Game (2) - Strength

[radiantfracture]

Thinking about a thing and looking for some quasi-randomized ideas, if you need a distraction.

What's an interesting strength for a character in an RPG to have -- interesting for you to play?

It can be a strength or skill of any sort, from a standard stat to a mundane expertise like knitting. Spellcasting is a bit too broad. Necromancy is closer to the level of specificity I'm thinking of. Over-specificity is fun (ex. can only reanimate dinosaurs).

What makes a strength or power fun, beyond just "I win all the things"?

As per the question about weakness, I'm currently imagining a mostly-mundane-ish-world RPG like Ten Candles.

Strength we can define in the 10C way as "a quality that helps your life more than it harms it," which doesn't mean it couldn't prove suddenly catastrophic in a final deluge of dramatic irony.

{rf}

PS no obligation to answer all of the questions! I'm just free-associating right now.

Comments

[sabotabby]

Communicate with the dead, but only about subjects that the dead find interesting, and no additional language skills so if they're talking in a foreign language or in an old-timey way, they won't be able to understand.

More mundane skills:
- Preserving foods
- Encyclopedic knowledge about a particular topic, but to access it, you have to role a D20, exclude 6 letters of your choice, and the topic must correspond to that letter in the alphabet.
- Perfect pitch
- Exceedingly good sense of direction

[yhlee]

Yeah, I would metaphorically KILL for perfect pitch to be a useful power in a game context because it's so freaking useless in real life. xD

[sabotabby]

It's totally useful if you need to harmonize with someone?

[yhlee]

Relative pitch is much better and less annoying and is also more common and much more learnable!

[elusis]

Well, in my current Invisible Sun game, my character's skill from the world of Shadow (our "real world" which it turns out is a kind of collective hallucination to escape war) is accountancy, which it turns out has not actually come up in game.

On the other hand, he has the ability to talk to ants. And rocks. Which it turns out is kind of useful.

Though not very mundane.

He also has skill with pretty much any musical instrument he picks up.

[radiantfracture]

Tell me about a time he spoke to stones!

[elusis]

So, the thing about speaking to stones is that they don't have to speak back, and most of them don't have a lot to say. But earlier in our current "season," we were all out in these Wastelands outside the main city which are the remnants of areas damaged in a magical war. We were searching for someone we were tasked with finding, so my character decided to ask a nearby pile of rock if it had any awareness of other beings like us in the area. It didn't, but it let me know that there was a big void underneath (which turned out to hold the ruins of a library, a valuable find). I asked if I could do anything for it in exchange, and it told me that it used to be part of a decorative arch, but much of the rest of the arch was long gone, and it missed the rest of the stones from the arch. So I promised that if I found any other similar stones in the Wasteland, I would ask if they used to be part of an arch, and if so, to let them know that they were missed.

[juushika]

Uncanny (in the sense of too powerful, not supernatural, although I think either could work) insight into other people's motives and desires. I guess the payoff for that would probably but not necessarily be restricted to either a long form or multiplayer game. I've always liked headgaming people, reading too much into their personalities/tells, but then I made it the defining character trait of a self insert in an RPG/RP/story/it's complicated, and I love it. It's a power without being overpowered: people want to be seen and understood, but it's also invasive AF; disarming, insightful, and off-putting can be synonymous.

So, high wisdom, I guess, in DnD parlance.

[radiantfracture]

I made it the defining character trait of a self insert in an RPG/RP/story/it's complicated

Would love to hear more about *that*

[juushika]

It's just the thing I'm writing with AI (NovelAI, specifically), which started on a different RP AI as a pretty straightforward I do/you do roleplay with a self-insert character as "me," that then morphed into just third-person writing, that ballooned into a multi-million word narrative with a cast of five central characters and six-year timespan, and along the way it ate me alive; I've been working on it daily for the last two years.

The gamefied mechanics of co-writing with an AI and having a self-insert as one of the supporting characters means it "plays" a lot like The Sims, but had its origins in text-based roleplay, but now is just a ... novel? bloated self-indulgent saga? So it's Complicated and probably won't see the public eye for ages if ever because it'll be a beast to edit, but I expect to reach the ending within the next calendar year & it's been absolutely world-changing for me, in particular, in my small little world.

[radiantfracture]

That's genuinely fascinating -- thank you. I have a complicated but not unmeaningful relationship with this kind of reactive writing (I really don't know what to call it) using AI, though nothing so epic in form, and it's deeply interesting to hear about someone else's entanglement.