RE: TROS (Insight) / Bushido (Karma) - Usage in BW

[Raegenhere (Huscarl)]

This might have been kicked around before?

I like the idea of further awards for good roleplaying. Bushido (FGU) didn't quite crack it with Karma (all honour and killing based really). Within The Riddle of Steel (TROS), there is the area of Insight.

Insight within their system, effectively represents building a re-birth threshold point from points earned from roleplyaing that generate Spiritual Attributes (SAs), namely: Conscience, Destiny, Drive Faith, Luck and Passion.

They don't quite equate to BW, however (and I'm going out on a limb here), they try to do the same mechanic, but I think BW does it better.

To get to the point, when I was looking at TROS, the whole name "Riddle of Steel" stuck in my head from the Conan movie and I liked the area of Insight, so I tried to knock up what I called the removing of the veils, ie, each level of Insight represented a movement towards knowledge of the riddle of steel. Of course, as the person got higher (if ever) that desire dropped away and what was represented was something like Buddhism, trying to achieve perfection.

I've only delved cursorily into Artha and awards and all that, but once I've gone through it, I'll post something (unless it's been done before) along the lines of Insight.

For those who don't have TROS, Insight would look like this:

Insight Value Bonus Priorities
1-15 E
16-30 D
etc

effectively, the bonus priorities represent better picks to produce a better character.

For BW, this bonus could be anything along the lines of:

* max number of allowed lifepaths
* max exponent
* additional traits (with allowed values)
* etc.

I like the idea of continually rewarding a roleplaying a PC, it also helps them drive towards not just improvement in this life but also in a form of karmic re-birth.

Any thoughts on this?

[24 Oceans]

*Mechanically* I'd say TROS insight is most similiar to creating a BW character with extra LPs. Basically, your character dies and you want to play a character that isn't a total newbie compared to the characters the rest of the players are playing.

You *could* go to all the extra book-keeping of tracking total Artha spent and referencing that to some homebrew table of character creation advantages. But given that BW already has a fair amount of book-keeping, I'd just roughly estimate about how far the other characters have advanced and give out an extra LP or two accordingly.

On the other hand, if your group starts grooving down some funky philosophical path that leads to more fun and RP, well then by all means go for it.

[Ozark Tim]

But that extra spent arthat bookkeeping is already built into the revised character sheets.

[Kaare Berg]

What you would be doing is to say Artha = XP and thus artha spent equals levels gained.

Now I can see why you are eager to mechanically be able to say, your new character has X numbers of lifepaths, as to prevent the GM fiat of "here you go bob take two extra lifepaths. Oh joe you just get one extra."

Given that it's been a while since I've read and played TROS.

However for this to work any five lifepath character should then be balanced with another five LP character. It dosen't work this way. LPS are not balanced. So by default you can't compare their values and thus the table is redundant.
Nor would you be able to take into account skill progression, which is independent of Artha.

The best way to enforce such a change would be to let artha follow the player (he earned it after all), yet ay artha invested in the character sheet is a trade off between shall I save for the future or shall I gain power with this character.

Then when the poor PC dies, have him come up with a character concept and adjust this to the power-level of the campiagn, by comparing the product with the other PCs.

Punishment for death is a hangover from back in the wargames days, heck you loose something that you have invested time and energy into, that should be punishment enough.

Like I said earlier, I can see why you want to mechanically enforce this. IMO the way to go about this isn't by turning Artha into XP.