Multiple Arcane Backgrounds
 

OK, folks, a question for the Community...

Which Settings would use multiple Arcane Backgrounds?

Right now, we know Rifts could use it, but we aren't doing an Official release of that like we did for the Companion books.

But I need to know how many other Settings would use this as a gauge for how much demand there is.

The biggest issue is the resource trackers. The current set up has one to track the max points, and one to track the used points. If we go down this road, it'll have to be refactored to require each Arcane Background to have their own set. This means that creating Arcane Backgrounds would require a few more steps. And adding a couple of more tabs to the Editor.

This is not a minor thing, folks. The possible side effects include forcing all Settings files using Arcane Backgrounds to be edited. I would hope that it would not change so much that we had to go down that road, but it's an outside possibility.

So, chime in, and let us know your thoughts.

I'm pretty sure Beasts and Barbarians does.

Perhaps SW Mutant Chronicles with the Art and the Dark Symmetry.


Salcor

OK, folks, I am not hearing a serious need, here.... Is it really just those two? Really?

There is also the Fantasy Companion's racial ability to have a power and it's own PP pool.

I know this i would use in my personal game since I have two races with on power each and would love to not just slap it on a text field/label.

While I've yet to personally run into a need for multiple ABs on a single character, I would agree with jfrazierjr that I have run into plenty of instances to have a need for multiple PP pools, usually for separate powers.

Could you expound on this being a house rule(as some of my wants are) or official setting things? I do not own but a few settings and those are all fantasy(Lankhmar which I just purchased, Hellfrost, and Shaintar) so I don't know(or care honestly) about all of the other genres setting rules other than mere curiosity. What context would preclude needing multiple backgrounds but require separate PP pools? The only thing I can generally think about is something like I mentioned in my first statement for the Fantasy Companion's Race point buy power option. Is it similar to that context?

Yeah, basically. I think the last time I was working with it was for a homebrew conversion of AD&D 4E characters (we tried 4E and after many months decided we just couldn't stand it and we'd just convert the darned thing to Savage Worlds instead). Definitely the Drow ability to get spells with a separate PP was a big thing, so that's very much a Fantasy Companion style method for a Race. However magic items, also, often track their own pool of PPs which it doesn't appear HL currently has any trackers for. Things like that.

That's functionally what my game is. Converting from D&D 4e(which I extremely liked myself, thought there were some things I did not.) and there are a number of races which my players have with racial powers so that's one of the critical things for me in terms of trying to shoehorn it into the current base Savage Worlds.

Well, on the separate power bit....

That's not multiple Arcane Backgrounds. Those specifically do not grant the Arcane background Edge. And the Arcane Background is what those resources are attached to. In order to have each power with it's own pool would require a complete re-write of the Arcane Background system. And for only that one thing.

I'm afraid that there is little chance of getting full-blown support for that. It would be HUGELY difficult to set up each power with it's own separate trackable resource pool. Because this is Savage Worlds, not D&D. We're set up differently.

This is one of those places where the fact that we have to support so many different flavors hurts us. Pathfinder/D&D/D20 uses one rule set, and one Setting. We have to be much more flexible. Which means there are levels of detail we simply can't support. It's why we don't support Skill Specialization.

Now, we are looking at a way to allow a Secondary Arcane Background. But only two. We can't afford to re-write the entire system to support the separate powers. It's like Skill Specialization, where it takes a basic concept and spins it on its ear. We're flexible, just not quite that flexible.

I think SeeleyOne mentioned others in the past, but he hasn't been on in a while; my guess would be most of them are at the fantasy end of SW, and I'm not terribly familiar when the wind blows from that direction.

I don't know about Zarlor's use case, but at least for my personal one, my thought process was:

Choose race
Race Bootstraps a new Arcane Background
AB bootstraps one or more powers(which share a singular PP point separate from the "normal" picked AB PP pool. )

If two Arcane Backgrounds were allowed would that use case not work? I personally have no requirement for for multiple individual powers, each with their own Power Point pool. If that's what you or others thought I was talking about, I apologize... I suck at written communication(I suck at verbal also, but that's a different story).

CC, it seems to me we just need a module to simply allow a tracker in the system, something that can increment or decrement like any other point tracker, that can then just be bootstrapped onto things so the tracker gets created. Admittedly I'm nowhere near handling anything in HL like that, but in most programming stuff it seems a pretty basic process. Presumably the hardest part would be just adding that tracker to the "In Play" tab so it can then be used by the player. Or am I completely off-base with how that would be done? That would add some flexibility in general for anything you wanted a tracker for, too, not just PPs. It doesn't have to mechanically do anything beyond hold some number that you can hit the arrows for to go up and down and maybe have a tag for the name of the tracker so you can define what it's tracking, I'd guess.

We're still looking at this, but it won't be in the next release. We didn't want to hold up the release for it.

What we're looking at is a way to add a "Secondary" Arcane Background, with a way to designate which selected Powers fall under the Secondary AB... That allows us to create only one more Resource tracker, and not require a new set of resources for each AB - which would have required a fairly serious re-write in both Core and Setting files.

That definitely sounds like it would work for the Rifts Mystic. Thanks CC for all that you do!