moepp said:

What were you going to say? I'm curious

Cifer said:

Cifer said:

One thing I never like in a RPG system is when the order you take the advance in has an effect. Especially when one order is permanently and objectively worse than another. Which looks to be the case here. Take a character who wants to go one god, but wants a single advance from another. If they take the other advance first, the total XP cost of all the advances is less than if they take it last. Or maybe they are taking enough advances from that god that the total discount is more than the increased cost of the other advance.

As for balancing it, if you have two players (the costs are before any XP cost adjustment):

 - One wants 5'000 xp of discounted advances, 200 of increased price.

 - One wants 4'800 xp of discounted, 200 of increased price and 200 of unaligned.

How can you build a system where the order doesn't matter for either player ?

The reason I don't like it is that I don't like having to chose between getting the fun advances now, or holding off on them so my character is better later.

This is especially important when you consider that by making the order important, the RAW is saying that the character has already chosen which god they are going with (you can't plan your advance order if you don't know where you are going). But the fluff says that a lot of people falling to chaos don't chose to, instead they are put in situations that slowly push them in that direction until they are too far gone.

Keep in mind that, whilst many skills or talents may be aligned, you do not become aligned just like that only for purchasing a single skill. It is when you constantly push into a specific direction when Alignment rules will take effect. You do not suddenly pop a Slaaneshi mark just because you've taken Charm. Similarly, a Tzeentchian may find the Charm skill to be more expensive, but will not raise the ire of his Patron God just for a single purchase.

Though, yes, I too think the system would benefit from applying two alignments (on purchase, player chooses which one applies) to some skills/talents.

It's not about raising the ire of a PCs patron god. The problem is that the system described in the rulebook means you can take two identical characters, give them identical amounts of XP to spend and apply the exact same advances to them, the only difference is the order you applied the advances. The end result of this is that one of the characters has spent more xp than the other. Meaning that the character who spent more is equal or worse than the other character in all areas, because the other character has identical everything except unspent XP, in which he has more.

Question: Think about players who plan out every advance they will take on their character sometime around character creation. What do you think of systems that encourage that behaviour ?

Because that is the kind of behaviour that this system will reward. I'm not sure how much it will reward it, but I find any amount to be too much.

Lynata said:

That would lessen the problem. Maybe even allow some advances to apply to three of the gods.

But to remove it FFG would need to remove the mechanic of allowing players to spend XP to alter the cost of future advances while leaving the cost of past advances fixed. Though that does give me an idea about a way to remove the problem: When something changes the cost of an advance that a character has already purchased, retroactively apply the new cost to the players unspent XP.

For example, if a character had taken an advance that cost 500xp when purchased, but does something so that it now only costs 400, the difference is refunded and he now has 100 to spend.

If the cost goes up, then he loses that amount, which may put him into an XP deficit. I'm not sure if it would be better to allow the character to work it off, or to force the character to lose advances with a refund to bring their unspent XP back up to 0

It would take a while to calculate. But it would remove the problem and give a major boon to a character when they align themselves with one of the gods, while imposing a penalty should they break away.

So, worst case, I can house rule this problem away.

@BilateralRope

Are there any systems where a planned character doesn't come out on top of a "let's see where this takes me" one in some way? The phenomenon existed in DH as well - The more Gunslinger advances you didn't take and waited until they became available in the later career stages, the less XP would you pay. Power Now versus More Power Later is IMO a quite valid mechanic.

As for the exact problem, there actually is a balance - the one who bought the Slaanesh power while he was unaligned will become aligned sometime later, thus he must have bought more Tzeentch powers for a non-reduced price. If the discount was as big as the extra cost, there would be balance.

MILLANDSON said:

To be honest, I botched up. Missed a word in my previous post and wanted to edit but accidently clicked the wrong button, thus a new post emerged .

I´ll blame it on the ruinous powers that haunt these forums, if someone asks^^

Bilateralrope said:

It's a bit premature to be invoking RAW when we don't have the book in our hands and are not seeing the actual rules for this in front of us.  This maybe far more flexable then you think.

I'm wondering how they will price Characteristic advances without classes/careers? Will every advance cost the same, or will the cost of advances be dictated by your starting "Achetype"?

Some reading between the lines might point to it being based on your Patron God.  It does say Khorne favors Strength after all.  That would make sense to me, at least.

I like the idea of removing Ranks and tables, as I was never really pleased with that system - so many things seem arbitrary in advancement tables.

I'm not sure about this Alignment system, though, for reasons mentioned by others. I have played many games in which fluctuating costs have led to a very constrained, counter-intuitive character development. The prime culprit in this regard is the Storyteller system by White Wolf, with it's "assign dots among categories" character creation system that made hyper-specialization so ridiculously better than spreading your points in a way consistent with the concept, it wasn't even funny. I wouldn't like BC to devolve into something like that, with gimped, overspecialized cardboard cutouts of characters dominating the play due to mechanical superiority.

But then again, FFG isn't WW, and we don't know enough details of the Alignment system to really tell how it will turn out. My past experiences with the 40k line make me lean on the side of optimism. In other words, I'm hoping for a nice surprise ;)

I have issues with class-less systems, as it tends to make everything a bit 'same-y', and can lead to power-gaming nightmares.

But I'm willing to give it a go.

BYE

H.B.M.C. said:

I dont so much mind the class structure, but its the level/rank structure that bugs me to no end. Guess we will see how this turns out.

Dulahan said:

So your class then becomes your patron, so it isnt classless! And if you still have to meet lists of prerequisites it will become a flow chart of advancement instead of a rank/career chart. I am interested to see how this unfolds.

As there are no level-associated Advancement Tables, a player has the option to take all three Advances in a particular Skill consecutively  - Men of Low Character

This is the thing that worries me. Being able, in one dump of XP, to go from nothing to +20 in any one skill is never good and in my view degrades any sense of accomplishment or growth from a character. This is the aspect of unstructured systems I hate. 

 Structured systems aren't of any help at that point either - they generally only provide a cap for a given level, but most of them don't say "you can't take all the points you have and dump them into a skill that wasn't developed before". The task of ensuring that all ability advances are somewhat believable falls, as always, to the GM.

(Case in point: It's easily possible for a high level DH character to one day stand up from bed and say "Hey, I think I could use some security today!", then pump 300 XP into Security, Security +10 and Security +20 if his advancement tables allow it. The reason this hopefully doesn't happen? The common sense of the involved player and GM.)