Thursday, November 15, 2012

Let's loot the Mystic for fun and profit (Part 1)

The Mystic, as introduced in the Rules Cyclopedia, is far too special to be of any use in a campaign. I had my take on a Monk about a year ago, but that's not what this is about. Parts of the subsystems used for the Mystic are ripe for looting and that's what I intend to do here...*

The Mystics acrobatic ability is an easy one to steal!

This subsystem in itself is pretty flawed. A Mystic can do Jumps and Flips, move over difficult terrain without penalty and stuff like that, but he gets a -20% xp-penalty for something that should be possible with any character in any game. Plus: it's in addition to the skill system presented in the RC, which is making it kind of redundant. But here is the interesting part (quoting Rules Cyclopedia, p. 30):

"The mystic's chance to perform any of these
actions successfully is calculated this way: Three
times the mystic's Dexterity score plus two times
the mystic's experience level equals the mystic's
percentile chance to perform the action. 
Acrobatics Check =
d% roll vs. ([3 x Dex] + [2 x Lvl])"
It made me thinking. Using it for specific actions is not working (with a skill system, etc.), but describing it as some kind of special advantage a character has might just do fine for flavour. Now it looks like this:
Special Advantage =
d% roll vs. ([3 x significant attribute] + [2 x Lvl])
+ 100 xp to base value of chosen class (using this again)

Example?

A player in my group wanted to play a fighter of noble heritage. With this subsystem it turned out to be:
Noble Heritage =
d% roll vs. ([3 x Charisma] + [2 x Lvl])
xp needed to reach level 2 = 2100 (2000 xp as fighter + 100 xp)
With level 3 and 15 CHA he had a 51% chance to use his noble heritage in the game, be it to intimidate officials, to get informations from other nobles or whatever he and the DM think fits in a given situation. One time he demanded a fair duell, because the group was outnumbered and he saw a chance to appeal to the honour of the bandits leader.

It's not much, but I figured it gives players one more tool to interact with the game world and adds a little flavour without taking too much space...

*I realized I'm going to need this for a post about halflings in the (very) near future. It's short enough and I will reference it quite often.

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