In SA, Neuroform is the first and perhaps most important decision you have to make when creating your character. Most first-timers breeze by it, which is 100% fine, but I find that a lot of experienced players like digging into it. There's a whole world of strange alternate characters available. If you have a parasitic dataform, a static baseline, and a dynamic group-mind on the same team, they all feel very different. If this was some other game, you'd be playing aliens instead of humans if you had characters like those.
Earthly Form doesn't work that way. Regardless of whether you're a swarm of fire elementals, a war-aspected automaton, or a possessing spirit, it all tends to feel like there are a bunch of humans in the room. Ghosts are the only things that feel somewhat different, partly because we have more cultural expectations for them. We don't have a baseline for how a fire elemental would act or feel different from other humans, and so they don't.
Earthly Form works well, I should point out. They represent most character concepts well, and I never had any trouble in the playtest. Mechanically, it's completely solid and I could leave it in with no problem. But in terms of its impact on game play, it's a pale shadow of Neuroform.
Supernatural Natures, on the other hand, have a substantial impact on how characters get played. People take Earthly Forms just to throw some paint on their character. They hesitate before taking Supernatural Nature. Some of that is because of the mechanical implications, but I think just as much is because they realize that this makes their characters distinctly, noticeably different.
What I'd like to do is ditch Earthly Form, and expand Supernatural Natures to cover the roles that Earthly Form used to cover. If you want your status as a fire elemental to count, you swap around your Natures to do it. In order to do this, Supernatural Natures need a bit of an overhaul.
So here's the idea: when you're a supernatural creature instead of a human being, you can change out your Nature scores. From least to most impact (and work from the player), you might…
- Rename one of them. For instance, you might have Calculation instead of Mystery, or Wrath instead of War. It says a fair amount about your character if you do this, but there aren't any big game effects.
- Link some of them. Maybe you're a trickster god, and your Self and Trickster Natures are one and the same. Maybe, as a war-ghost, your War and Mystery scores are intertwined. You should still rate all six Natures and calculate your Power normally, but if one of your linked Natures is impacted (say, hampered by a Complication or benefiting from strongly-aspected mana) then the other one is too.
- Trade an expression or two between Natures.
- Maybe you're a creature of creation and destruction. You move Energy Wave from War to Industry, swapping it for Travel.
- Maybe you connect to people by creating things from their subconscious. You move Conjuration to Communion, and move Universal Repository access to Industry.
- Remix two or more of them.
- You are a dragon, a beast of fire and destruction. You have two new Supernatural Natures: Dragon, and All Things Weak and Small. The Dragon-nature is composed mostly of the War-nature (magical assaults, curses, and fear) and some of the Self-nature (magic resistance, immortality). The nature of All Things Weak and Small is the rest of Self (changing yourself, soul-work, regeneration), and the strategy piece from War.
- You are a giant spider, curious and horrifying. You have three strange Natures: Inspection, Stitching, and Excursion. Inspection has Mystery's ability to analyze and discover, as well as Communion's ability to read people and access the repositories. Stitching takes healing and rapport from Communion, and Industry's ability to build, access mana, and maintain things. The remaining pieces (Mystery's concealment, Industry's travel, and Communion's blending in and access to the dream worlds) make up Excursion.
The Power/Import cost for Supernatural Natures goes away with this new model.
I need to figure out what happens if people turn two regular Natures into three Supernatural Natures, or vice versa. I might just shift the averaging back to the top 2 Natures if you reduce your total number.
