First: Yeah, there's a Philsys revisions thread. I felt this deserved its own thread.
Second: I'm going to enjoy a big heaping serving of crow, since I'm pretty sure Nama brought this up once and I told him it probably wasn't necessary. Now I'm starting to think it might be a good idea.
Third: Yes, the character closet is the "Philsys discussion" forum. I don't like that and never have, so sue me. I think that's a good place to discuss individual sheets instead of the system at large. :(
OK, so, the real point of all this.
I've been thinking lately about characters that have innate racial talents, partly because of Miang's sheet. It's been more or less accepted that dragons can breathe (stuff), for example, and Amanda had a lot of interesting ideas for things Miang could do with her breath weapon aside from simply breathing a single blast. There are a lot of other "racially appropriate" skills that have come up, such as certain types of magic (fey), unique talents (vampire charm/dominate/bite, succubus life-sucking), plain weird abilities (slimes, shapeshifters), and the like.
The solution to these issues has been somewhat inconsistent. The usual understanding of the situation is that the player must pay skill points when applicable; fey characters only have nature-oriented magic that the PC has spent skill points to justify. Not all (race) are going to have the exact same abilities, just inclinations toward certain racial talents, so this works reasonably well. Until we start looking at characters with more fantastic or unusual racial abilities, anyway.
Playing an unusual race in Philsys essentially costs nothing because it offers no "free" benefits; anything your character can do, you have generally spent skill points to justify, with some minor exceptions. It is generally accepted that certain innate racial abilities (darkvision, gills, even elemental affinities) are part and parcel of playing a specific race, so they get tagged [Innate] and everything is cool. Some [Innate] abilities are tied to character level, notably the system for gradually increasing elemental resistances that I worked out way back in the day for various characters with strong elemental affinities.
These sorts of "passive" talents seem to work well this way. They often don't scale up as the character grows in strength, and when they do, the character has no way to accelerate their growth because it isn't an ability set that the character is actually practicing in any way; you can't "try to be more fire elemental," for example.
Active skills are a different story.
Breath weapons, dominating gazes, life-sucking powers, shapeshifting, whatever, these abilities seem like they should cost skill points. The obvious initial objection to this is "but this is just something my character can do, not something he learned to do, why skill points?" I'm suggesting skill points because they're a fair way to require characters to invest some sort of cost in their abilities. Perhaps it's better to think of skills and skill points as a reservoir of points to spend on unique things that the character can do that other people may not necessarily be able to do rather than things the character has trained in.
There are some definite advantages to this revision.
Under the current system, the only way an [Innate] can scale as the character grows in power is typically character level. On one hand, the character gets a boost each level "for free" (which is probably bad). On the other, the character has no way to focus on specific abilities, being limited to the level progression and not being able to spend skill points to "do better." Of course, characters can only spend skill points at level-up anyway, but it's a good way to differentiate characters of the same race (as rarely as that happens).
For example, suppose two characters are both shadow dragons. What if one PC wants to focus his attention on improving his swordsmanship and the other wants to focus on improving his inborn draconic talents? Under the current system, the latter PC would presumably take ranks in shadow magic, while the first might not. However, both of them would get the same breath weapon and elemental resistances. Why not allow the latter PC to specifically train himself to have a much better breath weapon than the former?
Essentially, what I'm proposing is that characters who have useful racial abilities should take a skill for them, assuming that no current skill covers what they need to do. In most cases, Cou/Sta/Mag seems an appropriate base set. For example:
Dragons: Draconic Powers [Cou/Sta/Mag]. Covers breath weapons of all appropriate types, including more creative uses of the ability, and abilities that are very specific to the type of dragon in question.
Succubi/Incubi: Demonic Talents [Cou/Sta/Mag]. Life-draining sexual contact abilities, very limited shape-shifting at higher ranks.
Vampires: Blood Talents [Cou/Sta/Mag]. The classic bite attack, spawn creating abilities, etc. Domination and the like fall under the Telepathy magic school, so this ability does not grant them.
Shapeshifters: Polyself [Int/Wis/Mag]. Covers self-only shape-shifting abilities.
This is only a short sample list; we can come up with more as necessary.
Essentially, this sort of system gives characters a concrete way to improve their racial skills--by spending points--and allows them to have a tech progression like other skills do. For example, a dragon with 1 rank in Draconic Powers might have a weak version of a breath weapon, whereas a dragon with 12 ranks could create a wide-angle spray that fills an area and lingers, dealing continuous damage. Keep in mind that these skills do NOT include things that are already covered by an existing skill, notably schools of magic; instead, these skills cover things that a character can only do because of his or her race.
While we're at it, giving base stats to these kinds of abilities makes it easier to make opposed checks for them; at current it's pretty much assumed that a dragon's breath is opposed with either Mblock or MisEvade, but what the hell do you roll for the dragon's side? I've always treated it as a standard magical attack, but that doesn't seem right anymore.
Anyone else have any thoughts on this?