Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-5023546-20130910031001/@comment-11687-20131114165406

Nichosorn wrote: Good stuff Alzrius and I concur with the overall analysis.

My thanks.

Nichosorn wrote:

There should be Classes (Hunter/Huntress, Beacon Professor, Faunus Extrememist, Dust Collector) for others NOT playing students, and if the players are at Beacon, their class should be Huntsman/Huntress.

I disagree here; classes are (to my mind) meant to represent broad archetypes, ones which can encompass smaller roles that fall within a class's general theme (e.g. soldiers and thugs can both be Fighters, rather than needing a Soldier class and a Thug class).

Having classes with narrow themes runs the risk of introducing questions of how appropriate it is that X character has Y class simply due to the class theme, rather than due to the actual abilities that a class grants. The classic example here is the difference between someone with the Assassin class, and a multiclass Fighter/Thief character who kills people for money.

Nichosorn wrote: I have been trying to figure out how to use Semblance & Aura without making it too drawn out. Perhaps something like 4E D&D tried to do. Maybe a group of powers available to the character like the power index, sans Utility. I.e. At-Will (speed, glyphs) for Semblance and Encounter/Daily (Heal/One True Strike) for Aura. The "powers" must be bought with CPs (or as an additional point collection - like with the Cortex 7 System.  For example, take the number of CPs and add 20 for a new total of PPs ("Power" Points) ) and they work like the 4E D&D powers. I didn't care for everything in the 4E D&D stuff, but borrowing from it works for RWBY.

I'll admit that while the different collections of powers for each class that Fourth Edition would be a good fit here. However, I dislike the idea of "encounter" and "daily" powers; to me, they're the epitome of dissociated mechanics.

We don't know very much about what semblances are, at this point, or how they work. Nevertheless, the prevailing assumptions are that they're part of a person's aura, and thus can be used - to lesser or greater degrees - at will, until the entirety of their aura is expended. Ergo, having some uses of semblance be limited in how often they can be used (particularly for an "encounter," which has no in-game unit of measurement) is difficult to justify within the context of the game world.

Better, I think, to simply make it a collection of powers that have a point-cost to them, if not a skill-based (e.g. free-form) system altogether. As I noted over on my personal blog, the rune magic system in Eclipse is very apropos here (and is only a page long).

Having had an excellent conversation about this so far, I'm starting to wonder if perhaps the d20 System is necessarily the best way to go about this. It's not an issue of how well the game mechanics can handle running an RWBY campaign - I think that the rules can serve adequately, if perhaps imperfectly - but rather that the narrow focus of how characters would be built in such a game requires that a fair amount of what the d20 System already does be discarded, simply because there's little use for it in such a campaign.

When you're throwing out large amounts of what the system does, simply because it has no place in the game you're going to run, it's time to re-examine if it's the proper system to be using at all.

Of course, my bias is showing here, as that's one of the comparatively few systems that I know, and by far the one that I know the best. Still, if the game could best be served by another set of rules, perhaps I was mistaken to focus on the d20 System so much...though that doesn't negate the wider argument that utilizing an existing system could still be more fruitful than inventing one whole-cloth.

Nichosorn wrote:

I want to begin making the character sheet for it too, so the sooner we fighure out the "system" the sooner I can begin the layout.

In addition, I too have been gaming for more than 30 years, and I have a gaming foundation as well. Gaming is what I do, but storytelling is the key and I have been very, very good at doing that. So together I believe we can pull this off, and quickly.

It's fairly ironic that now I'm uncertain that this is necessarily the best course to take. The caveat, for me, being that there's comparatively little I can contribute if we don't use the d20 System for this.