NaGaDeMon / RoleVember 2019 - Comparisons

In Walkabout, I have a variety of occupations that characters might pick up as they meet people and explore the world. The specific occupations were designed to give some flavour to the world, to identify how certain people might service the communities around them, and what benefits they might gain from engaging in the tasks associated with those roles. The idea was inspired by the careers in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying, but with the twist that players didn't need to choose an existing occupation, they could just exist as drifters forging their own path if they wanted to.

In The Law, I have a single occupation for all characters, but I've been working on a similar system where a character might have a variety of abilities, and a set of minimum attriutes that allows them to open up training as a specialist in a specific field. As an example, a character with a good "social" attribute and skills in speaking and subterfuge might be worthy of training as an "undercover operative", while a character with a high "mental" atribute and skills in technology and repairs might be offered training as a "R&D field mechanic". All of the characters are still employed as Agents by the Department of Law, but their skills and attributes allow them to specialise in specific ways.

The thing about a game set in an interpretaton of the modern world is that trying to identify all the possible occupations and roles that people might have in society is basically futile. There are tens of thousands of occupations, and many people hold a variety of jobs in their lives. There are thousands of forms of training too. In this particular game, I've done away with the cultures that help set the tones for Walkabout and The Law; because everyone wil have a different opinion about a culture, and inevitably I'll open up a can of worms about ethnic stereotyping and caricatures if I try to pin cultural traits and skills to specific groups. In a similar way, I'm doing away with occupations, but the framework is still useful; it's basically the engine driving the spellbooks. If an occupation becomes available with minimum attributes and a range of abilities, and a spellbook becomes available in the same way, why not just make them basically analogous. Besides, within the setting this is probably how magi might refer to one another... "Oh, you're an alchemist", "Jenny is a bloodwitch", "Hanzo said he was a spirit-talker and a shadow-shinobi". Knowing what magic people perform is a good indication of what abilities and attribute levels they might have (because they'll have needed to meet certain requisites before the magic became accessible to them). Just like knowing a person's occupation tends to give you an idea of the types of skills they're likely to have (because they use those skills in their work).

This keeps the open character development system (with optional loose structure) intact.

Now I just need to pull the basic text out of the other documents, begin some formatting, and then work out where modifications are needed and how to write the additional bits that will make this game into something special.

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