Page 3 of 3 FirstFirst 123
Results 31 to 44 of 44

Thread: Couple of Questions

  1. #31
    Join Date
    Aug 1999
    Location
    Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, USA
    Posts
    389
    I think the similarity between d20 and Coda, what there is, lies simply in the fact that there are some game concept designs that just work better than others, and games that are well-designed (which I define as "designed with an eye toward being fun to play" rather than "designed with an eye toward showing what a great designer the game has") use these. Coda is, from my first experience, a very intuitive system. It has a nice learning curve, and incorporates some ideas that make it really snazzy, like the wound levels and the advancements. It is not "different for the sake of being different". It takes classic RPG design elements, combines them with the best of the ideas from it's predecessor, and produces a smooth, very playable system that does exactly what it sets out to do.

    My sincere thanks to all the designers of the system; this is the Star Trek game (and possibly the RPG system as a whole) that I've been waiting for

    Allen

  2. #32
    Join Date
    May 2001
    Location
    Los Angeles CA
    Posts
    249

    Reply to Lt. Dade

    I certainly didn't take offense at an honest and forthright comparison. I do take exception to the "fringe element" that sees what it wants to see, all the while patting themselves on the back for being "gamer elites."

    The comparision to D20 is natural. D20 is the biggest thing to hit gaming since the original D&D in 1974. If Coda had come out right after Vampire, people would be comparing the two. I could make a credible case that Coda is also "just BRP with the serial numbers filed off."

    D20 is now the lingua franca of the hobby games industry.

    Given that, I must say that the only thing any of us took away from our time at WotC and the new D20 was the underlying metagame. Tools-based, precise, flexible. That's what we wanted. I'm glad you saw that, Lt. Dade. That means we did our job well.

    I don't see it as a flaw of the game system that someone who plays D20 games can jump over to Coda System with a minimum of fuss. There are critical differences between the two. Yes, reaction tests could be called "saving throws." But ours are based on your attributes, not your class, and you can choose when to improve them. The fact that a D&D player will call reaction tests "saving throws" doesn't matter to me in the long run. He or she understands the game.

    I'd love to talk more about what the design process was all about, since I love designing games.

  3. #33
    Join Date
    May 2001
    Location
    Los Angeles CA
    Posts
    249

    Reply to AllenS

    The Coda System was intended to be as intuitive as the Icon System.

    About two years ago, I approached Christian Moore with a list of changes I wanted to make to the Icon System. The "what if I get the same skill twice" table was confusing. Renown didn't work well. Many traits didn't do anything specific. Certain skills were useless or ill-defined (like Command). The only reason people took Personal Equipment was for tricorders, which then didn't link back to anything. People hoarded their Courage Points. Dodge was a dumb skill (what do you do, stand in front of a mirror and practice dodging?), and the "saving throw" mechanic for things like Mind Control and Persuade didn't work well. The Difficulty level depended largely on modifiers to the base target number.

    At the time, I was told that it was too soon for a 2nd Edition, because the Icon system had only just come out.

    The funny thing is, all the elements (and more) I listed above were changed for the Coda System.

    What if I get the Same Skill Twice?
    We wanted a mechanic that explained how Sulu could jump from helm to engineering with ease, we called it specialization. In order for that to work, we allowed you to make tests in the base skill with a penalty for being "out of specialty" and we allowed you to improve your specialty level (for things like Engineering (propulsion) 1 (4)). This resulted in that horrible table, which seemed like a good idea at the time.

    If you don't want there to be a penalty when working out of specialization, then it has to present a bonus to test when working in specialization. In other words, instead of using the base skill when out of specialty, you get a bonus when working in specialty.

    Renown
    As I created NPCs for the Icon System, I quickly realized how hard it was to have a General Martok with 200 Renown, because at that point anyone in the Galaxy would recognize him. It was pointless to roll 18 dice to see if that alien living in a cave knew him. So Renown was changed to be a straight progression with a simple TN to roll against.

    Traits
    If you had Dark Secret, and were willing to do "anything" to keep your secret, would you scorch the surface of a planet with your ship's phasers to prevent someone from revealing that you cheated with the Admiral's wife? Why not? Doesn't say anything about that in the trait. And what if you secret was revealed? Could be something, with a good Narrator, could be nothing, with a bad one.

