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Rev03: Professions
By Corvus | June 5, 2009
This post is the sixth in an ongoing series explaining the basics of Rev03, the RPG system underlying the HoneyComb Engine. We’re starting with the individual elements of the Life Wheel.
Rather than classes, which I view as restriction-focused design choice, Rev03 uses Professions. Professions are simply groups of specialties, or skills, for which the character receives a bonus.
It’s up to the storytellers involved how often characters earn tokens for professional bonuses and there’s no reason the rate can’t be changed based upon the story being told. In the Buffy-inspired campaign I’m running for example, characters are earning a token for every nine years of their life. Every twelve years might be a better choice for other storyworlds, or even every eighteen years. You can also earn them irrespective of age, but only as the narrative supports it, as I’m choosing to do with the Three Ladies campaign.
Regardless of how often they are earned, each of the three profession slots can hold up to three bonus tokens. Each token reduces the amount of Will the character needs to exert when performing an action that is a professional specialty.
There are various ways of dealing with specialties, from free-form to more rigidly structured. The least structured method is to allow a storyteller to argue for the inclusion of any given action in their existing professions. In other words, if a storyteller argues that menacing a bank teller would be something that fell under the purview of their character’s Bank Robber profession, and if the other storytellers agree, Menace becomes a specialty of that profession. This can be done without limit, meaning that professions are a catch-all category that are limited only by the storytellers’ imaginations. This approach alters the rules of Renown a bit, lessoning the benefit of professional specialties, which I’ll discuss in a later post.
Alternately, a storyteller can choose up to nine set specialties for each profession. This can be a hodgepodge assembly of assorted skills, as long as the storytellers involved agree that they are profession-appropriate. While there are Renown advantages to randomly choosing skills to specialize in, they are not as great as the third method.
The third method allows the storyteller to choose specialties that align to each of the Influences. In other words, the storyteller would be limited to picking one specialty that corresponds to each influence. This is more limiting and forces the storyteller to choose carefully between skills when building their characters. For example, as both lockpicking and marksmen are skills that rely upon the Sleight influence, a storyteller may only pick one of them as a Highwayman specialty. However, as Sleight is an influence fed by Wit and Agility, the storyteller may opt to assign lockpicking to the specialty under the Mind or Body influence. These three specialty slots are secondary skill slots that are not able to receives as large of a Renown bonus as the six primary specialties that align to the six main influences. While this latter method of building out a profession requires more thought, it results in a better-rounded skill set and potentially has higher Renown bonuses than the previous methods.
There are two other professions types that and operate under slightly different rules. These professions are Mage Crafting and Psionics. Both are undergoing testing and revision, but I’ll cover them in the next post.
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