Garahs said:
I'm not sure why circuit/capacity is important for a story outside above, below, average, and unusual, but sure I'll use Daniel's generator....
I'm not even sure what I would do with that for spells, though I guess I could go as a Final Fantasy style red mage and toss heals and nukes. I guess I could make a scalding attack. If I was really vicious, maybe a hydrogen bomb of some kind, though I'd pretty sure that would be very dangerous to experiment with. I think I have about average units?
It's not
really important; I've already said I'll be playing my cards tighter to my chest in-story and only vaguely referring to people relative to some poorly defined average.
But, for Circuit parameters (and Elements too actually), I want to have a pretty clear idea of what the distribution curve looks like, so that at the very least, my vague references are internally consistant.
I already had Ilya say that nuclear alchemy is, like, stupid hard for the results it produces.
As for Garahs personally! Off the top of my head, things that occurred to me immediately:
Water + Fire = Steam / Ice => Thermal engines!
Water + Ether = Mana potions
The "evaporation rate" might be pretty crap so they might lose like 20%/hour or something at first, but with guts and practice, you could become a special kind of Crafting player I haven't featured yet...?
Fire + Ether = Kitsunebi, or Foxfire...?
Well, that's off the top of my head.
What about Reinforcement and Alteration?
Nephirin said:
Does he do any really major projection before opening his circuits?
Yeah, there was a space-heater in his shed, and the magical duplicate he made like three years ago; Rin was like "what the hell is this?" when she found it.
Circuit Parameter Generation
I fixed the 1-11 thing; like HH guessed, that was a typo, it was supposed to be 2-12. I just used the LIST tag and didn't think about it.
gwonbush said:
Daniel's generation system tends too high, especially in quality. By this system, quantity averages out at about 24 circuits, while the average magus is 20, so I'd suggest dropping a die down to 5d6 or keeping it at 6d6 but dropping the roll another die on 6s.
As for quality, note that Rin the super amazing magus from a strong line has a max output of 1000 with 100 potential circuits (including crest) to channel through. This means a quality of 10 units a circuit. I'd say 2d6 (no rerolling 6s) or 3d4 would make a much more accurate number.
I agree that 5d6 is a better fit. I ran a spreadsheet that rolled up 250 characters either way, also that rerolled on 5s and 6s for both (I just made number/size/reroll inputs to an excel VBA function).
Results:
Number of Dice______5_________5_________6_________6
Reroll on___________5+________6_________5+________6
MAX_________________68________50________84________53
AVERAGE_____________26.7______20.9______31.4______24.8
MEDIAN______________26________19.5______30________24
MODE________________26________15________31________24
90% MEAN____________26________19.5______29.7______23.6
As for the "quality" thing, Shirou only had about 20-30 units when he had a few Circuits open and he was working them really hard.
Projection, at five units, can't be too expensive for Emiya Shirou, age nine, using exactly one crap-quality temporary, artificial Circuit.
I don't necessarily buy that Rin is a super-amazing magus. I'll stick her a standard deviation (maybe two) above average for Circuit Quality, but in addition to the Average One thing...?
Well, maybe there's a positive correlation between Circuit Count and Number of Elements, but that's more complicated then I necessarily want this model to be.
Element Generator
Valint said:
I don't really have a handle on what the actual elemental distribution is in canon. My assumption was that having a single elemental affinity would be overwhelmingly the default, with two elements being outside the norm but still somewhat common, and anything beyond that being worthy of note. I'm not sure I have any basis for that assumption, however.
Of the five magi that explicitly have their elements named, two are Rare, and the rest are capable of at least two.
Shirou: Sword (possibly changed by Avalon)
Sakura: Imaginary Numbers (Zouken also installed Water in her)
Rin: Average One
Kiritsugu: Fire and Earth
Kayneth: Water and Air
Tokiomi also used (only) Fire magic, but then again, he spent Fate Zero doing nothing until he got ganked; the closest he ever came to "fighting" was sitting around with Gilgamesh, or maybe slapping down Kariya.
So this is a terrible sample size, but I guess it indicates that Rare aren't, like,
impossibly rare, and also that having multiple Elements might actually be more common than one Element; although the median is still probably like two or three.
