![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinI haven't made any more posts about A Wilder World (my roleplaying game project) lately because I haven't had a lot of chances to work on it, even to gather my thoughts and write them out for people. I'm leery about making posts that deal with the concepts at a glance without detail or supporting examples because, as the first post demonstrated, a "nutshell" description of something can be small enough to encompass entire universes of possibility.
Since I woke up today a few hours ago I have started pulling my notes on possible archetypes together into a sort of draft version of a standardized format. Later (possibly tonight, or in the coming days) I'll post some examples of archetypes, but for now I'm just going to post a bit of explanation and some rambly meditations on the subject of archetypes.
Again, player characters in A Wilder World have an agglomeration of archetypes rather than a single character class. Each character archetype consists of two or more possible areas of Expertise, some set Abilities, and a number of Techniques that characters of that archetype can choose to use.
Expertise is the main substitute for a skill system. It provides concrete advantages for your character over others. Rather than having discrete individually-defined skills, players pick from two broadly-defined areas defined for each Archetypes.
The Assassin Archetype chooses between physical infiltration techniques (scaling walls, opening locked doors, etc.) and social ones (disguise, forgery, etc.), with both options including hiding oneself from view. The Coward Archetype can have Expertise either in talking one's way out of trouble/danger or in hiding from/fleeing from such. The actual descriptions given for each possible Expertise are slightly longer and more detailed than this, but they are still fairly open-ended and dependent on interpretation, with the advice to GMs to be generous, especially when nobody in the party has a more obviously suited Expertise.
Each character can have a primary expertise, chosen from the options given for their Primary Archetype, and a secondary expertise, chosen from the options for all their archetypes. The difference is in frequency of use... secondary expertise can only be invoked once per act (the equivalent of a "daily" ability in D&D.
Abilities are things that every member of an archetype possesses, though they may differ slightly in details (bonuses conferred, frequency of use) depending on if it's your Primary Archetype, Secondary Archetype, or Background Archetype. They're roughly equivalent to "Class Features" in D&D. They're the things that most define each Archetype... not every Assassin or Warrior has the same Expertise, and different characters may have Expertises that overlap with each other. But Abilities are constant between characters who share an archetype. If the description of an archetype says that a Warrior is the most reliable combatant or an Assassin the deadliest or a Juggernaut is the hardest to bring down, the Abilities are what bears this out.
For combat-heavy archetypes, Abilities are often phrased as bonuses to certain attacks (or to defenses); for other archetypes, an Ability might require a paragraph or two of definition, as they lay out something that a character can do that is completely beyond the capabilities of most characters.
Techniques occupy a design space similar to Powers in D&D. In some cases they could have been written as an Ability, as they're basically an attack or defense with a bonus, but they tend to be "fiddlier", more complicated, or more situational than Abilities, or more tangentially related to the archetype... a natural extension of it, but not part of its core concept. Techniques are the most "free-form" portion of the archetypes; not only do they present the most choices within each archetype, there are no structural restrictions on choosing them. That is, each time you pick a new Technique, it can be from any of your character's archetypes. They could all be from your Primary Archetype, or none could be or they could be spread out equally among all. There are also Racial Techniques that can be in the mix.
(Characters are also further defined by Race, Gear, and Advantages, but those probably deserve their own post(s)).
My earliest attempts to write out the abilities of the archetypes had a lot more things as Abilities than what I'm doing now. When I started writing out the warrior-type archetypes in a standard format, I realized that a character would end up with something like 16-20 set Abilities that players would have to keep track of, and that a lot of them were pretty situational. In a lot of cases, some of these abilities were things that sort of complemented the other abilities but stepped on another archetype's design space... which sort of defeated the purpose of having multiple archetypes in a character.
For instance: Brutes (as I'm currently calling the aggression-focused archetype that could be used to represent a barbarian/berserker's rage) have abilities that let them trade defense for offense... I was giving them "toughness"-type abilities to make up for that, but that's what the Juggernaut archetype does. And toughening up the character that particular way is not the only way to balance out the equation. Basically, I was writing the Brute archetype as if it were a full character or character class and not one component.
I also ended up realizing that some archetypes could be combined without running into that problem. I'd envisioned a "crowd fighter" archetype that excelled at fighting multiple opponents, with a focus on spreading around attacks. I'd also thought a "mobile fighter" archetype would be a good idea. When I started writing out their exact abilities, I realized that due to the way the combat mechanics actually work I was basically writing the same abilities twice, phrased in slightly different ways. So the two became the Skirmisher, whose abilities are suited for moving between multiple opponents as well as doing hit-and-run tactics against a single opponent.
The other advantage to simplifying the archetypes is that it makes them more modular. When Brute includes nothing in its abilities that speaks to a character's physical staying power, the same set of abilities can be used for physical attacks with a great big axe, for arrows, for thrown weapons, for magical attacks/spells... even for "social attacks", anything that shares the same mechanic as an attack roll. Any character who attacks wildly without regard for defense can use the same archetype.
Likewise, the Challenger archetype, which I originally devised to let people make fighter-type characters with something similar to D&D's mark enforcement. It works very well for a knight or swashbuckling fencer who calls foes out, or a "tanking" fighter who seeks to "grab aggro", but because the abilities of the archetype focus entirely on the challenge aspect and not on the physical attacks or defenses needed to back it up (these would come from other archetypes), it works equally well for a bard-type character or a mouthy non-combatant who serves to distract foes.
