Special Abilities
One of the main reasons Solaris RPG is so unique is Special Abilities. All characters have the opportunity to make up moves and capabilities for their own character! This is a great opportunity for a player to really be creative and explore all sorts of wondrous things their character could be capable of doing. These abilities are yours - no other character can copy your ideas. That being said, of course, you also cannot copy other ideas for your own abilities as well.
The very first thing to remember when creating a new ability is fairness. You simply cannot make an ability that can crush people in one blow, stun someone indefinitely, or make your character all-powerful - these abilities will simply be rejected. This is a multiplayer game and so your abilities must be fair to others, otherwise the game would not be fun. Do not mistake fairness with balance, however. While the Staff takes painstaking measures to try to make all the races balanced in power for their tier and all the job classes balanced in power for their tier, you don’t have to take the time to look at every single racial and class ability to make sure yours isn’t going to tip the scale anywhere - in fact, the point of special abilities is to have a unique way to give you the advantage in, or out, of battle.
Another useful resource for abilities is other players. Especially if you are new to this or if you have specific questions about certain mechanics, you can be confident of receiving constructive feedback when you post your idea in the Peer Review forums. And don’t worry about having your good ideas stolen; even if your idea isn’t officially your special ability yet, the “no copy” clause still applies to your idea. As this is a game about community, there will always be players willing to help you out.
Don’t forget, you want to make sure that your ability is completely descriptive. Your goal is to make it so when you use this ability, every other player imagines it the same way you do. Obviously, no two people will see it exactly the same, but describing how something looks, how your character reacts, color, dimensions, and all that stuff will really help another person really get the full effect and full appreciation of your ability. If it is not descriptive enough, it might even be detrimental! If you imagine your ability to do one thing but don’t give it enough description, someone might think it does something completely different, or at least has a different effect than you intended, which can lead to confusion, or worse, arguments.
And furthermore, take pride in your work. Remember that this ability is going to be on your character page and it is going to identify both your work of art and the artist. Make sure to run the description through a spell-check, use proper punctuation, and all that other stuff. This ability is likely going to be with you for a while, so it might as well look good, right?
What Your Ability Can Do
To break it down to its basic components, special abilities can have mechanical and they can have cosmetic purposes (and in lots of cases, both). Mechanical purpose just means that the ability allows you to perform a special action in battle (or out of battle) or the ability grants some sort of bonus that is active at all times – either way, it effects the character in a way that it boosts a stat or combat capability or affects his normal capabilities in a manner that defies what the core rules say about his normal capabilities. If you take a look at racial abilities and job class abilities, these should all be good examples of abilities with mechanical purpose. They might give a permanent boost in defense (Lunarian - Elemental Resistance), or maybe grant the use of some special capability during combat (Gorgon - Meat Shield), or it might give some sort of bonus outside of battle that still affects the character’s relationship to the rules (Human - Adaptability). This just goes to show all the different things that you can do!
A cosmetic purpose is very different; it essentially gives your character something that doesn’t really affect the game. Lots of people shy away from purely-cosmetic abilities, as they are a waste of an ability slot. While that might be true on one hand, some players craft their character for role-playing and not at all for combat, so they don’t see a reason in having abilities that amplify their combat potential. However, having cosmetic components in an ability is a great way to add detail and length to the description of the ability. Take the Human racial ability Adaptability and give it a second glance; how could you change this description to make it longer? You could talk about what makes a human adaptable or how their past has affected them this way in the present. In the same way, your character might have an ability that prevents him from being cut and bleeding (which can be a mechanical purpose) but you can spruce it up by saying that the reason he can’t be pierced by weapons is because if his unnaturally thick skin (which is a cosmetic purpose).
Classification of Abilities
There are six main classifications of special abilities with mechanical purpose, which is just a fancy way to categorize them by what they do. They are Action, Reaction, Passive, Utility, Interrupt, and Preset.
Action Abilities
The Battle Guide states that a basic round consists of a “reaction and action”. The most basic of actions you can make is a standard physical, energy, or elemental attack. Many racial abilities and job class abilities (as well as even some other things, like Elemental Perks) can also function as something you can do during your action. Any ability or capability that would take the place of your action during your turn is, aptly named, an Action Ability.
Action Abilities usually take the form of a “special attack”. Maybe you want to be able to unleash a really powerful attack or maybe you want to fire off a flurry of blows that increases the accuracy of your strike. The special attack is probably one of the most common special ability as they are fun and easy to write and can be devastating in combat. Like most racial and job class “special attack” abilities, special abilities like this will likely be limited to a certain amount of times per battle. This will likely be a pretty small number at first, but when your character gains power, he might be able to upgrade his ability through the Science Labs and make it more potent.