Other Element Gen systems...
1) My first thought was, like, roll 5d3, one for each of the Five Elements, and if you get a three, then you have that Element.
Maybe flip a coin for East/West.
But, what if you don't roll any threes? That would be (2/3)^5 = 13.2% probability; 1 Element would be, (1/3) * (2/3)^4 = 4.4%, and would go down from there, until Average Ones are (1/3)^5 = 0.4% probability.
So that was even farther from distribution of Elements I was initially thinking about in the population.
If you flip it around (2/3= "have Element"), then it means "Average One" is the most common specific Elemental combo. Make it an even heat (1/2 = "have Element") then all specific combinations are equally likely.
I really
liked that approach, but fundamentally, the distribution just won't work the way I want it to.
So then maybe...
Roll 1d6.
- Fire
- Earth
- Water
- Air / Wood
- Ether / Metal
- Rare
Reroll on anything other than 6.
If it's something different (except 6), add that to your list of Elements.
If it's something you already have (or Rare), stop rolling. Your list is complete.
I feel like this is a little better, although the probability of a Rare might be higher than people expect.
If I throw away the constraint of a "dice that actually exist", then roll 1d11:
- Fire (West)
- Earth (West)
- Water (West)
- Air
- Ether
- Fire (East)
- Earth (East)
- Water (East)
- Wood
- Metal
- Rare
Then, on non-rare, roll 1d5 for the rest of your elements, or a 1d6 with a "nothing" result, if you want to increase the rarity of multi-elements. (Or even a 1d7 with two "do not pass Go" results, I suppose).
I feel like that's the most elegant in terms of design... except for the part where you need to roll a dice that doesn't exist (2d6 wouldn't work out, obviously, because each value has a different probability).
So that's that.
I'm also interested in seeing someone build with Elements of:
1) Air or Ether
2) Wood or Metal
That is to say, someone with "mixed" Elements that's, like, heterozygous for Eastern/Western Elements; a mutant like that would be a good candidate for "Ilya's Pokemon".
Basically, in the end, just do whatever you want.
But leaving all that aside:
Don't think, feel
Prince Charon said:
Due to reading comments about the [Element Generating System], I'm going to skip that until daniel_gudman says whether he's changing that, and if so, to what.
To my thinking, this is like, facing exactly backwards.
This isn't, like, a way to generate a roll up a DnD character, this is a springboard to start from and work
towards something. Like, if you start getting an image in your head, and the numbers don't match the image,
change the numbers, not the image.
Or from another direction, just use chargen as a springboard to create a fictional character.
If I was concerned with something like "game balance for a table-top RPG" or whatever, then I'd start from a point-buy system and work from there; then something like random chargen would reel out a "random package" with an associated point-cost that you could massage to match how many of your character points you wanted to sink into "magical traits" or whatever.
So I might even encourage you to roll up your elements/circuits more than once and pick the one you think is viscerally "closest to
you", rather than roll up once...?
Example Character
Here, I'll roll up
Captain Eyeballs (from the bottom of the linked post). This character is probably going to show up.
5d6 Circuits (reroll on 6): 19
5d6 Quality (reroll on 6): 15
(I don't know what the specific dice where because I just grabbed the top two rows from the matching CHARDICE column mentioned above).
Total Capacity: 304
Elements:
Drachsor style:
2d6 = 12 => Average One
1d6 = 5 => Eastern
my first pass:
2d6 = 6 => One Western Element
1d6 = 1 => Fire
zeroth pass (independent rolls):
1d2 = 1 => Eastern
1d3 = 2 => Fire = No
1d3 = 1 => Earth = No
1d3 = 3 => Water = Yes
1d3 = 3 => Wood = Yes
1d3 = 3 => Metal= Yes
my second pass (1d11 + 1d6 thing):
1d11 = 1 => Fire (West)
1d6 = 1 => Fire (again) (no more rolls)
So I guess that converges on either only Fire (Western), or having many Eastern Elements?
Well, as someone built form the concept "getting scouted by Ilya", they might have a Rare Element; Fire => Energy + eye-related => Element = "Light" or something?
