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The Dresden Files => DFRPG => Topic started by: Ophidimancer on November 02, 2012, 04:16:35 AM
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So I was looking over the Burglary Skill and Casing can basically be done with Investigation, Infiltration can basically be done with Stealth, leaving Lockpicking as really the only unique Trapping in this Skill. Have you guys found Burglary to be that useful or do you find that other Skills just make up for it?
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One of the PCs in my campaign is a thief, so yeah, he makes heavy use of Burglary, but otherwise, nah, it's not all that useful in most cases. It's like Survival a bit - if you're playing an outdoorsman or recon guy or mountain man, you'll have it, but in a city you probably won't see it used.
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I agree with admiralducksauce - Burglary, like Survival and a couple other skills (Drive, anyone?) is very very useful in the right situations, but it is up to the player to create a character who is likely to get into those situations, and up to the GM to give the player what he wants. As a GM, I look at a character's skills and consider that that's what that player is going to want to focus on, so I need to give him the opportunities to do so.
Personally, in a game as urban as Dresden Files, I'd take Burglary looooong before I'd take Survival.
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I agree with admiralducksauce - Burglary, like Survival and a couple other skills (Drive, anyone?) is very very useful in the right situations, but it is up to the player to create a character who is likely to get into those situations, and up to the GM to give the player what he wants. As a GM, I look at a character's skills and consider that that's what that player is going to want to focus on, so I need to give him the opportunities to do so.
Personally, in a game as urban as Dresden Files, I'd take Burglary looooong before I'd take Survival.
Agreed. Once in awhile I'll intentionally put my players in certain situations where even having 1 or 2 points in a specialty skill would make the scene much easier, as a reminder that having such a skill on the back burner is never a bad idea.
Another way to make skills like that more important is to hike up the difficulty of a roll a step or two when they try and use a different skill for it. Like if someone wants to use Investigation when Burglary would obviously be the best choice. Sort of a way of saying they can use the other skill, but the trade off is they may end up needing to use a Fate Point. It's not something I would do very often though, as it's a really transparent method.
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Another way to make skills like that more important is to hike up the difficulty of a roll a step or two when they try and use a different skill for it. Like if someone wants to use Investigation when Burglary would obviously be the best choice. Sort of a way of saying they can use the other skill, but the trade off is they may end up needing to use a Fate Point. It's not something I would do very often though, as it's a really transparent method.
I've done similar to this before, too. I don't want to just flat-out deny someone a chance to try something, especially if it's one of those edge cases where the other skill almost does fit or where you get a slight disconnect between what the player understands the skills to be and what the GM sees them as covering. Stunts are there so you CAN mix and match skill trappings, so what I do is keep the difficulty the same but require a FP (for effect) to simulate a swapping-trapping Stunt.
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People tend to ignore Burglary, in my experience. I don't think I've ever played or GMed for a character who was good at it.
I do the increased difficulty thing with Alertness and Investigation sometimes.
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Have you guys found Burglary to be that useful or do you find that other Skills just make up for it?
Any (every) skill's value depends on how relevant it is to the game - how often it get used for a meaningful effect. Guns won't be much use in a purely political game just as Burglary won't be much use if breaking in by stealth isn't an option the group chooses.
As for potential trapping duplication, that just gives you a bit of choice for character building. A professional locksmith probably has Lockpicking and not Burglary while a professional thief would swap the choice. When trappings overlap you'll often want to take one skill and a stunt instead of two skills - i.e. Burglary and Cat-Burglar instead of Lockpicking and Stealth. Neither choice is wrong, it's just a question of what fits your character.
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Personally I would probably give Burglary a Pickpocket or Sleight of Hand Trapping by default to buff it up a bit.
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Personally I would probably give Burglary a Pickpocket or Sleight of Hand Trapping by default to buff it up a bit.
I would too. My player in question has Burglary and Deceit at equal ranks, though, so it hasn't come up. :)
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I would too. My player in question has Burglary and Deceit at equal ranks, though, so it hasn't come up. :)
Oh yeah, I'd probably take away all physical type Stunts from Deceit and put them in Burglary.
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The book's split probably represents life a bit better. Historically at least thieves tended to specialize. Judging by crime stats that stays fairly true today - for that matter, pickpocketing is rare in the US.
