Olothontor wrote:The GM's job in this is a little bit ridiculous and over-burdened; he's got a ton of bookkeeping to do, and dice-rolls for practically everything on the list.
If there's any way to lessen the burden, I'd suggest it mightily. Nobody else is ever going to successfully run a game of this without giving themselves a headache every time they sit down to post a round.
I'd suggest allocating a little bit of the bookkeeping to each player, and having THEM make some of the rolls. The GM would still handle all of the world events (to include combat, which I agree also needs to be reworked slightly), but the players could, say, roll for their own traps and post that information with their own turns.
I agree with you that the system as it is now is a heavy burden on the GM. Three d6 for each player each turn/day allone is hard enough when there are more than just a few players. As if this wasn't enough, he has to keep track of the inventory of every player.
But giving too much power into the hands of players opens opportunities for cheating. "Woot, for today I rolled only 6es! Again! Lucky me!" And that would very soon kill the game.
It's the old conflict in PRG: Freedom vs. playability.
The less rules exist the more freedom the players have in their actions but the heavier is the burden on the GM.
And if you want to let the players do more in their own, you have to give them a very tight set of rules to keep things balanced. If players got the power to create new elements in the game - let's take a steam engine for example - and make up his own set of rules for them, you an bet that steam engines are the solution to everthing and the next day the player has his own army of steam driven soldier clanks.
The hell, we even can't agree how often a simple spike trap for animals can be used.
One solution would be to come up with some basic guidelines instead of formulating a rule for every if and when - just like in the Brikwars rules, where the stats of every thing on the field is derived by the same set of formulas.
Gathering resources is a fundamental part of the game. And there are different means to do so for every kind of resource. To produce food, you can hunt or trap wild animals, gather wild plants, but you can also set up a farm and grow crops and breed cattle. The later ones definitely have advantages to the former ones, otherwise we would still live in the woods. How do we reflect that in the rules? Every bit of resource invested in the method of production has to pay off in the long run - or at last have the chance to do so.
A hunters stand is build in one action and needs some wood and it should simplify the hunt. After some days the hunter schould have gathered more meat than his comrade who used the primitive method.
The hard part is to come up with balanced numbers.
The simple method (unskilled) produces about 1.7 units of recource, 3.5 at a skill of 2. So for each action you use for preparations, you should be rewarded with more than 4 units of recource in average when it finally paiys off. The amount of other recources such as wood that were used for the preparations should also be considered, let's say in a ratio of 1.5.
So it is not important exactly what kind of preparations you use, but how much you invest. In that context, your HP also are a kind of recource, and reducing the probability to lose HP in a fight (i.e. while hunting) is also a bonus, preparations can achieve.
For preparations you can use
- action points
resources like wood, stone, food...
What preparations can offer:
- reduced personal risk
temporal or permanent bonus productivity
reduces the usage of region specific values (number of trees, wild animals,..)
The longer the temporal bonus lasts, the smaler is the particular bonus to each usage, but the greater it is when you sum it up.
A farm needs time to set up, but once you have tilled the fields, they produce food with a constant and reliable rate as long as you attend to them. Maybe the farm doesn't produce much more than a successfull hunt, but you don't get hurt and your prey will not die out as wild animals do when you hunt to often.
I'ds like to discuss the "trapping" skill on this background. So far I wasn't too successfull with that: I spent 3 actions where solvess only used one and in the end had the same reward. Maybe if I could set up and inspect several traps simultaniously and reuse them more often, but with a smaller chance of success, things could be balanced.