on to Classes and/or Weapons, I feel that I need to address some design goals of each of these sections before beginning to lay down the ground work of these parts. So, that's what I'm going to do.

Firstly, I'm actually going to talk about Equipment in general as a single Part, with sub-sections about armor, weapons and adventuring gear. To address the concerns about equipment, I've made a handy bullet point list.

• Armor adding to dodge chance has never made sense to me
• The enchantment system for armor and weapons puts too much power in the hands of casters and removes it from other players
• Upgrades are needlessly tedious to obtain
• Keeping track of adventuring gear is too tedious and boring, so nobody actually does it
• Carrying capacity takes too much time to actually figure out
• Weapons become somewhat useless too quickly
• Weapon and armor proficiencies have always been a little weird

Now, to keep up the trend, I'll make another bullet point list to list some design choices I want to promote and how I'm looking at fixing the problems that I see with previous systems.

• Armor and Weapons are each created using a modular point-buy system
• This allows for players to create really cool or interesting weapons, as well as have new traits added or subtracted from a weapon easily
• Because this may be confusing for new players, there will be a set of basic equipment that shows off some common configurations for weapons and armors
• Weapon proficiencies and Armor proficiencies are based off the styles of the weapons and armor
• Weapons are grouped by the way you use them, and each grouping has traits that you can add to your weapon that match the style of how you would use it, but are unique to that group
• Armors are grouped mostly on similarity of make and how you can wear it, each group has certain traits that can be added to it that match how you would use it
• Shields boost your ability to parry/block attacks
• This is much more like real life, and matches the active defenses that I've mentioned earlier
• Adventuring gear is going to be based mostly around a "kit" system
• Kits are going to mostly be integrated with the skill and explortation systems, and so they will be explored there in more detail
• Kits allow you to have a general idea of what you have without having to keep track of every single piece of equipment
• Kits will probably degrade after a few uses and need to be kept up with some small change or small amounts of time gathering supplies

Now, for some talk about classes and class abilities:

• Classes are based around a concept and a single basic ability that matches that concept
• Combat and exploration roles are not determined by class, but by build
• Every class should be able to specialize in one of at least three different combat roles by choosing certain options, or they can choose to pick up options from multiple combat roles
• Exploration roles are decided by the character's skill choices, which will be covered in exploration
• At each level a character gains a predetermined number of "perk points" which can be spent in a number of different perk trees available to the character
• There are a set of basic perk trees available to every character
• Some perk trees are available to the character based on weapon proficiencies that the character has, these allow the character to gain advantages when using those weapons with certain traits that the weapon has
• Some perk trees are available to the character based on the character's chosen class and they alter the way the character's class abilities act and react
• Perks replace the design space of feats and chosen class abilities, allowing the player to create the character they need and fulfill the combat role the party needs

Classes will probably get more talk at another time, as I'm going to most likely detail more about weapons and then armor first.

Song of the Post: "The Message from Dr. Light" by The Megas