Acoma wrote:
Thoughts?
I'd start with the role a profession plays in Legend, how it plays thematically with the rest of Dragon Warriors, and how you'd see the profession working in an adventuring party before deciding on numbers and powers. I'm not really all that fussed about whether the profession balances with others because the canon DW professions don't really work like that - after all, all "game balance" typically means is who can beat up whom in a fight, which is not what an RPG is all about. What I am always interested in when considering introducing a new profession is whether it "fits" with DW.
Onto some more general notes:
- Any spell that manipulates or creates an intermediary force would not use Magical Attack, so to maintain the concept of force-manipulation magic, I'd look to figure out a way for your spells to make Strength checks or use Evasion to determine their effects rather than trying to cludge the MA vs. MD mechanic to work with inanimate objects - for example, if wooden doors now have a Magical Defence, can I use other direct attack spells on them? Maybe I'd want to petrify a door to wedge it in place. There'd be a lot of worms escaping their cans if you could do that.
- Similarly, whilst I know there's a precedent for instant-death spells, I'd think *VERY* hard about whether you (or your players) would be comfortable having their character killed on the roll of a single die - DW is a gritty death-filled game at the best of times but arbitrary and whimsical deaths are the least palatable to players. To the point that if you're going to introduce new rules, introduce ones that remove the instant-death effects rather than adding more.
- Lastly, I think your spell mechanics should be consistent within the profession - for example, use a 2d6 or 1d20 spell expiry roll throughout. Having to look up which spell expiry roll applies to each spell is just going to slow things down, especially if the Kineticist is a rarely used profession. It's bad enough that Attack vs. Defence and Magical Attack vs. Magical Defence have different mechanics in DW...
It's no secret that I typically take a pretty tough stance on new professions (including the new canon professions...) - especially the more fantastical ones - so, whilst the above may come across as unduly critical, hopefully this now puts my comments into a more palatable context.
If you do end up playing the Kineticist in a campaign, I'd be very interested to hear how it goes - the work I've done on my own professions to keep them thematically consistent and interesting to play has been the most challenging part of my DW campaigns so I'm always keen to benefit from how others have got on.