Sagatafl FAQ
From Sagataflwiki
Q: What is Sagatafl?
A: Sagatafl is first and foremost a character creation rules system, that is an objective set of procedures that a player can interact with, to make choices that together shape up to a coherent whole of a human (or otherwise) being, defined in terms of its inborn developmental potential, and its acquired abilities, with all choices having knowable consequences (all combinations of choices also have knowable consequences), and the resulting character being guaranteed (once playtesting is over) to not exceed the overall competence/goodness level one should except from the amount of Goodie Points that were allotted to the character creation process.
Mostly following logically from the character creation rules is a character advancement subsystem.
By necessity, since Sagatafl was never intended to output character sheets for use in other roleplaying gaming rules systems, Sagatafl also has its own subsystems for resolving actions, both physical and non-physical actions, and dealing as objctively as possible with the consequences thereoff.
Finally, because the primary use to which the chief designer intends to put Sagatafl is to run RPG campaigns in his Ärth historical fantasy setting, Sagatafl also has several magic systems, and rules for how they interact or fail to interact with each other.
Q: What is Sagatafl about?
A: Sagatafl is about human variety, the ways in which Humans can differ from each other, and how different Humans have different potentials for change. Sagatafl not having a subject is good, because it means that once one is equipped with knowledg of human variety, one can think up a character independently of Sagatafl, and once the character is fully formed in one's mind, one can go to Sagatafl and see that yes indeed, Sagatafl facilities the creation of that character in vidid and highly individual detail.
Other RPG systems are created to explore a very narrow subject and so by necessity require players to think up characters who conform to that subject, making system-independent character creation impossible. Or else theyare meant for use in an extreme ideological fantasy in which humans have infinite capacity for change. Or both.
Q: Does that mean that players have to create their characters wihthout looking at the rules?
A: Not at all. It is merely important to state clearly and frequently that it is possible to do so. To envision a highly detailed and defined four-dimensional individual human being, and then ome to Sagatafl and find that the infrastructure required to express that individual in game-mechanical terms is present.
The vast majority of player characters, and all NPCs, will be created via a back-and-forth process of the player (or the GM, when creating an NPC) interacting with the rules, his choices influenced by the rules, and some of the time a character will be created built around one or two special and interesting traits, possibly traits that no other RPG system simulates well (if at all). And that is a perfectly valid way to create a character.
Q: Long ago on Usenet, an experiment was conducted, testing Sagatafl (then named FFRE) against a pre-existing character creation, named Jill, created by Usenet poster Mary Kuhner. The experiment was to see if Sagatafl was sufficiently flexible to facilitate the creation and expression of this system-independent character. How did that experiment go? And where is the final result?
A: The experiment was severely marred by technical communications problems. This was back in the stone age of communication: Sagatafl existed as a series of documents in MS Word format, and Mary Kuhner had no ability whatsoever to read MS Word. There was no Open Office, using MS Word's built-in function to convert documents to HTML produced results that were horrible, verging on a crime against humanity, and in order to convert MS Word to HTML you needed extremely expensive software packages.
In spite of this, the experiment went very well, in that nothing Mary Kuhner wanted to express or define about the character Jill did not already exist within the Sagatafl character creation infrastructure, except one thing: The possiility that young characters (For jill was still in her teens) could develop intellectually as they matured. This struck the chief designer as an excellent concept, and so this was added to Sagatafl's character creation rules, although the current form of those rules differs from the one employed back then (nowadays developmentally immature characters have an RD penalty to the affected Attributes, e.g. Intelligence in Jill's case).
Since it was not possible to convert the resulting MS Word character sheet to a format that Mary Kuhner could read, except by devoting a dozen man-hours to typing it up in TXT format manually, Mary Kuhner never saw the character sheet, and so the experiment can reasonably be said to not have been completed. However, apart from severe technical communications problems, one must conclude that the experiment went well.
This is also an overall example of one of the ways in which Sagatafl develops, evolves and improves. The chiefdesigner has a vivid imagination for coming up with unusual and interesting characters, and since NPCs must be creatable by the rules, such characters are an excellent test for the system, to see if it is flexible enough.
For instance an as-of-yet not fully named Ärth setting character (his byname is Wand-Elf, because he carries a staff and has strangely white hair) has a staff that, among other Endownment, has the ability to change shape into a bow. Sagatafl already offered two Enchantments for objects to change shape, but one was cheap and easy and allowed only very subtle changes of shape, while the other one was expensive and difficult and allowed much more change in the object's shape than what was desired for this character. Because of the invention and definition of this character, a third intermediate Enchantment was added to the system, which can affect an intermediate amount of change upon the item, such as changing from staff to bow and back again, and with this Enchantment having a moderate cost and difficulty.