So while these archetypes are being grouped as "warrior archetypes", they can be used to take characters of many different stripes in a slightly different direction... there's no need to have a separate archetype for particularly hard-hitting spellslingers or miracle workers.
Since I woke up today a few hours ago I have started pulling my notes on possible archetypes together into a sort of draft version of a standardized format. Later (possibly tonight, or in the coming days) I'll post some examples of archetypes, but for now I'm just going to post a bit of explanation and some rambly meditations on the subject of archetypes.
Again, player characters in A Wilder World have an agglomeration of archetypes rather than a single character class. Each character archetype consists of two or more possible areas of Expertise, some set Abilities, and a number of Techniques that characters of that archetype can choose to use.
Expertise is the main substitute for a skill system. It provides concrete advantages for your character over others. Rather than having discrete individually-defined skills, players pick from two broadly-defined areas defined for each Archetypes.
The Assassin Archetype chooses between physical infiltration techniques (scaling walls, opening locked doors, etc.) and social ones (disguise, forgery, etc.), with both options including hiding oneself from view. The Coward Archetype can have Expertise either in talking one's way out of trouble/danger or in hiding from/fleeing from such. The actual descriptions given for each possible Expertise are slightly longer and more detailed than this, but they are still fairly open-ended and dependent on interpretation, with the advice to GMs to be generous, especially when nobody in the party has a more obviously suited Expertise.
Each character can have a primary expertise, chosen from the options given for their Primary Archetype, and a secondary expertise, chosen from the options for all their archetypes. The difference is in frequency of use... secondary expertise can only be invoked once per act (the equivalent of a "daily" ability in D&D.
Abilities are things that every member of an archetype possesses, though they may differ slightly in details (bonuses conferred, frequency of use) depending on if it's your Primary Archetype, Secondary Archetype, or Background Archetype. They're roughly equivalent to "Class Features" in D&D. They're the things that most define each Archetype... not every Assassin or Warrior has the same Expertise, and different characters may have Expertises that overlap with each other. But Abilities are constant between characters who share an archetype. If the description of an archetype says that a Warrior is the most reliable combatant or an Assassin the deadliest or a Juggernaut is the hardest to bring down, the Abilities are what bears this out.
For combat-heavy archetypes, Abilities are often phrased as bonuses to certain attacks (or to defenses); for other archetypes, an Ability might require a paragraph or two of definition, as they lay out something that a character can do that is completely beyond the capabilities of most characters.
Techniques occupy a design space similar to Powers in D&D. In some cases they could have been written as an Ability, as they're basically an attack or defense with a bonus, but they tend to be "fiddlier", more complicated, or more situational than Abilities, or more tangentially related to the archetype... a natural extension of it, but not part of its core concept. Techniques are the most "free-form" portion of the archetypes; not only do they present the most choices within each archetype, there are no structural restrictions on choosing them. That is, each time you pick a new Technique, it can be from any of your character's archetypes. They could all be from your Primary Archetype, or none could be or they could be spread out equally among all. There are also Racial Techniques that can be in the mix.
(Characters are also further defined by Race, Gear, and Advantages, but those probably deserve their own post(s)).
My earliest attempts to write out the abilities of the archetypes had a lot more things as Abilities than what I'm doing now. When I started writing out the warrior-type archetypes in a standard format, I realized that a character would end up with something like 16-20 set Abilities that players would have to keep track of, and that a lot of them were pretty situational. In a lot of cases, some of these abilities were things that sort of complemented the other abilities but stepped on another archetype's design space... which sort of defeated the purpose of having multiple archetypes in a character.
For instance: Brutes (as I'm currently calling the aggression-focused archetype that could be used to represent a barbarian/berserker's rage) have abilities that let them trade defense for offense... I was giving them "toughness"-type abilities to make up for that, but that's what the Juggernaut archetype does. And toughening up the character that particular way is not the only way to balance out the equation. Basically, I was writing the Brute archetype as if it were a full character or character class and not one component.
I also ended up realizing that some archetypes could be combined without running into that problem. I'd envisioned a "crowd fighter" archetype that excelled at fighting multiple opponents, with a focus on spreading around attacks. I'd also thought a "mobile fighter" archetype would be a good idea. When I started writing out their exact abilities, I realized that due to the way the combat mechanics actually work I was basically writing the same abilities twice, phrased in slightly different ways. So the two became the Skirmisher, whose abilities are suited for moving between multiple opponents as well as doing hit-and-run tactics against a single opponent.
The other advantage to simplifying the archetypes is that it makes them more modular. When Brute includes nothing in its abilities that speaks to a character's physical staying power, the same set of abilities can be used for physical attacks with a great big axe, for arrows, for thrown weapons, for magical attacks/spells... even for "social attacks", anything that shares the same mechanic as an attack roll. Any character who attacks wildly without regard for defense can use the same archetype.
Likewise, the Challenger archetype, which I originally devised to let people make fighter-type characters with something similar to D&D's mark enforcement. It works very well for a knight or swashbuckling fencer who calls foes out, or a "tanking" fighter who seeks to "grab aggro", but because the abilities of the archetype focus entirely on the challenge aspect and not on the physical attacks or defenses needed to back it up (these would come from other archetypes), it works equally well for a bard-type character or a mouthy non-combatant who serves to distract foes.
So while these archetypes are being grouped as "warrior archetypes", they can be used to take characters of many different stripes in a slightly different direction... there's no need to have a separate archetype for particularly hard-hitting spellslingers or miracle workers.