Nobilis and Alexander

[jeregenest]

So this summer has not been the best for gaming for me. But I do have a bunch of ideas swirling about. It looks like Alexander's March won the polling which is cool, its a very solid idea, though I'm still debating overruling democracy and running my last minute un-entry, Drink and the devil had done for the rest. Probably my biggest issue is the inability to find mechanics for the unstoppable hoplite army marching into weirdness game. Didn't like Shadow of Yesterday, didn't like Active Exploits, feeling a little uncertain about Hero or GURPS, etc.

Luckily peaseblossom has brainstormed and come p with a creative mechanic solution, which I'm currently muling over.

The abilities are: Aspect, Mythos, Followers and Fame Aspect still does the same thing it always does Magic (instead of Domain) is a catchall for magical/clerical/supernatural powers Followers (instead of Realm) is a measurement of the power of your legion or brothel or whatever, if you've got one Fame (instead of Spirit) represents your chances at immortality after death, based on your deeds and the force of your personality I think for Aspect and Magic you could get away with the same miracle-point structure. For Followers I thought of the following (which loosely scans to said structure): Define, Defend, Build, Attack, and Reassign. I haven’t really thought through Fame, but then Spirit was always the least defined of the bunch, anyway. Then, instead of Chancel we could have a score in our army, and the Imperator could be Alexander.

So lets think about this. It’s a good idea. The folks in my group like the diceless, resource management aspect of Nobilis. We haven’t been exactly finding any mechanics we like yet. And we would like to game soon. peaseblossom’s basic breakdown would work.

There is some stuff to think about. The first is power levels. The first option is to keep power levels the same and just assume that most mortal characters would not have attributes at all; instead they would buy Gifts. So PCs would be built on say seven points, which would probably lead to some hefty Argonaut style core characters. Players could buy attributes, but I’d expect most wouldn’t.

The other option, and I find myself liking it more, would be to rigger the scale which is probably necessary given peaseblossom’s revised structure.

So lets see, a scale. As you can see I’m a little blocked.

Aspect
Score What it does
0 Novice
1 Adept
2 Master
3
4 Champion
5
6 Legendary
7
8
9
10

Magic
Score What it does
0 Novice
1 Adept
2 Master
3
4 Champion
5
6 Legendary
7
8
9
10

Fame
Score What it does
0 Novice
1 Adept
2 Master
3
4 Champion
5
6 Legendary
7
8
9
10

Followers
Score What it does
0 Novice
1 Adept
2 Master
3
4 Champion
5
6 Legendary
7
8
9
10

Comments

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

If we set "kill an entire roomful of men eager to sleep with your wife" at level 6... and "play so sweetly that even dread Hades, who tolls the hours of a man's life, weeps" at level 8... and "out-spin Pallas Athena Mistress of Technique, Goddess of the Warp and Weft" at level 10... Hmm. I'm not sure that that scale needs to go all the way from 1 to 10.

[bluegargantua]

Interesting...

Yeah, the scale does need to be altered. Perhaps we can shorten it? What if it's only a scale of 0-5?

I'll also try and get a copy of Agon to you when I get back. It would also require some re-working for this game idea, but it's got Greek hero flavor in spades and might provide useful ideas.

later
Tom

Adapting Nobilis

[dkoulomzin.livejournal.com]

I feel Auctoritas is really a chief reason you want high Spirit in Nobilis. I don't see Fame as granting the same sort of protection. Am I missing something in the flavor of the setting?

I definitely think scaling down the power of the stats is best. Building a character with 7 points means most scores will be 0, with a few 1s and a rare 2. That means most players will have a 0 or 1 in a given score. There doesn't seem to be enough variation this way. So let's scale the stats.

In terms of capping at 5, I'm not sure shortening the scale works unless we also set the player score max at 3 and halve the number of miracle points (or make one bump cost 2 mp or whatever). Mechanically, we need to have levels extend above the max for the player so that miracle points are worthwhile to players with high scores. However, I think by reducing the scale, we start to run into the case of little variation from player to player. And anyway, I disagree with Jeff that there's too much granularity in a scale that goes to 10. We just make 10 less powerful. (But these go to 11!)

Stats

[dkoulomzin.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, I think we might want to split up Aspect. I don't know if in the game we're imagining it makes sense for just one stat to determine mental and physical prowess. I'd say the stats should be:

Aspect (here just physical)
Brilliance (the mental/social part of aspect)
Mythos (the Magic/Mysticism stat Jess proposes)
Blessing (more like Spirit: captures Fame and adds whether the Gods favor you, and grants protections sort of like Auctoritas)

Basically, I moved some of Nobilis's Aspect into Jess's Followers score, and renamed the score. Brilliance isn't quite the name I'm looking for, but the stat captures both social charm and thinking ability.