Talk:Charge

Great work but: Awesome! What do you think of making Errand a skill suite?



I already thought of that but:
From a game design perspective, it might make gunslingers too expensive. The prerequisite skills for charges are satisfied by the shootist class. I was imagining errands as being akin to pages: very young and doing mostly menial labour.

But if you have an idea for a charge skill suite, go for it.
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Obviously I want to make it complicated:
So the path to becoming a Gunslinger is based on taking the class of shootist and the charge kit? The Charge will then become a Gunslinger. Will Gunslinger be a kit as well building off of Shootist + Charge or will it be considered a class, forcing the player to choose between leveling Shootist or leveling Gunslinger.

Two thoughts on Errand: 
 * 1) It is a player's choice background
 * 2) It is a skill suite that teaches the basics of the Charge, pull from the Kit: Speak, Literacy, & Culture and reduce the cost accordingly. Then create a skill suite with Speak, Literacy, Culture, Etiquette, Horsemanship Basic, Holistic Healing, and one hand-to-hand martial skill.

Trust me, I really did think about it:
That combo is the assumed career path, but it's far from mandatory. It's not too far from magic traditions. That is, it's assumed that the necromancer will be an apprentice wizard, but witch doctors and adepts still work. For that matter, there isn't anything expressly forbidding someone from taking a magic tradition alongside a purely martial class. For a long time we had only the basics of the necromantic tradition, and hacked together shadow lord NPCs with that frame and Formourian soldiers. Whenever I'm creating non-generic codicils (emblems, kits, and traditions) I look at the parent classes for each level. This way the bonuses complement each other, rather than duplicating effort or getting in one another's way.

How I'm planning on handling gunslingers is to make them another kit. They would transition from charges straight into gunslingers (provided any other requirements are met) exactly the same way that phantom younglings transition into either agents or assassins.

Making the suite prerequisite training for charges could work. When I first saw your writeup on the forums, my first thought was that it would make gunslingers too expensive. They'd cost 21 skills, and you'd have only about half a percent chance to roll one up… and that's before the gunslinger kit itself was added.

The simplest way to handle this is for 'errand' to be just a bonus background. It's something that would happen during childhood for most gunslingers. As I understood things from prior conversations, your plans included: all charges were errands, and most gunslingers were once charges, but it would be possible (if rare) to start out as a gunslinger at first level.
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Tanturm, do things my way but I haven't really thought them out:
Can the Errand background come with a few of skills? Example, the background educated comes with some individual skills that need to be worked out. Errand could come with a few skills specifically those that relate to being from the Association: Culture, Etiquette, & Speak. Then we could drop Culture and Speak from the kit and replace them with One Hand-to-Hand martial skill and First-Aid. I think that every eventual gunslinger should know at least basic first-aid and at least one hand-to-hand martial skill.

In my opinion every Gunslinger of the Association should follow the same course of training, all of them should have been Charges and Errands before that. A Player could create a gunslinger type of character, aka Shootist, without the trappings of the Association but to call the character a Gunslinger of the Association they should be of the scripted path.

Other Questions:

Thank you for all of the work you are putting into the Gunslingers and the Association. I really enjoy what has been made so far and I am not trying to nit-pick every detail. Thank you for the regular reminders of the cost/probably to create the character. I often get carried away with what I think they should have to create the perfect Gunslinger and that drives me to build highly skilled classes, kits, skills suites, & codicils.
 * 1) When do they gain horsemanship: basic in the current build-up?
 * 2) Does the Gunslinger Kit have a cost? I assumed that like Phantom, a character moves into Gunslinger from Charge during the course of play. Tie spent playing through the lower levels is the cost of becoming a Gunslinger.
 * 3) With the current build plan in mind it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to start as a first level Gunslinger. Should it be possible?



Seriously I have thought about this alot:
Backgrounds can indeed come with skills. The whole point of backgrounds like educated or skilled is to provide additional skills. It's certainly possible for an ethnic background from a culture where all children receive schooling could have such. The two backgrounds mentioned previously are kept open precisely because they are generic. I'm a little leery of giving too many backgrounds associated with one's youngest years because things learned in early childhood aren't the same as adult skills. They certainly provide the foundation for such, but for the most part just aren't quite the same. A seven year old with a hand-to-hand skill, for example, just cannot compete with a grown-up with that same skill. Even if the kid is winning tournaments, he or she will get creamed by most adults with even a smidgen of hand-to-hand training, even when the attribute differences are accounted for. While we could make one or more suites for children, they wouldn't apply in quite the same way for an adult. Climbing is certainly an example here. Most kids climb, few adults can.

