A winged Demon (“imp”) npc visually demonstrating the effect of various settings on their powerball.
Was just thinking about this for Shattered World, I’ve been bouncing back and forth between a skill cloud and various other ways of handling how a player might specialize their character. It recently hit me then, that I could have biomass distribution allowing players to change their specialty relatively on the fly. Which brought me to an even more interesting thought, what if “level” was simply the amount of biomass invested into their body and therefore available for distribution. (+Equipment Value of course) Large concentrations of biomass would be needed to add a new limb type, and a lot of it would have to be sacrificed to change the type of a limb.
Obviously gathering a lot of biomass will add a lot of weight and size, making you slower, reducing fine motor skills which can bar you from a variety of activities, and requiring greater wingspan to fly. On the plus side, greater mass makes body blows count for more, you’re harder to block or parry and you can take more damage. Investment into “dense muscles (1-3)” will reduce your overall pool in exchange for reducing size and increasing both lower and upper body strength. Investment into “hard skinned (1-3)” will reduce the overall size of your pool for an increase in damage resistance. Both give bonuses relative to size and use the same cost growth, i.e. if you bought “dense muscles 1″ then “hard skinned 1″ grows in cost to be equal to “dense muscles 2″.
