Powers.
Powers are always the tricky part of designing any game, along with the paths these powers take. Anyone can bang out a quickie set of roleplaying rules covering combat and movement, but when it comes to talents and powers, this is where the real design work comes in. You want to provide a sense of progression with both powers and talents, a gradual sense of getting better and more competent. A number of games fail in this regard, or are so stuck to what came before they will never improve.
With D&D3 and Pathfinder, the name of the game is placing powers and unlocks on a Christmas tree called a character class - the same classes that existed way back in D&D1. The class roles are still strictly defined, that choice you made when picking a class at level 1 defines who you are for the most part until level 20. In Pathfinder, this is more pronounced, since it pays to stick with one class. With D&D3, you are supposed to weave and dodge your way up several classes until you find a prestige class you like, and stick with that. They are two different games, but your progression for the most part is predetermined. There are a limited number of options based on the first choice you make.
D&D4 was good when they introduced the second round of multi-classing, you were this interesting mix of two very distinct classes that had strange synergies and power combos. They quickly buried this cool system under a dump truck of errata and add-on books, to the point where designing a character required the online character generator, and you had a shelf full of out of date and worthless books that couldn't be used to play the game. Design-wise, you were still limited by the set of classes you picked, you could synergize in that buid, but if you decided to take your character in a new direction at level 10 you were stuck.
We are trying to take a different spin with SBRPG2. All powers and all talents are open from the start, though your starting stats will help or hurt the choices you make. You are classless, which is a huge change from SBRPG1, but then again, we have a different goal here, this is a different time in history, and we are shooting for a game that provides the ultimate expression of character design and flow as you level up. It is an organic goal, one more suited to exploring power frameworks, making choices, and developing your character as they live through various situations.
The ultimate goal is to reflect your story, your progression, and to let you make choices based on how you feel your character is learning and unlocking powers - without penalizing your progression in other areas. If your mage is fighting and chooses to improve physical toughness and combat ability, you can improve that and put your magical studies on hold for a while as you become a better survivor. If you want to improve social skills through roleplaying, that won't hold you back in other areas, and you can just focus on that exclusively for as long as you would like.
With D&D3.x and its related games, when you get a level, you have to make a choice that punishes your progression in other areas. Picking 5 levels in fighter means you lose 5 levels of progression as a mage. It affects your end-game power incredibly, and a mixed design like a 3/3/3 fighter/mage/thief really suffers in combat power - in no way is that character like a full level 9 anything, and they fall far behind in terms of usefulness to the party. With SBRPG2, we have solved that problem.
Regardless, sorting out powers and design paths takes a long time, and this is something we continue to work on. We are blocking out a system for you to design your own, but keeping things simple at first will allow more people to understand the system, so something like power and power framework design may be left for later to work on. It is a great design, one came through after five years of experimenting, designing, throwing things away,and redesigning a simple system until we had a great base.
That core 'the way things should work' is key here, it is easy to copy another system's progression, but it is unoriginal, and you inherit all of the limitations and flaws of the original. When you set out to do something new, it is always cool, but a very hard road. Finding what the system should do, what it supports, and most importantly, how the system supports the notion of a character story or epic is what we wanted to do here. The idea hit us, and it is more than a simple concept. Thigns have to be carefully worked through and thought of, in order to make the whole greater than sum of its parts.
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