Mon/Fri - Hey, Look At This, River and Road Stuff

I can do the thing, in a sense!

This was a busy week in areas that happened to be me being a domestic partner, and less of me being a writer/gamedev. This is what happens when you're trying to replace a car. However! I refuse to leave you hanging when I actually have momentum on a project. So today, I will do the thing I promised to, which is introduce you to The Ways of The River and the Road, R&R's equivalent of a class system. This is going to be less an introduction to the rules, and more actually the idea driving this system.

The Jist

BASIC has a numerical theme of 5 in it- 5 Attributes, 5 levels possible in each, and in the case of The River and The Road, 5 playable Peoples and 5 Ways. Obviously, there's room to expand on that, but for now, we'll keep things simple, and stick with the whole lot of 5s going on.

With 5 Attributes and 5 Ways, that means the idea here is to have an array of 5 wide-area professions, 5 ways to specifically lean into a gameplay turn. Some people like to kick doors and then kick whatever's on the other side of the door- no problem here, have your Way that makes it easier to crash and bash. Other folks like to take more nuanced approaches, either poking around in a scene, or engaging with NPCs via the Narrator, sussing out the solutions to obstacles the party is facing. That's also fine, because the Instinct and Cunning Ways let you do that instead. The thing is, this isn't meant to be something that locks you into a specific one way of playing, but rather aids you in doing that specific thing. The entire idea of BASIC is to have a system that's assists you, rather than restricts you, a system that has provisions for having a more fun and permissive GM at the center of the experience. You want to bash heads in close, you can do that. Doesn't mean you're stuck being a barbarian, because you can be instead a very well-read brute.

The Warrior

Body

Individuals possessing not merely physical strength, but the focus, nerve and emotional hardiness to bring it to bear. So in other words, if your general solution to a challenge that has a heartbeat is to walk up to it and then hit it as hard as you can, with the confidence that you did in fact hit it really hard, hello, hi, this is probably the Way for you. The ideas in play with The Warrior is not something that's specifically going to lock you into a big clanking suit or armour, but something that could benefit from that if you wanted it to be. Instead, travelling the Way of the Warrior equips your character with a martial focus and weaponized might, individuals that benefit from the ability to better control close-in combat not by dodging and shifting around their opponents, but rather bulling them around and punishing lighter hostiles for trying to stand and bang. You can wear armour if you want, but instead going with a cool jacket is something you can benefit from as well. After all, Warriors know, sometimes you don't always find the fight, sometimes it finds you, and you don't have your stuff ready. They, however, are always ready, and this Way has ways of reflecting this.

The Freelancer

Agility

You aren't a thief, or a rogue. You can be, but that doesn't necessarily that's what you'd put on your resume. Really, that's more something that, if you do engage in it, it's really more of an act of opportunity, and also want. Really, in the Converged Worlds, people who have sure feet and can move are in demand, either on the River or the Road, with sea-legs or long distance ones, so they wind up doing a lot of stuff. Which is, incidentally, sometimes crime. So in other words, the Freelancer is a Way that has synergy with people who like to play as movers and shakers, who can be swashbuckling fighters that use graceful Agility-linked weapons in combat, or distraction-causing troublemakers that get into places they shouldn't be, or folks who slink unseen through doors that were locked a second ago, or even just folks who would like to point out that they flip and tumble everywhere, and can they get a bonus from doing a cool roundoff as part of that last action? That's why it's called Freelancer- you can get a lot of different jobs done when you're enough of a mover and a shaker.

The Outlander

Senses

Individuals not simply graced with strong senses, but the ability to discern the details in what they're being shown through them. Perhaps not a back country nomad, but someone who is in their own little world, composed of analyzing the details of the world around it, possibly more concerned with the minute bits, rather than the stuff that's right in front of them. Folks who travel the Way of the Outlander are attuned to their surrounding reality, with the surface level in full focus, the subtle layers beneath leaving hints everywhere for them to find. They are extremely adept at both navigating unknown wilds and reading unknown people, able to pick up at threats in hidden thorns in the underbrush, or the subtle twitching in someone's otherwise smiling eyes. In a fight, they tend towards the use of weapons that are precise, to bring their personal precision to bear. This means that out of all the Ways, they have a natural inclination towards stuff that shoots. That doesn't mean you're going to be behind a bow every single fight if you don't want to be. It just means that if you're using a rapier or a spear, that point is probably going to be hitting exactly where you're aiming it.

The Seer

Instinct

Instinct is about being connected to your surrounding environment in a subtle level, your sixth sense and the way it tweaks your other senses, tells you "hey, something's there, you might not be able to perceive it, but see how everything else around it seems off?" This is a naturalistic sort of connection to the world, hardly scientific, but then again, the Converged Worlds are a place of highly compromised science, and magic that tends to be weirdly permissive. Travelling the Way of the Seer means embracing this strange, part tenuous, part certain connection to the world, and then harnessing it to do work. Seers are individuals who, as part of their gameplay, can turn to a wall and ask it "seen anything interesting lately?" and the Narrator has to respond with something. This doesn't mean the wall has to talk back- it can though, because the Seer also trends toward magic use -but it can mean your odd question asked to your odd perception results in you noticing an odd detail. This is another feature of the Way of the Seer- if you like to play a weirdo in RPGs, here you go, the weirdo-aspects are baked in. You can keep them to yourselves if you want, or not- assist, not restrict!

The Academic

Cunning

Cunning is about reading the laws and influences of the world around you, be they natural, scientific, social, or even artistic ones, and then developing a plan based off what is known about a situation, rather than what is only perceived. So it would follow that the Way that focuses on Cunning, The Academic, is a Way that focuses on taking the brainy, and oftentimes social approach to dealing with obstacles in the party's path. An Academic doesn't specifically have to be some sort of spellcaster, though they can be easily, the Way does lean toward it. But being an Academic is also about being resourceful and asking around, about leveraging knowledge, experience and an eye for clues into problem solving. There is no library too grand that an Academic can get lost in, at least not of their own want to. When engaging in diplomacy, which can be extremely useful in situations where the arrows are already drawn back and on fire, an Academic has tools to be more persuasive, really pitch their case to people who very much otherwise wouldn't be interested. You don't have to always be out-thinking everyone, but for an Academic, it can be the easy option.

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The task for this week- turn what I've shown here into something that's actually playable. Which is at this point, gonna be pretty easy, so I'll see what else I can do on top of that. See you then!

-G