Friday, 16 May 2014
Arrows of Indra: Caste Skills
I'm particularly proud of Arrows of Indra's skill system. I know that "skill system" is a bit of a dirty word to some old-schoolers, conjuring ideas of min-maxing, point-investing, and exclusionary mechanics. But what I tried to do in Arrows of Indra is create a skill system that had a truly old-school nature, that avoided all of these pitfalls.
There's a bit of difference between Class Skills and Caste/Background Skills; the former are less like skills in the D20/3.x-system sense, and more like proficiencies and extra special abilities. I'll talk more about those in some future entry.
The Caste/Background skills are much more like conventional skills. But there's a few important details that I think hit all the right old-school spots:
1. By default, they're randomly generated during character creation.
2. There's no point-buy elements.
3. Most of the skills are not related to the standard elements of adventuring; though creative players will be likely to find use for almost any of them. So they are meant to enhance the roleplaying of the character and immersion, and NOT the stats and power-level.
4. There's no artificial sense of balance. A player is as likely to begin with Cooking, Perfuming and Mining as he is with Hunting or Sage (the knowledge skill).
Finally, most skills can still be checked by people without the skill, albeit at a penalty.
The list of caste/background skills are:
Accountant
Animal Training
Arrow-making
Artist-musician
Artist-sculpting
Astronomy
Baking
Barber
Brickmaking
Butcher
Carpentry
Chariot-making
Chronicler-Scribe
Cobbler
Cooking
Courtier
Farming
Fishing
Herbalist-doctor
Hunting
Jewel-smithing
Laundry
Leatherworking
Managing Corpses
Mason-architect
Masonry
Merchant
Mining
Perfuming
Poet-orator
Pottery
Religious Dancer
Rope Making
Sage
Seamanship
Scribe
Slave-trading
Spy
Swimming
Tablet Making
Tailor
Translator
Weaponsmith-Armorer
Weaver
Anyways, that's all for now; as I said, later I'll get on to the Class Skills.
RPGPundit
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is there anywhere one may check out this game? it sounds appealing but I have never seen a copy so cannot tell for sure. reviews seem positive, but I would like to see it for myself.
ReplyDeleteThe link is right at the start of the blog; but are you asking where you could see a hard copy? I know that its been distributed to a variety of gaming stores...
ReplyDeleteYes, looking to actually see the game so I can decide whether to buy it. Have yet to see a copy; have only seen reviews but RPG reviews I find wildly unreliable.
ReplyDeleteHmm, I know that Arrows is in a distribution network; you might want to check with Bedrock Games to see if they can tell you of a store where it might be found.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the info: your game and "Spear of the Dawn" have both been brought to my attention as likely games for me as I don't have much interest in the standard ersatz Europe of most fantasy games. Ancient/fantastic India and Africa have long been neglected as game settings. Would love to see a Mesoamerican/South American/American indian game; basically pre-Columbian Americas fantasy or historical. Same for the Near/Middle East and Southeast Asia.
DeleteI agree! It would be great to see more of these, written intelligently by people who have done the research.
ReplyDeleteSent Bedrock Games a message asking about where I can find the game; waiting on a reply. Even if I can't find a copy to peruse I think I'll probably end up buying it as soon as I scrape the $ together. Sounds too cool to pass up. Keeping my fingers crossed!
ReplyDeleteThanks; I really do think you won't be disappointed.
ReplyDelete