HereComesPete wrote:The cutting things into A and B styles was a different idea entirely
Ah, I hadn't realised that was a seperate thing, I understand more what you were saying now.
'A' being a more encompassing style which may or may not include aspects of your own pysche, the emotional attachment being there because it's a character you've lovingly created.
The 'B' style seems to translate more to the min/max munchkin sort of player, which one might quite reasonably create in a singleplayer computer game, but with little investment or care about the character's background doesn't offer much to anyone else in a group roleplaying environment.
Slight tangent, but on the lines of games development. I've been thinking for ages about integrating software into tabletop RPGs. I've a knack for creating character sheets in Excel that do the maths for you. Typically in RPGs this is done by amateurs such as myself, as pen and paper means exactly that. However, most people have the internet now - particularly 5punkers, and lets face it I don't really care about anyone else RPGwise. So when it comes to games design if you look at it from the point of view that it will have a computer element to it you can suddenly develop far more complex rules providing the computer does the maths for you. It's quite liberating in a way, to stick your fingers up at the luddites and let rip with massively complex rules.
The players still have to have some understanding of how stuff's being calculated though, so they have an idea of whether they stand any chance of an action succeeding, or what they can do to improve their chances.
Computer RPGs no doubt have some massively complicated maths going on that you never see though, and they usually work without the player feeling they're not in control. Often they'll provide a simple bit of feedback, like in Fallout where it shows you the %age chance of a Speech attempt succeeding.
The spreadsheet could be the same, put some rolls in at the top, allocate points in skills - massively complicated maths in-between - at the bottom it shows your chances of performing various actions.
I was thinking more for tracking stats and characteristics and such. I'd rather see a combat system transparent and fast, with all the complicated stuff done on the character sheet beforehand. My thinking being making the one-off stuff (like derived stats at character creation) more complicated in order to simplify the live stuff like skill rolls and combat.