Some Action Abilities don’t actually attack someone else, or at least don’t deal damage. Maybe your character utters a curse that can affect an enemy by dropping his defenses for several rounds or maybe you generate a shield to protect you in battle. Many of the Elemental Perks follow this formula of being an action, but a seemingly less aggressive one (or at least, less aggressive than a full-out overhead cleave).
Lots of battles are deceptively small. Even though they may take hours in real time, they can last less than 20 rounds, meaning that while it is nice to have a whole bunch of Action Abilities, there is nothing wrong with normal attacks, so you don’t need so many Action Abilities that every action you make is a “Special Attack”. A “once per battle” here and a “three times per battle” there will be more than enough for most characters to keep their combat style unique and interesting, as well as unpredictable.
There are a few examples in the race and job class abilities of Action Abilities that are described as being “instantaneous” and can be used alongside another action. These are like freebies that can be slipped into your turn, for a “reaction, freebie, action” scenario.
Reaction Abilities
The Battle Guide states that a basic round consists of a “reaction and action”. A Reaction Ability is anything that takes the place of a reaction or augments your ability to react. This could be something that increases your Dodge or Hit SVS to make the target for your avoidance rolls easier to hit or it could be something that fills you with rage after you take damage and give you some sort of offensive capabilities. In a nutshell, a Reaction Ability only takes the “reaction” half of your turn, so you can still make an “action”, even if that action is an Action Ability (yes, two abilities in the same turn!).
Reaction Abilities that allow you to completely avoid damage by bypassing avoidance rolls completely are highly scrutinized and will be severely limited. The roll system for dodging and parrying attacks is a mechanism that was put in place to both award characters for spending the AP to boost defensive statistics and also to add some suspense and excitement when a character’s life is on the line and fate could be determined by a random number. Abilities used to overlook avoidance rolls and ignore attacks are useful to an extent, but they can easily become out of hand. The general rule of thumb is that it must be only usable once per battle and you can only have one Special Ability that does this and even then, it might be denied anyway.
Passive Abilities
A Passive Ability grants some sort of capability to your character that is always in effect. This means that it permanently alters the way your character responds to different situations. There are many examples of Passive Abilities as racial or job class abilities, but most of those are rather powerful, and most only exist because they are iconic to the race or job class. Many Passive Abilities taken as Special Abilities are therefore mostly cosmetic. This is because a lot of things that are written as Passive Abilities that rely strongly on mechanical purposes tend to be strong to a point that they are declared unfair and denied.
You cannot make Passive Abilities that give you additional AP, increased SM, permanent boosts to Hit or Dodge SVS, permanent boosts to base or bonus damage, or a permanent boost to Physical Damage Reduction. You may have Passive Abilities that grant permanent boosts to force damage reductions, but only against specific energies or elements.
Utility Abilities
A Utility Ability augments another ability that your character already has from his race or job class, an elemental perk or energy burn effect, or another source. Do you like your human racial ability Hidden Potential, but wish you could use it twice per battle or wish it gave you a bonus to hit as well as bonus damage? Utility Abilities are nice and easy to write, as you don’t have to start from scratch when you are thinking it up – you can piggy-back your thought process onto a pre-existing idea. Keep in mind that Utility Abilities are meant to augment abilities that you already know! Don’t think you can get away with making the “Superior Hidden Potential” ability if you are a Solarian.
While this does not affect many characters, and even if it does, it won’t affect them for some time, a character can use Utility Abilities to retain some capabilities from their class when upgrading the character to a Legendary Job Class at level 100. Now, this does not mean that you can just copy-paste a Job Class Ability to take with you to your new class, but you could certainly make a Special Ability that plays off of the idea of your old ability to craft it into something that you simply could not live without.
Also rare, but important, is a player’s option to use a Utility Ability on a multi-racial character to emulate a Racial Ability from his recessive race. Multi-racial characters are most usually created by the Integration (Solaris Labs) of two separate characters. However, they can also be created as the off-spring of two characters of different races. A multi-racial character must pick one or the other to be his dominant race, which determines which Racial Abilities he can use, but a Utility Ability can be used in this way to snag a benefit from his other race. So, you might be able to get away with “Superior Hidden Potential” if you are a multi-race Solarian / Human.
Interrupt Abilities
An Interrupt Ability is something that you can use either outside of your turn, or even during another character’s action. The rogue ability Feign, which forces an opponent to re-roll a parry roll, is an excellent example of this. Like some Reaction Abilities, new Interrupt Abilities usually get put under the microscope a bit longer than other abilities. Not because they are more likely to be unfair, but they require a player to act out of sequence and this can occasionally break the flow of game. Clearly they aren’t broken (otherwise they wouldn’t be allowed), but a character filled to bursting with Interrupt Abilities will likely cause hiccups in combat that can potentially ruin the experience.
