This is for discussing the Modern AGE Corebook, Companion, and any ideas we might have for house rules to modify the core assumptions of those documents.

A thought exercise I undertook. I don't really know anything about horoscopes beyond what I read on random websites and GURPS Thaumatology, but I thought it was interesting that there were 12 drives and ran with it. This might be a good thing to add to a Vietnam/Woodstock era game.

That's really nicely thought out I like it :)

Someone else came up with about half of it, but I swapped quite a bit around. They had Leo as Ecstatic. As a Leo I thought that while I'd like to claim the benefits of Ecstatic, the actual talents I as a real person would have would be more in line with the Achiever. That and some of the descriptions I read were way off in comparison to 3 other ideas the other person had so I swapped them around.

Getting modern age companion next week yeah

It's a pretty awesome book to my mind. There's so much you can do with it. Hazards are awesome, and they leaned into the horror angle with Fear, Terror, and Alternate Damage. It's great, I feel like it would be perfect to run a horror game with (and I really want to) but I couldn't garner any interest.

Just got the companion.... This evening after work it will be me a glass of whiskey in my garden with this baby lol

Unfortunately was only able to have a quick flip through the book last night and didn't even get to have my whiskey :(

What I saw looked interesting and you could definitely do shadowrun with it. I need to read the power section but I was wondering if there was enough there to do the hero TV game or even use the setting for brave new world from pinnicale entertainment

Well, someone could. Best I could do is some approximation of it. A cyberpunk genre game with fantasy themes.

Initially I thought I would want to stratify which Enhancements were equivalent to what Talent degree, but it seems like the easiest way to deal with it is just make them Adventure Rewards. If there's any balance issues, the only way to avoid them is for the GM to just tell the player "these are the implants/enhancements available".

In a game with Gritty or Cinematic Resources, the GM could always say that the player could forego Resource restoration or increase at a given level in exchange for an Enhancement (since it seems reasonable for those to cost as much as someone's resource+10 on average anyway)...

It occurs to me that base Resources for such a game could be Gritty, and the Affluent talent could increase it to Pulpy or Cinematic at Expert and Master levels... unless of course, that overcomplicates things.


Don't know, but superheros in general is probably viable with Force Multipliers for things like jumping, lifting, running, and thinking. You'd have to convince me to write a supplement on it before I could go further.

At a glance though, straight force multiplier wouldn't work for damage, but if you added individual points of damage, the Demon Lord from Fantasy AGE Bestiary could survive one hit from a 6 Strength Enhancements individual (who would do 1d3+100 at 6 enhancements before considering things that would change it to d6 or add dice)

Hazard Immunity would be appropriate for a supers game, but I'm kind of in the GURPS camp where I think complete immunity toward something is either

1) bullshit because infinities of any kind are broken, or
2) should be accompanied by vital points or ways to deal additional damage to the character.

I'd probably change it to Damage from sources is divided by the number of enhancements it counts as (1-6) and you get the number of enhancements as a bonus to attribute tests to resist non-damage hazard penalties.

Innate attack would have to be more significantly detailed in a full rewrite as to what features of range, area, would count on a point system, then applying the totaled points as Force Multiplier and using that total to determine how many enhancements something is. For example, 50 yards range would be 50 FM instead of just +1 Enhancement, but also 4d6 damage wouldn't be 4 enhancements, it'd be equivalent to x Force Multiplier. Probably 2 FM per D6 just because base unarmed damage is d3 so each d6 would be a doubling.


o...k...

I suppose that means that means they can be fully purchased in any game that isn't gritty above Novice talent... Then again the ones listed in the book are capped at 2 EN as far as I remember. But that does actually suggest to me where I should put what talents if I were stratifying them.

I dunno, I'll think on generic versions of some of these ideas if you want me to.
This message was last edited by the GM at 14:44, Thu 18 July 2019.

I wonder, do you guys think Freeform Character Creation could be used to make so called "Archetypes" (like Cyberpunk's Street Samurai) and do a handful of them in advance so players can just pick one and jump in?

In reply to The Ageless One (msg # 10):

That sounds like a good game supplement, TBH. Archetypes (they called them 'Character Templates') were always one of the great things about d6 games. I can only assume AGE didn't put it in the main book because they were keeping it generic.

I'm not sure who they is, but Archetypes is a fairly common word when you're trying to avoid using something along the lines of "classes". I really like the classless approach, I just feel like if I were to say "this concept picks from these pre-specified choices" it would really cut down on the complications of character creation, instead of saying "well, these backgrounds and drives are available, and each of those has the specified choices."