    We worked very hard to ruthlessly stamp out anything lacking a concrete game effect. If it didn't have one, we gave it one. A penalty to social skill tests for the revelation of your dark secret, for example. This leaves it up to you how far you'll go to protect your secret. Will you wipe out a planet to avoid a negative modifier? How many people will be affected by the penalty? That's up to you.

    (I'd point out at this stage that D20 does not have flaws.)

    Skills
    The Icon System didn't do as great a job as it could of telling you what certain skills did. If I succeeded at a Command or Tactics test, what happened? If I succeeded at a Personal Equipment (Tricorder) test, what do I learn?

    In some cases, things that were skills were removed, which left us with the question "what do we do with them?" The option we settled on was to include professional abilities. Once we did that, we defined that these abilities had to modify your basic functionality, your skills. Professional abilities generally affect skill tests, the aquisition of skills, or allow you to use skills in ways not covered by the skill description.

    For the remaining skills, we wanted to group them into test types—Academic, Physical, Social. This way, we could remove the variables from the difficulty number. In other words, the Difficulty in Icon tended to be like this:

    Routine: Standing on one leg
    Difficult: Standing on one leg in a wind storm
    Challenging: Standing on one leg in a strong wind storm

    Not very useful. Wind storm and strong wind storm were really modifiers. So we lumped together all modifiers into one of four types. This allowed us to make TN descriptions like this:

    5) Standing on one leg
    10) Standing on your hands
    15) Standing on your head

    To which you could then add modifiers for the wind storm. Way more useful.

    Once we did that, however, it occurred to us that you could use a physical skill academically or vice versa. Where is the best place to hide that case of smuggled Romulan disruptors? Make an Investigate test as an academic test.

    Then, we got even sexier with it. If I'm dealing with a Ferengi, couldn't my investigate test be modified by my knowledge of their culture? Thus was born affinity bonuses. These really aren't limited. If you can make a case for it, we encourage the Narrator to allow it.

    Tricorders
    Personal Equipment was a dumb skill. Tricorders now provide a +5 bonus to tests in which they're used. Looking for life forms? Life Science skill test. Or System Ops test. Or Medicine test. Want to decipher those Debrune glyphs? Add a +5 for using your tricorder's data banks. This made tricorders as functional in the game as they are on the shows.

    "Saving Throws"
    If we eliminated the Dodge skill, how do people get out of the way? Don't people have an instinctive ability to try to get out of the way? If I punch someone in the face, won't they throw up their hands or duck? This is a natural ability of being alive. Don't we all have some kind of BS detector? Don't we all have some kind of temptation resistance? These are also natural abilities. I, for example, can tell when Don Mappin is giving me a line, and can resist rum and coke much better. =)

    If these aren't skills, which must be selected and improved ("oh, so sorry. You're as gullible as my cat because you chose to give yourself Phaser skill instead of Resist BS skill"), then what are they? D20 calls them saving throws. We call the reactions (because you react to something). Other games have you roll against some attribute. The effect is the same.

    I, however, really believe that gamers like to calculate stuff. In the old Villains and Vigilantes, I loved adding my Str and Dex and dividing by 3 to find out how fast I could move. So we tried to base our reactions on something (and I argued that you add your modifiers together but was voted down). We could have just as easily said that you dodge using your Agl and resist BS with your Per. This is the reason behind reactions—I wanted some kind of "secondary attributes."

    In the end, we wound up with a system that was more intuitive, faster paced, and simpler to understand than the Icon System. Believe me, we were surprised by that.

  4. #34
    Join Date
    Aug 1999
    Location
    Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, USA
    Posts
    389

    Re: Reply to AllenS

    Originally posted by RIsaacs
    In the end, we wound up with a system that was more intuitive, faster paced, and simpler to understand than the Icon System. Believe me, we were surprised by that.
    I have played a lot of different RPG systems since I took up gaming in 1979. I have taught myself how to deduce rules when such are not easy to figure out. I never had that much problem with the Icon system; all it took was a few read-thrus of the "what if I get the same skill twice" table and I pretty much had it down.

    Teaching to others, however, ran into two major roadblocks; the aforementioned table, and the dice-rolling method. I think there is just some sort of primal thing, maybe a race memory or something, that tells you "when you roll a bunch of dice, you add them together". I can't count the number of times (ok, I actually can, five, I believe) when I had to tell the players "No, you roll all those dice but you only count the HIGHEST one." It wasn't that tough, and they did eventually get it, but it wasn't "natural", according to one of them.

