The Gaming Den

At this point in my personal project (after many many months) I've gotten my plan on how I am going to handle combat pretty clear cut. Now I am setting that aside to make the next big decision. How to handle a character's life outside of the dungeons. I don't have much experience in settling down to really decide what to do with characters outside of the dungeon. Normally adventures are one time skip away with little to nothing between them.

I think, for now, that I want something to fill that space. So now I am looking first into what players might care about when their character isn't actively saving/dooming the world. Along with listing these things I have to also figure out what I'm going to do with them. So far I have

Allegiance - Which is basically what I'm going to replace alignment with. Its what a character believes in essentially.

Prestige - Social status. This can be a measure of fame, infamy, rank in some organization (military, church, thieve's guild, etc)

Wealth - How much currency is falling out of a character's pockets

Treasure - contacts, loved ones, magic items, holdings, transports and the like.

Other than this I haven't been able to think of anything else that really mattered.

I think having the players navigate medieval power structures while advancing that of their family's could be a worthy minigame. It may be hard to keep your players on a leash, because a 10th level druid can utterly destroy a conventional army. To do politics right though you are going to need to keep track of a good number of NPCs, and have a handle of what each populace thinks of its nobility, so that's some extra book keeping. What might be most difficult is keeping the mundane world relevant to higher level characters though, or they could just be dukes of hell/some other dimension.

I'm not so sure if I'm going to make it into a mini game in and of itself. More like these things dictate what you have and don't have when you're not dungeon delving. I, at this point, can't fathom what a functional social mini game would look like. If I were to see one that worked really well, to give me inspiration, I'd probably be all over it.

MGuy wrote:I'm not so sure if I'm going to make it into a mini game in and of itself. More like these things dictate what you have and don't have when you're not dungeon delving. I, at this point, can't fathom what a functional social mini game would look like. If I were to see one that worked really well, to give me inspiration, I'd probably be all over it.

Well the real question is what you really want the character to be able to do/achieve from all this.

So do you see these things as goals, or as something the PCs might use, or both?

Does Allegiance include both politics and religion?

@RC - Well the reason why I say its not gonna be a mini game is that there won't be a chance of failure, or rolls involving this stuff. As for a goal I want characters to have what they get out of adventuring to be regulated.

I liked Fantasy Craft's Lifestlyle bit and I'm making efforts to meet and exceed it with my own ideas. Basically the idea boils down to this: a PC will have wealth, contacts, social status, magic items, rituals, etc purchasable with experience. Buying these with experience doesn't effect your leveling up or anything. There will be difference between current (which you spend) and total (which just rises) experience. Buying more wealth has various effects on how much a character can earn and keep. Buying into contacts allows a character to acquire and improve contacts and cohorts. Social Status - allows you to garner things without gold (with experience), affects income, improves/worsens PCs initial attitude toward you, effects the size of the holding/transport you can retain without extra costs, and possibly other things I can't think of now/haven't thought of. Magic Items allows you to keep a certain number of them. Rituals must be paid for with experience but have lengthy to permanent effects instead of being temporary (as most magic in my system is).

@Orca - I see them as things players care about outside of how well they fight. I want these things to be regulated so a character doesn't have to depend on lying, stealing, or cheating to acquire them while allowing a character who does do these things to pay essentially the same price as a character who doesn't. I want characters who are both altruistic or underhanded to pay the same price for their gains.

@Maj - Allegiance is unclear even to me at this point. Since it focuses more on character behavior it isn't as important to me while I am working on mostly just mechanics. The idea of it is however that there will be sample allegiances a character can align themselves with. These will include things like "The Hero" and will basically be "Don't knowingly do bad things". Or "The Knight" which will have something like "Obey your lord/lady with little question". And of course there will be various allegiances for the religions I'm going to have to make up when I make a setting. For right now I'm leaving it at that.