Powers coming together.

Just a quick update before heading to bed. I spent some time slogging through the powers chapter today. I think almost all of the powers are in a first draft stage now. Just a few more powers that need details added. Most of the time I spent today was on the beginning of the chapter about different power sources like magic, psionics (and its little brother, mentalism), supernatural martial arts, alchemy, etc. I wrote up Vancian Magic and Mentalism/Psionics today. I also started thinking about super science, mad science, and alchemy: the kind of power sources that put powers into a device or potion to use them and had an interesting idea.

If a mad scientist knows how to make a death ray, he could make an energy pistol with cool rings and tail fins. What if he built the same thing but much bigger and mounted it on his rocket ship? It would be simple to say that it just works on the larger scale. He won't be able to use it to hunt Venusian tigerphants on safari, but if he runs across any Venusian warships on his way then he could shoot at them (just as he could use his pistol against the Venusian marines that try to board his rocket). It occurred to me that the same "scaling up" could be applied to the other power sources too. A wizard who can teleport himself short distances with a few seconds of mumbling and handwaving  could cast a scaled up version of that spell to teleport vast distances by using a much longer ritual. Why do powerful wizards live in big towers? Because a wand or a dagger or a staff is a sufficient focus for a small scale spell, but if you want to be a spellcaster on the international stage then you'll need a much bigger phallic object as a focus. A diviner with a dowsing rod can find a lost item in his village, but if he has a big wizard tower then he can find it anywhere in the whole country or even in neighboring countries. If you lead a group of soldiers to attack a wizard out in the world, he'll blast one of your spearmen with a lightning bolt or hit a handful of them with a fireball. If you lead your army against his tower, he'll blast a whole unit of spearmen with lightning and then devastate your left flank with a blazing inferno. Of course, while he's operating on that larger scale, he suffers the Death Star vulnerability: a small single-man fighter could get through the defenses and strike a vulnerable spot.You can't swat insects with a cannon, so it's a trade-off.

Talents and Drawbacks

I've been feeling rather unmotivated recently. I meant to post the Talents and Drawbacks section about a week ago, but I've been putting it off. I've also been very slowly working through the Powers chapter. I've had that file open but minimized for the past few days but I only occasionally look at it and work on it. I usually do some work on it late at night before going to sleep. I start to make some progress then decide to go to bed and continue the next day, but then I wait until late at night again. The Powers chapter is still a monstrous hodgepodge of abilities that I'm struggling to trim into shape. When I'm actually working on it, it doesn't seem so bad. When I'm not working on it, I have the idea in mind that it's going to be really hard so I procrastinate working on it. The Talents and Drawbacks chapter used to be a similar monstrosity but I've finally cut it down to size. 

Talents are like Edges in Savage Worlds, Feats in D20, or similar advantages in other systems. In my original draft of that section, every Talent was a special case with its own rules. As I had more and more ideas, it started to bloat out of control. It was turning into what I hated about those other systems. I needed to trim it back and get it under control. When I showed it to Mike Addison over at Zombie Dojo, he suggested that I give Talents a limited set of effects and then just vary the circumstances where they apply. In their new stripped down form, Talents essentially function like Fate's Aspects in the way they all provide the same bonus when they apply. However, unlike Aspects, there's no cost to invoke them: they apply whenever they are appropriate. I like the way this works because it means that the different Talents can still have their different descriptions of what they are and how they work, but the specific mechanical effects are easy to remember. You only have to read the Talent once and the name of it should be enough to remind you of when you can use it. I'm also hoping that Talents will provide another layer of description to  help define a character and differentiate one character from another. Rules and examples after the jump.