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I'm given to understand that burglars also (have) tend(ed) to specialize even so far as the types of buildings they will target, such as one burglar or group of burglars targetting jewelry stores, while another targets banks, and yet another targets appartment buildings.
I still wouldn't demand three different skills to represent that specialization. That's the role of stunts and aspects.
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I think it'd be easier to just get rid of Burglary.
It's not really damaging to the game to have it, but...what's the point? Why bother including it?
I feel like everything it does could be done just as well with stunts.
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I think it'd be easier to just get rid of Burglary.
It's not really damaging to the game to have it, but...what's the point? Why bother including it?
I feel like everything it does could be done just as well with stunts.
So like a Doctor -> Scholarship and Demolitionist -> Craftmanship setup, but for... Thief -> Deceit? Or Thief -> Stealth?
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Burglary works good for those whose concepts demand it.
A cop should have Investigation but a second story man should have Burglary. One has been trained to investigate crimes while the other has developed a skill at committing them. If nothing else the motifs are completely different.
Richard
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So like a Doctor -> Scholarship and Demolitionist -> Craftmanship setup, but for... Thief -> Deceit? Or Thief -> Stealth?
Not sure what you mean.
I was saying that Burglary could be ditched. Hacking and lockpicking could be folded into Scholarship and Burglary, or made impossible without stunts.
Regardless, you could pick up any Burglary trapping with a stunt for Stealth or some other skill. Which would give you the same "I'm a thief, it says so on my character sheet" effect without the need for another skill.
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I'd think it'd be easier to make Burglary the apex skill to cover those things instead of having to make a couple different skills high and then spend refresh on stunts to add trappings if you wanted to play a thief-type character.
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I greatly dislike the idea of basic iconic capabilities requiring stunts.
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What I like about burglary:
When I started playing, I made all of my players tell me about their characters. One of the things which said they needed was a profession. That is, when they're not fighting monsters, what do they do?
One was borderline homeless, who was hired by various gangs/crime syndicates as security or muscle.
One was an heiress of her father's media empire who ran a blog about supernatural conspiracies.
One owned a jazz club.
One ran a diner (a Coney Island, our game's in Detroit).
One said he was a thief.
That's how he paid his bills. He was a thief. He stole and fenced goods. The burglary skill let him be pretty good at this without it being all he could do (he's also a practitioner). So he can steal, he can pickpocket (we moved the trapping in game), he can case buildings, etc. He's not good at investigating, not good at scholarship, fixing things, or even hiding. But he is good at picking locks, finding weak points in security, lifting a wallet, and getting away.
If he had to buy a ton of stunts to do this, it wouldn't be a viable character. If everything were a declaration, it wouldn't be a viable character. He couldn't use magic and steal.
So this is one of those "groups of trappings" skills that allows characters to do a bunch of fairly specialized things. It doesn't need to be as broad as Scholarship (which I think for many games is too broad) or as narrow as Fists.
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You already need a couple of skills high to be a good thief. Anybody who wants to pick pockets needs Deceit, anybody who wants to sneak needs Stealth. Alertness, Investigation, and Athletics are also really handy.
I don't think removing Burglary would make the need for stunts/multiple skills any more noticeable. Craftsmanship, Scholarship, and Investigation can easily absorb lockpicking, hacking, and casing. And many characters will only need one of those trappings, since as Umbra said thieves tend to specialize.
Especially hackers. Kinda bugs me that breaking into houses is presumed to go along with computer shenanigans. How many fictional hackers are also skilled safe-crackers?
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How many fictional hackers are also skilled safe-crackers?
How many fictional mathematicians are also skilled linguists?
Specialization is the role of stunts and aspects. Basic competency is not. And yet you would have basic competency at a substantial number of these tasks require stunts. Why?
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Specialization is the role of stunts and aspects. Basic competency is not.
Agreed!
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You already need a couple of skills high to be a good thief. Anybody who wants to pick pockets needs Deceit, anybody who wants to sneak needs Stealth. Alertness, Investigation, and Athletics are also really handy.
Also he did say they moved the Pickpocket trapping to Burglary, so no need for Deceit.
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How many fictional mathematicians are also skilled linguists?
If you count programming languages, well...
But seriously, it is a bit silly. It's just that silliness doesn't justify more silliness.
Specialization is the role of stunts and aspects. Basic competency is not. And yet you would have basic competency at a substantial number of these tasks require stunts. Why?