Culture, Speak (language), and Literacy can be seen as special cases. Half of one's adult vocabulary is learned by age three. Most literate adults learned to read and write as children. However, it is very clear that the implementation of language is quite different between a child and an adult… the way some adults write on the Internet notwithstanding. Culture is a very special case. For the vast majority of people, it isn't taught; it's simply the way you grew up. Culture is a separate skill only for people who grew up in a separate culture, and studied the foreign one in question. Your native culture is a free skill, much like speaking your native language, and for the most part doesn't need to be mentioned on the character sheet. Culture is listed for some classes, codicils, et al. as a way of lampshading that the class/subclass in question is unique to that culture. So, every charge, as a native of the Association, would have that skill, none of them need to be taught it.

Both the shootist class and charge kit offer a choice of any horsemanship skill. It's deliberately kept pretty open (and rather phrased as such) for a couple of reasons. One is that this allows the player to better customise the character. Some will want to be expert riders, and others can do just fine with only H:Basic, or will want to have a trick or two (such as mounted leap) rather than an automatic increase of H:Cav to journeyman. Handling things this way also guarantees that an (eventual) gunslinger will be able to ride a horse, something rather essential given the open nature of the Western Territories, while still allowing for the possibility of a non-shootist classed character becoming a gunslinger, but without making them wait until they've earned their six-shooters before learning how to ride a horse.

The Gunslinger will have a cost, but this is mostly a technicality. That kit is not unlike the Stigmartyr codicil: it's not intended for starting characters. P:agent and P:assassin have no stated cost because it's impossible to start out at those ranks; one must work one's way up through the P:youngling class first. However, you have expressed a desire on more than one occasion to have the possibility of a starting gunslinger, though you wanted it to be quite difficult for gunslingers to not already have some experience before earning their guns. Having a skill cost listed for gunslingers would make this possible. We don't want a class designed for advanced characters to be free. However, since the number of skills gained from the Knowledge attribute is for character creation, it wouldn't apply to those gunslingers who started out as charges and worked their way through the levels.

Currently, we have a huge list of potential skills for gunslingers, and a whole bunch of level bumps. These need to be paired down and ordered. The requirements for the kit, on the other hand, are already completed. One of these is previous history as a charge. A minimum level isn't specified, and I do try to limit the metagame aspect of such whenever possible. The other requirement (besides the minimum attribute, background, and trait requirements) is passing the Pistols Test. This is automatic for anyone who is a level V charge (and seven years as such), or by defeating your trainer in a duel, or hitting a dime-sized target at 30 paces. So, it is possible for a first-level character, just very, very difficult.

I'm quite content with just leaving errands as a storytelling element, a part of the character's background that needs no game mechanics. We need to ask ourselves just exactly what we would be trying to accomplish by mechanising such, and why.
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But, but, but, but:
I still think that Errand should have Culture, Speak, & Literacy. While the overall Culture of the Association is very similar the individual cultures of each Barony will vary. The requirements of Errand states that they will be trained in a Barony other than the one of their birth, this requirement allows for a greater understanding of the Association. The same logic can be used for Speak, the Language of the associaition has not been discussed much on the site yet, mostly because I haven't had time to work it out but the plan is that each of the Major Baronies, and maybe the Minor Baronies, will have a different but closely related language. These different Dialects are closely related and share one common written langauge. Literacy is very important in the Association because of the shared written word. The young age of the Errand would be prime time to gain that literacy.



Languages are fun:
I love screwing around with languages.

The linguistic divide is an interesting idea, but it doesn't seem likely to happen. Languages split due to isolation, and dialects form from separated communities of substantial size. The Association has none of these things. However, a deliberately cultivated (and large) corpus of shibboleths and buzzwords could be developed to separate one barony from another. This would be an intentional form of self-identification. "We say 'platform' instead of 'table'." This would be as obvious and artificial as rival small towns selecting different colours and mascots for their football teams. These shibboleths would have to be taught, and would be mutually intelligible for the most part.

Game mechanics wise, I would make this a 60 hour social basic skill with a prerequisite of whatever the broader language would be (a dialect of Bizzannite, I'm guessing) and possibly Literacy (given the nature of how it's taught) with mandatory specialisation.
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Because screw logic:
In the Association the Cowboys are Indians... let us consider the distrubution of Native American languages prior to the arrival of Europeans in the Far Western United States. One such example is the Na-Dene Language Family that spread from Alaska to the Rio Grande. It is certainly possible that 11 varieties/dialects of one language could have developed in the area of the Association long before the formation of the Association. I have not set on a given name for this Language in the Association but I did not plan it to be Bizzannite; it is likely that Bizzannite would be commonly spoken as well.



Logic is the way:
Are you saying that an area about the size of Texas and Oklahoma, that is united into one nation-state, has naturally formed least a dozen separate and mutually unintelligible languages?

Na-Dene is a pretty broad language family. It covers pretty much the western third of North America, and includes languages as diverse as Tlingit and Navajo. Of course, as a top-level grouping, it's on par with Indo-European. That group includes languages as far removed from one another as English and Urdu.

For languages to separate, some isolation is involved. This usually means time, geography (either very great distances and/or impassable terrain) and cultural separation.
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Sense and Sensibility:
My argument is that the language and the divisions within it developed long before the "nation" of the Association. With that being said I fully understand your argument against the likelihood of it occurring and the negative effects that it could have on the Association. With that in mind the Association will have a single primary language, the name will come later. I still like the idea of different dialects or at least varied cultural idioms based on the different major baronies.