Q: So is Sagatafl open for new challenges of the Jill type? The claim that "you can create any character" with Sagatafl comes across as extreme, and it would be nice to see this claim challenged and upheld.
A: In theory yes, Sagatafl is open for such challenges. In practice, the system is incomplete, and so it is not particularly interesting to create full characters as of yet. Finally, the you can create any character claim must be clarified. First of all, only characters from within human capabilitistic variety are guaranteed creatable. Secondly, the amount of simulation that goes on, the degree of interaction between inborn developmental potential and ability acquisition, is what is noteworthy about Sagatafl. A few other RPG rules systems also allows the creation of any character one can dream up, such as GURPS by Steve Jackson Games, and Hero System by Hero Games, but these systems hardly attempt to simulate character development before and after game start, and implicitly fail to discern between that which is inborn and that whih is acquired.
Therefore, what could be of value to the design process currently is written sketches of characters, with unusual traits or four-dimentional developmental paths clearly marked out, accompanied by questions such as "Can Sagatafl do this?" Being able to say yes is valuable. Being able to say "No, but your sketch has prompted clear or vague plans to expand Sagatafl to be able to do this" is also valuable.
Q: The other claim made about Sagatafl is that its character creation procedure is abuse-proof, and therefore does not require GM intervention. This makes no sense. Any RPG character creation system can be abused!
A: Other RPG systems with trait synergies have character creation systems that can be abused, because they were not carefully designed, and utilized an overly simplistic model of the individual human and of human change. This necessitates giving the GM the right to reject a filled-in character sheet for reasons other than world compliance, and that right is intolerable to the chief designer, as it impedes the process of creative flow that creating a player character ought to be.
Sagatafl claims that for any amount of Goodie Points, the basic currency of the character creation process, there is a ceiling of overall goodness, of desirability-as-a-PC from a generalized point of view, a point of view that has no specific agenda but to play an RPG, that cannot be exceeded. Thus abusive optimization cannot take place. If the players all create characters built on 120 GP, then the GM can know that no single character will have an overall ability to exert his will on the surrounding world, that is disproportionately greater than that of other efficiently created 120 GP characters.
It is quite possible to spend one's GoodiePoints in a less than sub-optimal fashion, and in fact the vast majority of PCs will not be created in an optimal fashion. They will, however, be fairly close to optimal, since Sagatafl can only be said to punish those character concepts that are self-contradictory, such as a character with low Agility and low Perception whom the player wans to have a very high Dodge skill.
Sagatafl gives each player the choice of where the character should fall on a spectrum ranging from a complete generalist with some ability at everything, over a semi-generalist or a broadly specialized character, to a character who is narrowly specialized in a single activity. This is good, and one must be mindful of the fact that there is nothing wrong with creating a specialized character. Any realistic world will be full of specialized characters, and specialization is in no way inherently abusive; it only becomes abusive if the character's overall ability to exert his will on the surrounding world is disproportionately greater than what one would expect from his GP value.
The two most common forms of "abuse" in non-abuse-proof character cretation systems, are the skill expert and the combat monster.
The combat monster, however, is often not an actual problem, but merely a perceived problem; a character that is perceived by the GM and/or by the other players to be a problem, even though in fact it is not. The problems arise from the campaign not taking place in a world - a place that has a social structure that responds realistically to violent threats and disruptions, and/or by the lack of competence on behalf of the GM in presenting a campaign in which one feature is that by virtue of natural emergence, only a subset of encountered problems can be efficiently solved by violent means.
The skill expert is a character who has unreasoanbe expertise in all or nearly all non-combat skills (or in some cases also in combat skills) - unreasonable out of proportion to the amount of character creation currency that the character was built on. This is a phenomenon that occurs only in a subset of RPG rules systems, and this is due to bad design decisions having been made, at the very core of those systems, thus making them infixable; to fix such a system, one would have to perform major surgery on it, almost to the point of taking it apart and re-assembling it in a different way.
Q: So can I challenge Sagatafl in this way? Create a character, and argue in a calm and objective fashion that it is abusively good for its GP total?
A: Sure, provided you have access to all the necessary character creation rules. You don't have that currently, but once you get it, you're welcome. Just keep in mind that the definition of abuse employed has to be be objective and reasonable. "I don't like" is no good, and "this character is optimized" is downright stupid. If one does not optimize when one creates a character, then what one does it to not choose an area (broad of narrow) of specialization, and so the result is inevitably a generalist character.
Also, people who are interested in advance access to material are encouraged to subscribe to the mailing list, and to there request the necessary material once posts are made about it. E.g. the character creation spreadsheet.
Q:
A:
Q:
A:
Q:
A:
Q:
A:
