Friday, July 9, 2010

Ruleset, part 1

Hi all, Sherincall here..

Seeing as we haven't been around for a while, it is only fair that we show something good when we come back. That something is our new ruleset. Unfortunately, it is not finished, so we can let you play with it just yet. Until such a time comes (soon!), I'll just give you a quick overview of it.

There are no classes in the Shadows and Silver ruleset: everyone plays as a generic PC class. Sounds dull? Not really. Rather than limiting a character to three strict classes, we allow seamless customization for all character types. If you want to play a sword master who is interested in the arcane, and also obsessed with locks, you needn't be a fighter/wizard/rogue. You will simply increase the skills you want. In order to achieve this, we had to modify most of the skills, and add many new ones. Here are the skills present in the S&S ruleset at the moment:




There will be a detailed explanation for all of the skilled listed above, but for now let's just say that the Arcana skills will be used to perform actions similar to spellcasting in NWN, combat skills will increase your battle prowess, such as attack bonus, armor class, damage and even attacks per round. Most other skills are self-explanatory.

Another novelty to the NWN skill system is that skills can now be progressed without gaining a level. So, if you want to train your marksmanship skill, you can either gather experience and put a point in the skill at level up, or you can pick up a bow and practice. This goes for every skill, and those cross class skills can only be perfected this way.

That's it for now. Next time I will explain how feats work in the new ruleset. After that, you will get a chance to try it for yourselves.. I'm eager to get some feedback.

5 comments:

Michael A. Sinclair said...

Ooo... I hadn't gotten to see the new icons yet. Me likes. :)

BH said...

Nice work guys.

Anonymous said...

Cool stuff,

i love the way you use skills, with only a few class. Wanted to do a system like that myself.
does it will be shared with the community?

thanks and have fun friends ;)

chico400

Michael A. Sinclair said...

Time will tell how effective the system will be, but Sherincall and I both want to share things with the community. So I suppose that's a tentative yes.

Thanks for what you've shared with the community, btw. :)

Sherincall said...

Couple of small updates:
1) I was away for a few days, didn't do anything during that time.
2) Everything is done except setting the feat requirements and modifying the descriptions.

Now, that might sound like good news but it's actually bad news. The process is very simple, but very time consuming. While you could theoretically do it for one/two minutes per feat, the desire to work wears off after 10 minutes, so it's going to take a long time.

As for releasing it to the community: No reason not to make it available, but it will be specific to S&S, so I'm not sure anyone else will find a use for it. If they do, great.