More on languages:
We might find better inspiration with the Iroquoian language family than with the Dené–Yeniseian family. Specifically with the use during the days of the Iroquois Confederacy.

One of the neat things about that collection of nations was that each determined its own way of dissimilarity with the rest. One nation might consider what makes them separate and unique to be their architecture, though the other elements of their culture are quite similar to the rest. Another nation might think of its manner of dress to be the defining point, though its architecture (and other aspects) are aligned with the other nations in the confederacy.

But we're talking languages. I know first-hand that Mohawk and Cherokee are not mutually intelligible. Linguists do note many similarities between the two, in spite of three millennia and half a continent separating them, making these two languages about as close as English and Dutch. The Southern Iroquoian subgroup is comprised mostly of endangered languages, other than the aforementioned Mohawk. The closeness of the languages, perversely, has been cited as part of the reason for the languages' disappearance: it's harder to form a unique identity if the languages are so close. In broad cultural overview terms, the Iroquoian Confederacy was far more analogous to the United States than the European Union (and not just because the IC was a deliberate model for the early US).

Given the terrain of the Iroquoian Confederacy, the language speciation was due mostly to low population densities, pretty crappy winters, and deliberate efforts to keep the component nations separated culturally (even if maybe a bit artificially). Though the Association is fairly comparable in geographic size, it's a bit easier to navigate, and has far superior climate. I cannot speak to population densities, but when we were figuring gunslinger demographics we were using 1860s Texas as a base model with its much greater populace.

We have a bit of a size conundrum. If the baronies are too small, there isn't enough of a population for languages to split. If they are too large, they stop being baronies.

As far as game mechanics go, there is already precedence for having related languages. The various forms of Gobbley are good examples. If a language has diverged too much to be a simple dialect, it's one level removed. That is, a master of one is a journeyman in the other. Very divergent dialects also fit into this category. As a non-native speaker of English, there are some dialects that are barely understandable to me. The Nordic (more properly termed the North Germanic) languages are Real World® examples of this. Similar languages, part of the same family, might be two levels removed. Some of the Romance languages would fall into this category. A native speaker of one might get the very basics of a simple sentence, much as a student (apprentice) of that other language would. More diverse languages, such as French and Romanian, would be too far removed for any mutual intelligibility. These would be three or more levels subtracted, or no longer usable by the same Speak (language) skill.

Upon further reflection, I totally agree with you that Bizzannite is not the best choice for the basic language. The mountains that keep the proto-associates penned in together to form a unique culture also keep foreign linguistic elements from affecting them too much.
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Skill proposal
How does this sound? It's a little bit language, a little bit culture, a little bit etiquette, and a little bit Strait'nin' the Curves, Flat'nin' the Hills.

Association culture (barony) Social Basic 300 hours Requires Culture (Association) and Speak (whatever we ultimately decide is the primary language) master

You are intimately familiar with one or more baronies of the Association. You can converse with the appropriate dialect, shibboleths, phrasing, and taboos. You can comport yourself in a manner of a citizen of that barony. This skill is free for anyone from the Association, appropriate to their home barony. Likewise, errands, chargers, and gunslingers develop this skill for the major barony where they train. Without this skill, it is easy for people to exclude you from conversations, and you will seem very much like an outsider.

---

Other points to ponder could be giving adjacent baronies fully mutual intelligibility, but anything more distant we reduce by one level of skill. That is, someone from Wister could converse just fine to somebody from Brand, Thompson, Grey, or Wesson, but when talking to someone from Hogan, for example, each would effectively be talking at the journeyman level. The written form of the language is a whole 'nother issue. It could be logographic, like Chinese or Bizzannite, where spoken differences in the language are far less important; the written forms are still largely the same. It could be alphabetic (or an abjad, abiguda, or syllabary) where local pronunciation can make the written forms quite different. Or, it could be a formal separate (typically archaic) form of the language—as with Latin versus Vulgate, or Classical Arabic—that would likely be a reduced level of skill or even a separate language, in game mechanics terms.


 * <span style="background-image: -o-linear-gradient(left, silver, black); background:-webkit-gradient(linear, left top, right top, from(silver), to(black)); background:-moz-linear-gradient(left, darkred, silver, black, black); color:blue; border:4px ridge; border-color:black black red red; border-radius:2em 2em 2em 10em; text-shadow: -22px -9px 15px yellow, 0px -1px 2px rgb(255, 255, 0), 0px -3px 3px rgb(255, 204, 0), 0px -5px 4px rgb(255, 153, 0), -2px -7px 5px rgb(255, 102, 0), -2px -9px 6px rgb(255, 51, 0), -3px -11px 7px rgb(255, 0, 0); " >    ————Golgotha—Kinslayer—  &#9760;  || || || ||