Which tasks are you under the impression that I would make require stunts?
PS: Adding pickpocketing, etc, to Burglary is certainly an alternative to dropping it. I just don't see the point; it seems to me that people's desire to keep it is founded more on the fact that it's there than on any real value.
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It mimics real life? Obviously not that accurately in terms of which trappings go with which skills (I haven't seen a game yet that gets that right) and the like but by limiting overall competence by having skills split up into enough categories to make it be impossible to even do everything, let alone be good at more than a little of it. It's niche protection.
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Which tasks are you under the impression that I would make require stunts?
This, among other posts by you in this thread and possibly others:
Hacking and lockpicking could be folded into Scholarship and Burglary, or made impossible without stunts.
Regardless, you could pick up any Burglary trapping with a stunt for Stealth or some other skill. Which would give you the same "I'm a thief, it says so on my character sheet" effect without the need for another skill.
(bolding added, obviously)
I could go back further into the thread to grab more examples of this suggestion by you, but I think my point is made.
One of your most prominent suggestions for how to do away with Burglary has been to require stunts to gain the lost trappings in other skills.
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That would be how you would do it RAW anyways. Also I don't see the need for getting rid of Burglary. It is a skill that builds off of itself.
CASING:
You can use Burglary as a very specialized
perception skill, specifically to assess the weaknesses
and strengths of a potential target. Here,
you try to determine the existence of unobvious
or hidden aspects using assessment.
INFILTRATION:
Given an opportunity to case an intended target
(above), you are much more prepared to infiltrate
that location. You can invoke known aspects on
the scene.
These two at least give me the impression that it is supposed to be specialized in that a police detective isn't looking for this when he is investigating or that joe schmoe isn't looking for this with his awareness. It's something thats done for a specific reason.
I don't see the point in getting rid of it.
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I always presented the use of stunts as an alternative for people who didn't want to fold the trappings into other skills. Or at least that's what I tried to do.
I don't see the point in getting rid of it.
I don't need a reason to drop a skill, I need a reason to keep one.
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I always presented the use of stunts as an alternative for people who didn't want to fold the trappings into other skills. Or at least that's what I tried to do.
I don't need a reason to drop a skill, I need a reason to keep one.
And I, as well as many posters, need a reason to change the game we purchased. If there's no reason, we'll play as written.
You seem to be largely interested in game design. In coming up with a "second edition," and use a very large number of houserules and errata. But this isn't how the majority of gamers approach games. We just want to play. We'll only make changes if we think they're needed. Otherwise, we use the system we paid for. We paid for someone else to design it, so that we wouldn't have to.
And yes, I've come up with a bunch of custom powers, stunts, etc. But in actual play, our houserules are pretty much me acknowledging that the way we thought things worked in the first place was incorrect and noting the nonstandard interpretations.
My posting here is largely me working through the system, thinking about things that I like and don't like, and asking for ramifications of making a change or critiques on homebrew.
At this point, Scant, you're not playing the same game as everyone else. And sometimes, this means you're not having the same discussions.
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Actually, I play by more or less the same rules as everyone else. Most of my projects have not been fully integrated into a game, though I use almost all of them here and there.
This whole discussion has been about the best way to houserule; it started when Ophidimancer suggested giving it a Deceit trapping and I said it'd be easier just to remove the skill. "Not houseruling" isn't really on the table.
Unless somebody changed the terms of the debate while I wasn't looking, I guess.
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I see your suggestion to just remove Burglary, Sancta. I just think once I start doing that, I might as well revamp the whole list because just getting rid of one Skill and splitting it up as Trappings or Stunts for other skills sounds like a bandaid. Giving Burglary pickpocketing as a Trapping is also a bandaid solution, but of the two I think it's an easier bandaid. If I'm going for something harder, I might as well go all the way and fix the Skill in total.
Does that make sense?
I applaud your revised Skill set by the way, that's way more work than I have the time for.
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You don't really need to do much to split up its trappings among other skills. They're already there, almost.
Casing is entirely covered by another skill. Hacking almost is, but for some reason the Scholarship Computer Use trapping is specifically handicapped. And if you read the Breaking trapping of Craftsmanship generously, it can already be used to pick locks.
And that's basically the entire skill.
So there's essentially no work to do, with my approach.