    I hope I didn't get them so programmed to count the highest die only in Star Trek that I have to train them OUT of it now <g>

    Allen

  5. #35
    Join Date
    Aug 1999
    Location
    Berlin, Germany
    Posts
    589

    2 quick questions

    Though it isn't explicitly stated anywhere (at least I couldn't find it), I presume that characters who gain skills as Species Abilities may spend their 'species skill picks' (INT x 2, p.85) on those as well?

    Why are there prerequisites to Starship Officer Elite Professions if you can override them by simply picking the Starship Duty professional ability? You can even do so multiple times. In addition to that why is Starship Duty a prerequisite for every SOEP?
    No power in the 'verse can stop me.

    "You know this roleplaying thing is awfully silly, let's just roll the dice." - overheard during a D&D 3E game.

  6. #36
    Join Date
    May 2001
    Location
    Los Angeles CA
    Posts
    249

    Your Answers

    >>Though it isn't explicitly stated anywhere (at least I couldn't find it), I presume that characters who gain skills as Species Abilities may spend their 'species skill picks' (INT x 2, p.85) on those as well?<<

    That is a really good idea, but it's not in the rules. You may spend your species skill picks on the skills listed under species skill picks (language, culture, etc.). I don't think your presumption would hurt the game any, and it's a nifty little house rule. Kudos to you!

    >>Why are there prerequisites to Starship Officer Elite Professions if you can override them by simply picking the Starship Duty professional ability? You can even do so multiple times. In addition to that why is Starship Duty a prerequisite for every SOEP?<<

    Like all elite professions, anyone can join so long as they meet the prerequisites. Which means you can start out as a Vulcan Mystic and practice with the ahn-woon and cultivate your powers of perception, then choose to join Starfleet as a security officer. At that point, you can join the Security Officer elite profession without taking the starship officer profession. Remember, you can't choose a base profession; there are no multiclass rules in Coda. So there would be no way for characters to join Starfleet after entering play without this option.

    Once we did that, we had to have a way for starship officers to circumvent the prerequisites. In other words, Starfleet trains you to become a security officer or science officer. If you want to join later in life, then you have to meet certain requirements.

  7. #37
    Join Date
    Aug 1999
    Location
    Berlin, Germany
    Posts
    589

    Re: Your Answers

    Originally posted by RIsaacs

    That is a really good idea, but it's not in the rules.
    Strange. It does seem quite reasonable.


    Like all elite professions, anyone can join so long as they meet the prerequisites.
    I understand the reasoning behind it, but the prerequisutes state that you need the Starship Duty ability. Which you can only get if you chose Starship Officer as a profession.

    Or do starship officers only need to pick Starship Duty while other professions need to meet the prerequisites? If so, there is a very important word missing in all the SOEP prerequisites, namely "OR".

    And thanks for the answers, Ross!
    Last edited by Joe Dizzy; 04-26-2002 at 11:00 AM.
    No power in the 'verse can stop me.

    "You know this roleplaying thing is awfully silly, let's just roll the dice." - overheard during a D&D 3E game.

  8. #38
    Join Date
    Aug 1999
    Location
    Worcester, MA USA
    Posts
    1,820

    Health Advancement

    I noticed that in CODA Health can be advanced for 5 picks, but Vitaility could be advanced for only 4 picks.

    Is Health separate from Vitality after character creation, or is there another reason why someone would spend 5 picks to improve Health?

    Am I missing something here?

  9. #39
    Join Date
    Aug 1999
    Location
    Salt Lake City
    Posts
    2,923

    Re: Health Advancement

    Originally posted by tonyg
    Am I missing something here?
    Nope you're not missing anything.

    (Innocently whistles to himself, trying to avoid eye contact with Ross.)
    Mass Effect Fate RPG | "Mass Effect meets Fate meets awesome = FREE"
    Contributor, Gnome Stew
    "In every revolution, there's one man with a pizza."
    Star Trek (TOS) "Pizza, Pizza" (Second season), story by D.S.McBride

  10. #40
    Join Date
    Jun 2000
    Location
    Twin Cities, MN USA
    Posts
    156

    All kinds of replies

    <B>Re: AllenS's description of the Coda/D20 situation</B>

    Very well said, sir. Wish I'd said it!

    <B>Re: Ross's description of Coda's ancestry</b>

    It's a real treat for me to get this sort of insight into the design process, Ross. A lot of what you say can be inferred from the language in the rulebook, I think, which is a Good Thing.

