Two sessions of All For One down and one 'episode' or adventure in the can. It is time to revisit the Great Character concept for Jean Baptiste de La Pointe. Unfortunately it is already apparent that my character is somewhat flawed. Jean Baptiste was designed to be a socialite/high-skill character. The first adventure proved that the All For One skill system is almost totally unforgiving in making successful skill checks when a character doesn't actually have the skill required. Despite the initial character design of spending all starting experience on skill, Jean Baptiste is still seriously lacking.
In order to make a skill check in All For One, a player rolls a number of dice equal to their skill rating. Each die rolled is either a success or failure. The number of dice that are successes are counted up and compared to the difficultly assigned to the skill check. Exceeding that difficulty is a success, coming in under is a failure. If a player doesn't have the skill in question, their skill rating defaults to the associated Primary Attribute minus two. With all of Jean Baptiste's Primary Attributes being twos and threes, that means any skill check with a skill he doesn't possess starts with at best one and at worst zero dice!
Now, having read the rules several times, I knew this going in. It is possible to gain additional dice by using style points on a one for one basis. It was my plan to make up for any lack of skill in this manner. However, I quickly discovered this works once. Given our limited play time (3-4 hours) blowing through all starting style points on the first roll gives a chance to make that particular roll, but style points are not awarded fast enough to be useful again in this fashion (i.e. they won't be flowing like water which the rulebook seemed to indicate would be the case). With 30 skills in the game, odds are good that a player will have to make several skill checks with skills they do not have. Jean Baptiste started with ten skills. More than any other player, but still only one third of the total number of skills.
Fortunately, the skills are quite varied and many of them are not likely to come up as a necessary skill challenged very often. And many of them will not be something that every player will have to make. Some of them however, are skills that most if not all players will have to make. In the adventure we just finished, several of the combats required either an Athletics or Acrobatics roll. Jean Baptiste had neither and, at the time, didn't have any style points to spend making them automatic failures. Not good for a Musketeer. Also, the second part of the adventure started off in a chase with Jean Baptiste driving a carriage. Not a problem I thought, driving a carriage is a Ride skill check and I was driving because I had the most skill in Ride. The second roll however in the chase wasn't a Ride challenge, it was a Survival Check! The road forked and navigation falls under Survival, a check was needed to take the correct fork in the road. Despite having lived in Paris for nine years according to his established background, it appears the Jean Baptiste (mechanically anyway) has no clue how to get around in the city because he doesn't have any ranks in Survival. While that's an stretch, clearly Jean Baptiste knows how to get to places he's already been, but without Survival, in a pinch he cannot figure out where he is or where he is heading.
So, right off the bat, Jean Baptiste has proven flawed. The GM awarded a full fifteen experience points after the adventure for character improvement and indicated that this would be the norm. Also a departure from the indications in the rule book where three to five was recommended. While this made my original plan of banking two points to help with my first planned character improvement, the Talent Parry, totally obsolete, it definitely would help with correcting the flaws I see in Jean Baptiste. There are two ways in which I could about correcting these flaws.
The first is by utilizing a Talent I thought about during Character Creation, Jack of all Trades. This Talent eliminates the negative two penalty for using a skill you are not trained in. It also gives you access to all of the specialty skills that cannot be used at all, unless you are trained in them, by letting you use them at a negative two penalty. While this is a Talent that makes a great deal of sense for what type of character I wanted Jean Baptiste to be, I shied away from it during character creation because it's a feat/talent available in a lot of systems that I have used often in Min/Max builds. Looking back, that may have been a mistake on my part. At the moment, I cannot purchase that Talent for Jean Baptiste because, while I have the experience points to buy it (fifteen being the requirement for a new Talent) I don't have the prerequisite of a three intelligence stat met. I could boost Jean Baptiste's intelligence to three (again, fifteen being the requirement for that, new score times five) with his current experience, go through one more adventure with the skill flaws I see and buy Jack of all Trades after the next experience award. Doing so would however, in my mind anyway, kind of waste all the starting experience I spent at Character Creation on skills. I could also petition the GM for a retcon (thanks to my brother there is precedence for retcons in our games) and switch out Jean Baptiste's purchased skills and intelligence stat and buy Jack of all Trades with starting experience points, then use the awarded experience to buy it again (the Talent can be purchased up to three times, each after the first giving a plus one bonus) which would put him right where I wanted him to be at this point.
The second method would be spending all of the awarded experience points and one of my banked points to purchase eight new skills at level one (two points each to improve a skill from zero to one and no more than a one point increase at a time by rule). By using this method, I would go from ten of thirty skills to eighteen of thirty skills with most of the ones Jean Baptiste not being trained in being the less often used or obscured skills. I say that now, but just you watch, in the next adventure we will have to fire cannons and I'll be sitting there going, "yup, ten years as a French Army officer and I've got no idea how to fire a cannon because I'm not trained in Gunnery". This method does however put him very close to what I imaged him to be and doesn't require wasting his starting experience points or asking for a retcon and being teased by my brother for doing so.
At this point I've done up a version of Jean Baptiste using the second method. I plan to also make up a retcon version for comparison. After our post game web hangout next Monday where we discuss the game, I will make a choice on where to go from here. The retcon clearly needs GM approval and that may require some lobbying, but in truth, he reads this Blog and the whole thing is already laid out. And truth be told, without seeing a copy of a retcon version, I'm not unhappy with the second method except it's kind of sort of the long way around to do what I didn't do because I was trying too hard to stay away from Min/Maxing. In either case, the object, as all ways is the Great Character, so my decision will be based upon whichever method brings me closer to that.
I think that the entire issue actually has to do with perception. I based my perception on what Jean Baptiste was and will be on the background created for him. We didn't want to start off as newly recruited Musketeers. So Jean Baptiste is a man of 19 plus years experience. While only 36 years of age, which is still fairly young by modern standards, in 1636 France, he'd be middle-aged and at the peak of his professional career. Joining the Army at age 17 and spending ten years as a military officer then nine years as a Musketeer it was easy to picture him as a contemporary of Athos, Porthos and Aramis. Unfortunately, while we decided that the characters wouldn't be newly recruited Musketeers, the game system for creating characters is designed for beginning characters who have room to grow. It wasn't possible to roll up the character using the rules and make him actually fit the background as a man with 19 plus years of experience. When it's all said and done, despite what we planned on, creating established Musketeers, we were still rolling up the equivalent of first level characters. I lost track of that and so my character didn't meet my perception of him.
Until next time... Keep Rolling My Friends.
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