Topic: April Issue - Custom Professions

[John Duffield]

For clarity - that is actually my article - John Duffield - not Wayne Johnson.  I assume that will be fixed shortly.

Incorrect attribution aside - I would appreciate any feedback on those rules.

[Zat]

Just to confirm, although I am not sure what's happening here...

I have not written anything regarding 'Custom Professions'

Wayne Johnson.

[Wolfhound]

Yes, that was a mistake on our part and will be corrected soon.  I want to apologize to both of you for the mistake.  I suspect it was a copy and paste type of error, as we are still struggling with working out the bugs of the change from Nicholas heading things up (which he did a fantastic job of) and those of us who have stepped up to try to fill his shoes (and are having a little trouble keeping our balance with our arms flailing).  Hopefully next month things will go better both timing wise and with fewer mistakes and issues.

[Fnord]

I really liked the article, I'm a big fan of creating custom races, professions, spell lists...
I'm thinking of starting a short campaign with HARP in a custom world with some peculiar guilds, so it will be really helpful. Thanks.

I wish there was a similar set of rules for creating custom professions for RMC!!

[GrumpyOldFart]

Excellent work, teinedraig. I'll probably be using it soon.

[John Duffield]

Thank you for the feedback so far.  It would be interesting to see some of the professions people make with these rules posted up here.

I should also have a spreadsheet available soon.

Fnord
I will have a look at RMC when I get some spare time - I am an old player of RM2 (I have just about every book) and I have the RMC PDF's as well.

[John Duffield]

I have had it raised with me that allowing 4-6 skill categories with no cost might be unbalancing.  As an optional way around this I though that a sliding scale of available points based on the number of skill categories might be an offset.

Skill Cats	Trait Points
4	22
5	20
6	18

Any thoughts?

[GrumpyOldFart]

I'd have to check that for balance against what else you can get with a "trait point", but that seems like a good start anyway.

The thing is, at low levels you probably wouldn't see much difference, but at high levels when all the "core" skills are fairly well topped out, a difference of 2 favored categories can be a lot of difference.

However it's also "leveled out" some by the fact that your table specifies no less than 2 ranks in a favored category, and a spell sphere requires 8. So yes, you could have 6 favored categories and a spell sphere, but all but 2 of your professional ranks would be committed already, by the minimum ranks required per category.

It's still doable, but you'd have to survive low levels to get the advantage.

[GrumpyOldFart]

I found one other issue with it.

Gain Talent @ Lvl 1          Purchase any talent as a profession talent          Talent DP /5

There are some few professional talents that (at least so far as I know) don't have a DP cost. A Shaman's "Spirit Tongue" comes to mind, for example. Hedge Wizardry is another one that falls into that particular hole, I think. So either someone has to figure out DP costs for such talents or people like shamen and hedge wizards are rather out in the cold with this method of character generation.

[John Duffield]

I will work through the HB pub professions and work them up as well using the point build.  I should have something done in a day or so (damned work always slows down the fun stuff)

[GrumpyOldFart]

I think I'm gonna try this out with my playtest group and see how it does. Remind me now and then teinedraig, and I'll keep you updated on any problems we spot. However,

Skill Cats     Trait Points
    4                 22
    5                 20
    6                 18

...after giving it some thought, I think this is too cheap. Consider that in a practical sense, 1 trait pt. = 5 DPs. The above basically puts an extra favored category as equivalent in value to the Sense Magic talent. I'd want the extra category to be something the player doesn't go for automatically, but sees if it justifies the cost. You can make up those 2 trait pts. spent on the extra favored category by the time you have 5 total skill ranks in the category newly favored.

So I think I'm gonna start with

Skill Cats     Trait Points
    4                 23
    5                 20
    6                 17

I may eventually go as far as 4 trait pts. = a favored category, which would take 10 skill ranks to make up the cost of. I'm a bit edgy about that idea, because if you want a very focused character anyway, the extra trait pts. you get for losing a favored category could probably make a fair amount of difference (that's enough to make Outdoorsman, Quiet Stride or Subtle effectively "free"). I don't want to "overcorrect" and have players always wanting fewer categories and more trait pts, that's no better than them always wanting more categories and fewer points.