The end result is (hopefully) that you're making a similar amount of choices, they're just more narrowly defined and it lowers initial "choice overload".

In reply to The Ageless One (msg # 12):

Hm. It looks like a sentence or two got deleted. Too bad I can't remember what I was saying. :-J
At any rate, Kits or Archetypes or Templates or Flavors or whatever you want to call them sound like a cool idea to me; although, they tend to be geared toward a particular genre, which Modern Age (at least ostensibly) is not.

Well, that one system does all sorts of templates for a variety of different genres and that's its whole schtick. I think if I were to do something along those lines it contain several templates for several genres.

In reply to The Ageless One (msg # 14):

Yep. I agree with you, I don't see any reason they shouldn't be included in the book. Green Ronin doesn't seem to share our opinion. In their defense, though, they seem to be consistent: I couldn't find any archetypes in their True20 book, either, and they had much more extensive genre writeups in that one (albeit for fewer separate genres).

That's not really the opinion I conveyed, and not really the one I intended to either. I just randomly looked over at the Freeform Character Creation in Companion and then back at how hard it seems sometimes to get a modern AGE game going and though it would be cool to just sort of go at it with a bunch of specific ideas in mind regardless of what should or shouldn't happen with existing documents...

Unless you meant that they should be in a book, not some book that already exists. That actually makes more sense re: what you were agreeing to.

It actually probably has more to do with the fact that I never did get an opinion one way or the other whether I should make a thread so people could write up specific character ideas, and how possibly taking the initiative to write a bunch of concepts/archetypes could serve as a distraction to stave off boredom or whatever.

In reply to The Ageless One (msg # 16):

Fair enough.
ITC: personally, I find archetypes annoying, dislike them on principle, and always have. I don't even like character classes, so what could I possibly find beneficial about somebody else presuming to make my character for me? I find the whole thing ridiculous and an unconscionable waste of space. However, every player I've ever had loved them, so I allow they're a sensible thing to put in the core book as they effectively convey the feel of character you're trying to express in your system, illuminate ways that you intend for your players to use game mechanics to create common character concepts, and exemplify how math works in your system better than you could in ten solid pages of text.
As far as making them into a standalone supplement apart from the main book, though?
I don't see any point. Making archetypes for a campaign makes sense because they tell players the kinds of PC you want to see. Making archetypes for a campaign setting or a genre supplement makes sense because they convey the kinds of characters to expect inside the setting or genre. Making an archetype to illustrate a particular trick in the character creation system would be useful in the scope of an argument or blog post. Divorced from context, though, all a bunch of character archetypes accomplishes is showing off how you'd make particular character concepts.
On the other hand, I don't like archetypes, personally, and pretty much all the players I've ever had did like them. Conclusion: Sure! Why not? Sounds like something people would like.

As to the other question, I don't currently suffer from boredom and don't have all that much spare time, so I probably wouldn't contribute.

I mean backgrounds, professions, and drives do that for Core Modern AGE, I'm just looking for a way that offers a similar number of choices that look easier to make so for example:

1. Concept is already chosen for you by picking one of these archetypes
   
2. Abilities are chosen as the game dictates they be chosen
   
3. Companion says you get 3 Ability Focuses. I would give 5-6 options per Archetype and you'd still pick 3
   
4. Probably the same for Talents (pick 3 from 5-6)
   
5. I'd offer the default two choices for improvements, but a few of the concepts would specifically allow -Health or -Resources explicitly for another improvement.
   
6. as is in Companion
   
7. as is in Companion
   
8. as is in Companion
   
9. as is in Companion

An archetype, sure. I'm talking about making more like a dozen, +/- up to 3


The ideal--which I may fail to hit--is that it doesn't show one way to make a bunch of character archetypes. Ideally it shows at least two ways to make each archetype. I haven't started work on it though, and I honestly don't know if or when that could happen.


Yeah, probably everyone else is similar which is why nobody decided they wanted to put their characters here.

Sorry. Been too busy to check RPoL at all the past week.



If you're creating archetypes, this seems to me like a reasonable way to do it.



Making nine archetypes to illustrate one trick in the character creation system would typically be overkill, even for an exceptionally obscure trick. Making fifteen archetypes to illustrate fifteen different tricks would be... pretty much exactly what I already said if it were in the stated context.



