Design Diary: Talent Trees from Tommorrow's Foundation

Greetings everyone! Welcome to the first in what is hopefully a series of design diaries for the Future Player's Companion series of sourcebooks, brought to you by The Game Mechanics. As one of the designers on this trilogy of PDFs, I thought I'd take a moment to give faithful readers a sneak peek at the upcoming books, as well as explain some of the design methodology that went into their creation. Today's topic will be Talent Trees culled from the pages of the Future Player's Companion Volume 1: Tommorrow's Foundation. Keep in mind that this developer diary is based on the raw, unedited turnover I produced and may change slightly from now until the time it sees publication.

When we sat down to design the FPC, we knew immediately that we were going to want to create new talent trees. In fact, during the design of d20 Future I really felt that the Characters chapter should have had some Talent Trees in them, but unfortunately we were cramped for space as it was, so I saw this as the perfect opportunity to remedy what I saw as a problem with the original source material. The d20 Modern system relies heavily on all-purpose talents for many of the classes, but while they do a good job of covering most of the basics there are some pieces of technology in science fiction settings that make these talents a little strange, or even worse, obsolete. For example, in d20 Future Mecha are treated as suits of armor that boost the character's statistics, provide bonus HP, and change the character's size category. Then you take a look at the strong hero's talents and realize that they don't really mesh well with mecha. The Melee Smash talents might be just fine for street-level fights, but in a mecha a few points of damage doesn't make much difference. So one of the things I made sure to do was take a good look at the concepts and technology presented in d20 Future and figure out new ways to make the base classes work more efficiently with them.

So when it came to writing talent trees, one of the first things I made sure to do was create an entirely new talent tree for each of the six base classes that would specifically interact with the unique technology and conepts in science fiction settings. Remember that problem we had with the strong hero talents being ineffective in mecha? Now, using talents from the Man & Machine talent tree in the FPC, a strong hero piloting a mecha will be even more deadly than before, as the mecha will now not only boost his existing strength but also the bonuses from his other talents. Say you want to create a pilot, naturally you're probably going to go for the fast hero, right? Well, now you can do that and pick talents that specifically make fast heroes into aces in the starship cockpit. Then take my personal favorite villain of all time: Darth Vader. He's got more cybernetic enhancements than you can shake a stick at and he still manages to kick Rebels from one side of the galaxy to the other. To do so he's got to be one tough guy, so the tough hero gets a new talent tree focused on taking on cybernetic enhancements and still managing to stay tough.Those are just three examples of new talent trees, but rest assured there are several more.

Future-specific talent trees aside, looking at d20 Modern's talent trees gave me another idea. As I said earlier, most of the modern talent trees work well in a science fiction setting since they are relatively general in nature. Realizing this is a strength and not a weakness, I set out to create a second talent tree for each class that was general enough to work in science fiction, modern, or past settings. This way, the FPC would be useful to both players and Gamemasters in any time period, allowing modern-only roleplayers to pick up the book and still find something useful in there. For example, as a player and GM, I love to see a party work together to achieve goals. While the aid another rules are nice, there aren't a whole lot of ways to work together to any effect. Anyone who knows me (or my bibliography, see The Noble's Handbook) knows that I love class abilities and feats that let you coordinate and synergize, providing bonuses to one another. Enter the new Instruction talent tree for charismatic heroes. Not only do they make great leaders, but charismatic heroes make excellent teachers now too; the talents in this tree allow them to grant other party members temporary skill ranks, feats, and even use of talents and class features via this talent tree. Yeah, that's right: class features. Charismatic heroes just got a whole lot more useful.

Of course, no book with talent trees would be complete without new talents for existing trees. Though most of my focus went into new trees for use with sci-fi set pieces, I also tried to include a few new talents for existing trees that could benefit from tweaking. I'll let you in on a dirty little secret: most of these new talents are actually tweaks I would have made to d20 Modern in the first place, or house rules that came up when we were playtesting d20 Future. Most are actually just improvements to modern talents and will work in almost any setting.

So there you have it, a sneak peek at the talents section of the upcoming Future Player's Companion: Tommorrow's Foundation PDF. Hopefully this will give you an idea into my thought processes while designing the book, and will whet your appetite for the book. Next design diary: Future Feats!