    Regarding <B>deriving reactions</b>, I really, really like the "this or this" method in the book. One, choices are great in gameplay (and metagameplay) are great. Two, it allows a lot of flexibility, a whole new set of toggle switches, to use when defining alien races.

    What if I were to design an alien race who have a requirement that their Savvy reaction must be based Perception for some reason?

    Regarding <b>redefined flaws</b> like Dark Secret: I think "that's up to you" is the magic phrase. One our PCs in Icon had the "Impulsive" flaw (or some such), and it's gone now. "So what," the rest of us said. "You already know he's impulsive. Play that. Write it down if it makes you feel better."

    That is, I like mechanics strong and flexible and I like them to keep their hands off my stuff.

    And god bless the TN modifier. It's the most obvious, versatile mechanic around. It puts the emphasis on the game world over the rulebook.

    Let me also say that I had to re-explain the "roll attributes, use just one die" concept every week my group played the Icon system. At the same time, the "roll 3 dice, use two" abilities in Coda are cosmic. It's a special treat with an exciting metagame effect and a tangible feeling of extra power in that third die.

    word,
    will

  11. #41
    Join Date
    Aug 1999
    Location
    Worcester, MA USA
    Posts
    1,820

    Re: Re: Health Advancement

    Originally posted by Don Mappin

    Nope you're not missing anything.

    (Innocently whistles to himself, trying to avoid eye contact with Ross.)

    Okay, so I take it raising Health is supposed to cost more than raising Vitality.

    I guess that means we will see people maxing out Vitality before raising Health.

    2 or 3 picks for Health would have been nicer.

    Or how about a Toughness edge?

  12. #42
    Join Date
    Aug 1999
    Location
    Worcester, MA USA
    Posts
    1,820

    Trait Questions

    Capable: This Tier 2 ability for Starship Officers lists another Tier 2 ability, Intrepid as a pre-req. As far as I can tell this is the only Tier 2 ability that has another Tier 2 ability as a prerequsite. Is this correct? Should the Prerequsite have been Rounded instead.


    Trait Upgrade: How does this work with the Sherpa edge, since Sherpa replaces the carry mutipliers rather than simply adding to the base ability (like most other edges). Can we assume a +3 to each category?

    BTW, Trait Upgrade: lists Resolute in it's description. A trait that affects Courage use, and thus one that cannot be upgraded.

    Sherpa: What is the maximum heavy load capacity for a character with this edge? . I'm assuming Strength x 18 kg, but according to the description it seem to be either the same as someone without this edge (Strx15kg) or non-existant.



    What happens when two abilities overlap. For Instance the Soldier Tier 1 ability of Favored Weapon is almost identical to the Weaponmaster (Eleite Profession) Tier 1 ability of Sacred Weapon. How would someone who had both abilties for the same weapon (say a Bat'leth) resolve them.

    THe main proble I can see with these abilties is that if they do not add together, someone will have to "waste" abilities in order to fufill prerequsites.
    Last edited by tonyg; 04-27-2002 at 07:21 AM.

  13. #43
    Join Date
    May 2001
    Location
    Los Angeles CA
    Posts
    249
    Health would have to be separate from Vitality after character creation. Since Health is a secondary attribute, I guess it just seemed obvious to us that reactions and Health were the same. It would have to be like reactions (which are also considered separate from attributes after play begins).

    So then why would you ever improve your Vit if it has no bearing on your Health or your reactions? You wouldn't. You would improve those attributes that applied to skills to improve your attribute modifiers.

  14. #44
    Join Date
    Feb 2002
    Location
    Salinas, Calif., USA (a Chiefs fan in an unholy land)
    Posts
    3,379
    Specific Question on the Contact Edge:

    Okay, I have a situation where my PC has a contact within Starfleet Intelligence (basically an old friend from the academy who now works in OSFI HQ).

    I want the contact to be one that provides intelligence information, and I'm not sure what Enterprise skill would be the proper choice (Streetwise or Administration).

    Any thoughts from the resident gurus (Don, Ross, Doug)?

    Also, are there any plans to include new edges/flaws (like a "high security clearance" edge similar to LUG's)?
    Davy Jones

    "Frightened? My dear, you are looking at a man who has laughed in the face of death, sneered at doom, and chuckled at catastrophe! I was petrified."
    -- The Wizard of Oz

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •