So my last post asked for feedback as to what Temian should spend his points on… and y’all provided! Thanks for all your thoughts, folks.
Having weighed up all the options, I decided to focus on skills. One thing I didn’t say last time was that I particularly like to spend character points in a way that reflects the narrative – so I’ve decided to to focus on skills, either new or existing, that Temian actually used during the adventure.
So what sort of skills did he use last adventure?
- Temian spent a lot of the last adventure dealing with Demons: he fought them; eavesdropped on them; examined the remnants of their infernal ceremonies, and even uncovered the secret plotting of a Demon Prince. All this being the case, it seems appropriate to give him Hidden Lore (Demons) [1] 11. (Mechanically, it would probably be more worthwhile to spend 2 pts on this, to get it at 12, but I don’t really think his experience justifies that much knowledge yet. Maybe later! )
- Temian dealt with the Witch of Dunmoss a number of times. He also read her forbidden tome of witchy magic, and did some research to discover her weaknesses. During the adventure, he also dealt with a lot of miscellaneous low-level magic. All this sounds like Occultism to me, so let’s go ahead and raise Temian’s Occultism from [1] 11 to [2] 12. That’s another point spent!
- 4 points to go. During the last adventure, Temian did quite a bit of fighting. His Broadsword skill is currently at [4] 13, and it would be great to get it at 14, since that would raise his Parry by one, as well as making him a much more reliable fighter. And yet that would cost another 4 pts – and I’m not sure I can quite justify spending that much at this stage. Could Temian really have improved his Broadsword that much during this adventure? I don’t think so. So I think I’m going to do something very silly from a min-maxing point of view, but quite satisfying narratively: I’m going to put just one point into Broadsword – which will now be at the odd value of [5] 13. This will give him precisely no benefit in combat – yet – but does move him a step close to real improvement.
- 3 pts left. Temian also ended up trying to disarm people a lot. Despite the fact that I always say it’s a silly move, it seems as if disarming is becoming something like a go-to tactic for Temian, at least when dealing with non-monsters. I’m not sure how I got into that situation! But I think it might be fun to honor this by making it one of his as-yet-undetermined quirks: something like “When fighting human foes, likes to open by attempting a disarm”. Then I’d probably better give him the Disarming technique for Broadsword, to make him good at it. This would cost 2 pts, just to get it at 14, which is another very inefficient use of points. But still, it might be fun… Hmmm… Ok, I’ve decided to embrace the stupid here, and go for it. So let’s add Disarming (Broadsword) [2] 14. A terrible use of points? Yes! But one that fits the narrative.
- One point left. Temian spent quite a bit of time wandering through the mountains, getting lost etc. Raising either Navigation (Land) or Survival (Mountain) could be nice. Let’s make it the latter, and raise Survival (Mountain) from [1] 11 to [2] 12. That seems pretty plausible – and it ought to come in handy a lot, too.
Right! That’s 6 pts spent. None of these changes are going to make a big difference to him right away, but cumulatively, they’ll probably end up mattering. They should increase his chances of survival just a little, at least.
Being a character built for solo play,Temian is an all-rounder, which means that he has to improve a wide range of things simultaneously, rather than sinking all his points into a single specialization. So he’s not suddenly becoming awesome at anything, but these points do represent incremental advances on a wide front… Hopefully he’ll survive long enough to make that count!
Here’s the updated character sheet.
Later edit: and here’s the next post in the series, too: what should Temian spend his money on?
The Collaborative Gamer 