Then you'd be showing off two ways you'd make particular concepts. The point of contention is that if you made a Glitter Boy and I made a Glitter Boy, they'd be extremely different characters, and there's more than a passing chance that I'd find your character build pointless and boring. Characters I build tend to seem stupid to other players, too, though, so it goes both ways. Unless you're illustrating your own game or campaign, the usefulness of the endeavor seems suspect to me. Personally.
Now, I'm willing to concede the point that I'm anal-retentive about building campaign characters. If I'm planning on caring whether the character lives or dies, I want the character to be optimized my way, not anybody else's. That's for campaign characters, though. If it's a one-shot game, of course, I play whatever and it doesn't matter how the character gets built. Archetypes work okay for those.
But as I said, most people don't share my stubborn obsessiveness. Archetypes seem to work perfectly well for them, so I arrive at the same conclusion as before.

The intention is to actually go find a bunch of books for a bunch of different types of games, and point Modern AGE players to the ways Modern AGE deals with the statistics in the other game, so strictly speaking it would be "source+liberties where exact duplication is impossible" with the liberties hopefully being slight. But as you say,


You probably find the archetypes or whatever they're called in the respective source materials boring too, so I'm not sure how that helps either way.

The fact that I haven't heard from

• Someone who might like archetypes but doesn't like what Modern AGE has to work with in that regard
• Someone who likes how some other game does them and might have insight.
• Someone who simply has a better idea

isn't really an indicator of whether archetypes are a good or bad idea, or an indicator of whether this suggestion does or doesn't need work for reasons other than your personal bias. Credit to you that it's self admitted though.

And this is not me telling you to shut up by the way, I know sometimes I can come off like that's what I want and it isn't. I was sort of hoping for a variety.


That's not really something I understand, but then again I come from a system that does nothing but create archetypes for campaigns that don't exist, and their entire purpose is to provide a baseline off of which to springboard player's unique twist.


There are markedly fewer ways to skin a cat with the Background/Profession/Drive system tan Companion's Freeform way it seems like. Sounds like the Freeform way ought to be your wheelhouse. Personally I created a scientist with it that would have otherwise been completely impossible to create without it, but who nonetheless existed by virtue of how the story progressed. As a player of that other game, it's a cool thing. You and I from what I can tell, we don't get Choice Paralysis. We walk into every single game we play knowing exactly what we want to play in it. But you're one of 5 people I've ever met who does in the last 19 years... goddamn it's been almost 20 years.


which is that you tolerate them I suppose.

In reply to The Ageless One (msg # 20):

lol guilty on all counts. Sorry, I was prepping for a con last weekend that ate up about 25 hours of my days.
Like you said, point buy is my favorite character creation system by far.

Now, I'll allow that if you're drawing from multiple books to make archetypes that somebody might not have access to otherwise or that show off the options available in the different books, that could be useful. Kinda like a preview of what different options you can get. I do like the sound of that.

At any rate, I've had good and bad experiences making pregens or archetypes for my players, so my experiences are mixed. At the con this past weekend, I was running BESM and one of the players said, "This Esper seems underpowered compared to the other characters. What's up with that?" Now, I'd designed the character to have more raw power than pretty much any of the other pregens, as far as the stats went, but it was also a high schooler so a little lower on the to-hit numbers, so I just kinda scratched my head and said, "Um. Well. It is a point-buy system, so there are a million different ways to make a combat esper. The way you make one might look completely different than the way I made that one." I mean, the esper could fly, for crying out loud. The character had 1000 kg of Telekinesis. It made Jean Grey look like damned amateur hour. What, exactly, did the guy want?
I mean, he was new to the system so it wasn't really his fault, but this is pretty typical in my experience. You make an awesome, generic character that can function well in twelve different ways, and then the player immediately picks it up and runs in the opposite direction with it and then says, "This character sucks. What in the world were you thinking?"
[eye roll]

Ideally not just multiple books, but hopefully multiple books from multiple sources.


I'd probably have said something like "it's like how a fighter has slightly higher hit probability because of reliable techniques and a barbarian has slightly higher damage because of angst"


I can't answer that in a way that bears exactitude of correctness, but he probably just didn't really know what 2/3 your average car correlated to in damage points? Also the lower hit probability kinda fucks with the knowledge of what's powerful.


Newbs gonna be newbs no matter what anyone does. I generally don't design for one offs outside my adult material which follows the 80 20 rule. I make generally applicable things actually apply in generalities.