Random question regarding orders

[Ineti]

Has anyone played with the idea of omitting orders all together and just having all the order abilities in one big list that players could pick from for their characters?

Just curious as to whether it would work or not. I was looking at my write-up for Aragorn, and I had him as a Warrior, captain, noble, ranger and wondered idly if it might be neat to just omit orders and let players pick whatever order abilities made sense for their character concept.

[Cpt. Lundgren]

I can't see any reason why it shouldn't work. The orders are just a balancing and archetyping tool. If you feel that the rules has to be rebalanced, in contrast to just wing it as you go, you could add the pre-requists that the elite orders had to the order abilities that came from that order. Then either raise the cost for the abilities, or give out less advancement points, to compensate that they don't have to buy the orders anymore.

The system would be more open to min-max abuse but IMNSHO, the eye of a GM will trumph any safe-guard placed in the rules.

The sweet part is that CODA would be much easier to introduce to anyone who demand a class-less system.

[GandalfOfBorg]

If you were to go Order-less, I would suggest making ability trees and/or add more prerequisites and/or cost to some abilities like Spellcasting. Yes, this might reduce the number of available abilities in the beginning but it helps balance the fact that you aren't spending 5 picks to gain a new order. The one problem I have with going Order-less is that there will be a number of abilities that would never thought to be chosen because of their lack of crunchy power while there will a scant few taken most often by almost everyone (Evasion and Preferred/Favoured Weapon come to mind). Sure there is Narrator fiat, but still there would be a predisposition to do that. You can always use the Orders as templates (X, Y, and Z are the kinds of abilities usually taken by those who are of the warrior type, etc.).

Also with going Order-less, what do you do about the cost of skills? Are they all 2 picks? 1 pick? Do you make all the skills you start with at 0-adv have a future cost of 1 pick while acquiring ranks in new skills costing 2 (and possibly mitigated to 1 pick by the Cross-Order ability per skill)?

If you go Order-less, have players pick from the entire pool of Order packages and maybe tailor a group of 5 abilities for each package just like is done for edges.

Going Order-less also heightens the need for in-game justification and Narrator review for the acquisition of items purchased via advancement picks.

[Feanorgil]

I agree I like the orderless concept... I will tackle it more latter following ... tonight.
Vaughan

[GandalfOfBorg]

In my CODA BSR, I have some suggestions on how to use the system without orders and further exposition can be seen in my Harry Potter RPG.