A Brand New System - Official Announcement

1) What's a "Novice Feature"?

2) I assume the trait points are the combat-side of the level up progression?

3) If you get '1 special move' at lvl1, does that imply more later, from other sources?

4) Can legendary/Heroic points (combat and non-combat) buy those of the tier below them? Such as, using a legendary point to buy a heroic one.

1) A special kind of combat trait from a select list at level 1.

2) Yep.

3) No, it's just being precise. You only get one special move. More would stop making them so special.

4) We're considering this heavily, but we can't confirm one way or another yet. It depends on several additional factors.

What about point spillover, for the heroic/legendary tiers of stuff? I.e. you're left with an excess 1-2 points (trait or ability) with nothing worthwhile to spend it on, or want to wait some levels to get a costlier ability. Would there be any 'compensation' for such unspent points, akin to how Daniel used 'unspent' talent spec points to give yourself a pseudo-skill boost in his talent spec module?

Also notice a lack of any 'gold' mentioned. Are items now DM-given/crafted rewards, rather than auto-upgrades? Will there be equivalent non-combat /'technique' items in that case as well (or a list/template of them that the DM can use, for examples or DM simplicity)?

That's one of the factors we'll be considering. Our priority will be making sure the system is as pleasant to use and as painless as possible. We just can't come to conclusions until we have a good picture of the specific abilities available and their associated point costs. Since the specific abilities aren't even designed yet, much less developed, we can't comment on this aspect of the system yet.

Gold was actually never an auto-upgrade and was always a DM-only reward. My own games almost never had players with level-appropriate gold. Usually they'd be vastly over or under the norm depending on how things were going for them in the story. However, most people almost always played it as an auto-upgrade so we just decided to go with the flow. DM rewards will now get to be more special in comparison.

It'll also be easy to provide gold and say, "1000 gold is worth 10 points of traits, so if you have 3000 gold you can buy an item that simulates a 30 point trait". Hopefully though, this will encourage DMs to keep their bait for players in terms of story-hooks or truly unique items rather than posting a basic gold reward.

Penetrating analysis. =)

Why are you up at 5am anyway Fury?

Great to hear. Glad the changes look exciting. They're a lot of fun to work on.

Did you see the others spoiled in the rest of the thread yet?

Fury of the Tempest wrote:6. Tiers. I have to put my full support behind this. Recently I’ve had a character that has a heavy focus on perception. He’s got a +15 on it, and has a eagle-eye, sharp eyes, empathetic, and Nightwatch. In other words, his perception is maxed out, and there isn’t anyway for it to evolve. Having his abilities limited to some degree, and having more methods of them being able to grow, would be great.

It could be argued that tiers might not do much for this. Depending on how things are divvied up, the collection of abilities might still be available at level one. Building styles may be an interesting thing pending on how this goes.

Indeed. Tiers are going to be specifically designed to spread out upgrades like this though, so you can't max out a major concept at novice tier. Maybe a minor concept though.

How did I miss the No Max HP thing? Not sure how I feel about that. Given the nature of HP in this system, it makes sense, though.

So I guess this'll be like 2nd Edition of Pony Tales/Living Legends?

I dunno. Abilities sorta makes this change feel more like a 3rd edition.

Indeed. It's basically a massive leap forward from the originals. If we consider the stuff back when we had racial barriers to utility the first edition... This might be 4th or 5th. Alternatively, you might even consider this to be the first edition, because things never did get out of beta. Or a whole new version. =)

Spoiler combat talent for the new system.

[+4] Spark - Standard Attack
Deal 1 damage to target creature.

Why did you have to start this discussion the day I left for Washington DC? Now I have 5 pages to read through, and so much of the proposed stuff looks so amazing, and I just may incorporate the Fatal Damage stuff into my already existing campaigns (unless players complain, or just don't like it) and see how stuff works from there.

I don't know if this was talked about later, but how I would probably deal with All Or Nothing is that the drop to -15 damage would be non-Fatal Damage dealing damage, until any more damage was dealt to them. Basically, other players would have until this player is back above 0 HP again, or even 1 damage dealt would result in this player suddenly having 16 FD. Maybe make it so that instead of -1 HP with 1 damage would result in 2 FD instead of 16 FD, but deciding between those would have to be an experimental thing instead of a hypothesizing thing.

I also like the lack of Max HP, and may incorporate that too. In fact, I like the idea of extra health above normal starting health taking away from FD at the end of a combat, so that a player can survive the day by getting a bunch of super heals if they somehow get 24 FD early in the day. For example, if a player is at 34 HP when a combat ends and they have 10 FD, they start the next combat with 30 HP and 6 FD instead of 30 HP and 10 FD.
To add to this concept (though it may be taking it too far), maybe make it so that if you have so much extra HP at the end of a combat that you get negative FD, that negative FD adds to your PiPs for the next Combat. Example: end of combat [44 HP, 12 FD, X PiPs] next combat [30 HP, 0 FD, 6(4+2) PiPs]

I would love to see more X PiP talents too, both plus and minus.

Spoiler number 2.

[-X] Magic Missiles - Minor Attack
Deal 1d4+1 damage to X target creatures.

I think I'm going to love this combat revamp.  

I'm loving the revamp too. Can't wait to play in it.

Just like with normal AOEs, you can't target the same creature multiple times. Magic Missile is a cool power because you can scale it to hit X different creatures.