Maybe make it the (relatively common) "Holy", but that's got a little too much baggage.
Other parameters...
Gender:
M/F? = Female
Ah, wait, if it's eyeball-related, let's make her a
tetrachromat?
Yeah, and if we want to drive towards that being, like, her
defining feature, then we take away every other possible thing that distinguishes her: mediocre at sports, not particularly smart nor inclined towards academics, no remarkable friendships, nothing like that; we can feed that into her being "someone that only watches", a wall-flower, and tie her personality into her magecraft direction. Yeah, and that overlaps with her "below average but not remarkable" numbers for her Circuits.
Okay, that's a pretty good foundation for her personality... since I already did that "insecurity" thing with Silica, we'll make her preversely proud of her mediocrity, someone that brags about being a "natural C student" with hobbies like "observing more interesting people"; if we're going to have her develop unique magecraft of her own volition, in that sense, she should have remarkable self-confidence to hare off into the woods and become a weird ultra-specialist?
Plus if she's a tetrachormat, the colors in SAO might look strangely washed-out to her, like they're too flat, because VR is used to feeding information to a normal human eyeball that sees three colors; so dealing with that annoyance would be her first push, recovering that becomes her first spell:
Alteration Specialization: 4th Color
Adds an additional band of color-sensitivity to vision, like installing additional cone-cells in the eyeball. At higher levels, multiple wavelengths, or wavelengths beyond the normal visible spectrum, can be added. (Eg, infrared-vision, ultraviolet-vision, and further either way).
...with metal element, maybe braching out to cone-cells with tiny grains of metal that react to magnetic fields? Ducks can do it.
Wood element => photosynthesis => conversion of light into prana? Probably, would get sealed as a heresy, because it's "not really vision magecraft".
Well, giving her "lots of Elements" is too far away.
Without Ether, getting prana-vision would probably be somewhat difficult, so she might resent Kirito for that; also, be tempted to steal a certain spell from the Paladins (she's too prideful to buy it, but not prideful enough to steal it? Ah, another troublesome heroine).
...Maybe I'll give her a "Rare Element", but she doesn't even know, because she never did the Element ID quest in the first place? If she's still focused on her Alteration magecraft, she might not even try. But if she did, then she might "seal" her element because she's not appropriate as a Protagonist. ...But cutting off her own chances like that, that might be loading her up with too much mental baggage that she would actively deny that?
High-def vision is the most straight-forward use of vision Reinforcement.
[Night Vision] is the example of a "skill that has been replaced with magecraft" so she can chase after that literally, huh?
Polarized light perception is relatively common in the animal world, so that's a given, although I'm not sure what it does for you.
Other spells....
Fake Second Eye
Closing an eye and attaching its vision to a talisman (much like Hexadecimal did on the Slime Floor). However, this girl would consider it an incomplete solution from two directions:
1) Shutting off "natural" vision
2) Needing the talisman
To address (1), training herself to accept visual input from 3+ eyes sounds like the obvious, just-the-right-amount-of-crazy solution.
As for (2), that just requires going to straight-up clairvoyance, although that might be more difficult than she expects.
Of course, creating familiars that exist only to be remote cameras is another natural use, and just as obviously from point (1) right up there, she'll train herself to accept "two (or more) viewpoints".
Those familiars could also "naturally" have that enhanced-type vision that can see in the dark and also x-rays and stuff, so we're starting to push her towards something like, "local omniscience" as an endstate...?
So someone that's totally gangbusters at mapping and spying, but not all that great at fighting? Someone who Scouts on the Front Line or Midlines, but doesn't ever participate in Boss Fights.
Well, in conclusion, looking at what I've gotten developed here, my point is, just use the random-trait generator to come up with stuff to work with, because speaking selfishly, the bald numbers are like the least interesting part of your post; if it's just rolling the numbers, I can do that another 250 times just by clicking F9 in my excel spreadsheet.
. Asking Cardinal questions is sufficiently easier than asking Akasha questions that I can see him figuring out such a divinatory Mystery by the endgame, and he'd have approximations by the midway point. Pointless in combat, but either he would seek out Argo or Argo would seek out him, because together they would be a rather terrifying intelligence team.