“Stat Increment Bonuses and/or Perks”
I’m rebuilding my little system from the group up right now and trying to pin down some core elements/ ideas. I want the game to play as a gritty, lower health game with supernatural elements and spooky monsters. A basic outline of my idea is as follows:
Players are students at a boarding school a couple months after a supernatural event drew monsters from the earth and filled the air with poisonous gas. Survivors stay inside and underground to avoid danger but they are never truly safe. Among the survivors are individuals who have “strong souls” ( their class and the ability to commune with and understand the supernatural) and have gained otherworldly powers. Gameplay will consist of surviving and exploring the monster overrun school, interacting with other groups of survivors, killing monsters, and communing with deities (or killing them) to strengthen your “soul”. Players are working to figure out how it happened, why it happened, and if they can return everything to normal.
My little ordeal is that i’ve got two ideas that I probably could figure out on my own but i’d like some advice on obvious problems or recommendations. (I’ll be using 5e stats during explanation to keep it simple). My two ideas are pretty much just two different ways to implement “perks”
- Stat Increment Bonuses
When a character reaches specific increments in a stat they’ll get to pick from a couple minor bonuses. Ex. character has 13 Str which means they get one extra inventory slot or get an increase to pushing and grappling (just an example i’ll figure out the bonuses when the time comes). When they hit 15, they’ll get something, and when they hit 18 they’ll get another.
- Virtue and Vices
During character creation players can choose “virtues” and “vices” (positive and negative bonuses) split between major and minor. If they pick a major virtue they’ll have to pick a major vice and same with minor. They’ll choose a set amount of both major and minor OR i’ll make it a point system kinda like project zomboid (each positive bonus has a positive point value and each negative bonus has a negative point value. You can pick as many positive as you want but will have to take as many negative bonuses to make them them equal zero
ex. 1
Major Virtue: +5 health
Major Vice: -1 dexterity
Ex. 2 (zomboid)
Virtue with point value 4
————-
Vice with point value -1
Vice with point value -1
Vice with point value -1
Vice with point value -1
———
total points = 0✅
Everything is up in the air and i’m still figuring stuff out
by the minute. Any advice on the whole “perk” fiasco is appreciated- I would like to include them to give people a more specialized core character but I might just end up tying “perks” to class progression (spend a resource to advance a class specific skill tree)