Quote Originally Posted by gkathellar View Post
I'm going over what we have so far in terms of rules, and it occurs to me that only two ability increases (even to two stats, as in Saga) is kind of light - that totals up to two modifiers being 1 point higher. Kind of insignificant.

Maybe four ability increases, coming in at levels 2, 4, 6 and 8? That gives characters a +2 to two modifiers, which is more respectable. It also decreases the wait on ability boosts, which gives a sense of "woo my ability score went up" sooner - a nice feeling even when there's no tangible benefit.
Point 1
So four levels at which you increase two abilities? That seems reasonable considering I can't see magic items with a "+x to y" being all that common.

If this is the ability score schema that we will be using, I think we should try to keep a similar philosophy with our magic items as we do with talents: Less increaseing numbers, more new abilities. The issue with that is that very soon all characters should be hitting the T1/T2 mark as all characters will have at least some way to solve common problems, and a group is very likely to be able to use a combination of abilities to solve less common ones.

A ballancing point could be that these new abilities are situational, such as the Vagrant's ability to control the speed of a train: functionally useless in any situation in which a train is not involved. The problem with this is that any ability that is functionally useless is dead weight.

I guess to cut a long ramble short, this ability score increase gives us more slack to run a bit more wild with talent and magic item creation, but we need to be careful to make sure that situational talents have use outside of their situation. Magic items matter less in that regard, and making them situational to the point of uselessness is less of an issue as they can be discarded.

Point 2
It will get very difficult as this project grows to stay within the forum's rules. E.g.: I think posting on the Vagrant thread is now commiting thread necromancy, however as classes are all in their initial stages of development they will need to be revisted after long hiatuses to balance them against new classes, add new talents and switch up old ones that are either out of date or just plain crap.

Would it be worth finding someone to create a wiki for the farmpunk stuff so that we have our own discussion space? A HUGE downside to that is that there is less scope for people to drop in with their own ideas, which is what this really needs. Giantitp has a great community and to go onto our own seperate site would be cutting that tie, so it may be too early for this at this stage.

Point 3
What ever happened to The Vorpal Tribble? I was convinced he'd have more to say about what we're doing to his idea. A homebrewer of his calibre would be very useful to have and I'm sure he could fill in the gaps in terms of talents with some of the classes.