Interrupt Abilities must be incredibly specific as to when exactly they can be used, and they usually cannot just be used at any time at all. Using Feign again as an example, it must be used immediately after a character rolls his parry attempt. If you try to use it after he has already posted his turn involving that reaction you want to put under scrutiny, then you will likely be berated.
Preset Abilities
A Preset Ability is an ability that you choose from a list (below). There are abilities that are so important that many people want to have them, so we wanted to make them available to multiple characters so they didn’t have to break the “no copying” rule. Maybe these rules didn’t make it to the Level Guide because they weren’t universally useful. Maybe these rules didn’t make it to the Job Class Guide because they would be envied by other classes that didn’t get them, but it wouldn’t make sense to give the exact same ability to multiple classes. Whatever the reason, they need to be available to multiple people, so they made it to the Preset Abilities list.
Preset Abilities are much easier to write, because they are practically written for you! However, you do actually have to write something. The list will give a purely mechanical explanation of the ability (like some of the bland racial and job class abilities), but it is your responsibility to give a little more description and flavor to them before they make it to your character page. Why does your character have this specific ability; was he born with it or did it come from training or study?
Preset Abilities List:
Potency: Gain a +0.10 to energy or elemental potency or a +0.05 to both energy and elemental potency.
ATT: A specific weapon type (sword, bow, staff) in your hands has a 15% increase in maximum ATT.
DEF: A specific armor class on your person has a 15% increase to both maximum P-DEF and F-DEF.
Making a Special Ability
The first thing you should do before writing your own Special Ability is to think about what your character wants or needs. Characters have vivid personalities, and their Special Abilities should reflect that. Very docile characters would look out of place with a berserk ability and an incredibly aggressive character might look weird with abilities to grant a shield to an ally. Of course, stranger things have happened, and an ability might augment a part of a character’s personality that would not be able to be brought to light without such measures. Characters also have weaknesses – races and job classes are built to be vulnerable in at least one aspect. Special Abilities can be used to create an edge for your character to face otherwise insurmountable tasks by maximizing his potential in an otherwise weak area. But keep in mind, you cannot make an ability that is directly fashioned to work against another character or one of his abilities, so you can’t write an ability that is “Anti-Elemental Barrage” just to counteract your arch-nemesis’ “Elemental Barrage”. (Even if you don’t call it “Anti-Elemental Barrage”, we’ll know.)
You can start by either writing the cosmetic or the mechanical purposes. To start cosmetically, try to think of some aspect of your character that you would like to accentuate; maybe he has a painful history of loss and regrets. Try to condense those woes into a sentence or two that can stand alone. Now, you just need to give your character a capability that ties to that description in some way. If he has been emotionally hardened by these events, maybe you should think of a defensive ability that plays off of the comparison between hardened emotions and hardened defenses. Alternatively, these painful memories could have a way to come up during battle, throwing him into a rage if he sees an ally hurt.
Many players will likely write their abilities from the ground up, starting with the meat of the issue and creating only cosmetic text needed to keep their ability from being too short. Maybe your character is having a hard time combating ranged characters, so you know right off that the ability must be ranged or some way to hinder ranged attacks. In this way, you don’t really care why your character can or is doing this action, at least not yet. All that is on your mind is how you can overcome this hurtle. Maybe you want an ability that allows you to throw a weapon without incurring penalties or an ability that reduces the accuracy of projectiles in the battle for a short period. Now that you know what you want it to do, go back and determine what about this character allows him to perform such a feat. Or maybe you could describe how difficult it was or how much time it took for your character to undertake the task of learning such a capability.
Once you have those things, you might want to nail down a name. Now, this step can be skipped for now if you are really having trouble with it, but inevitably, it will have to be called something. The name must make sense for the ability and the backstory, or cosmetic purposes, that go along with it. The ability’s name can’t already be taken by another ability: racial, job class, or even another character’s ability. This will most definitely lead to confusion. Lastly, and definitely not least, you want to avoid using words that might be associated with other mechanics that are not part of your ability. For example: the word fire can be used to describe using a ranged weapon, like “firing an arrow” but that word also describes one of the elemental forces. If you want to make an archery ability, you might refrain from using the name “Rapid Fire” even if the ability allows for a flurry of shots, because the word fire in the ability might lead to confusion.
Once you know what it does and have a little flavor to go along with it (and optionally, the name worked out), the next main step is to post the idea on the Peer Review forums. Take the time to explain your thought process; maybe you can give some insight into why you chose to make such an ability or even explain how you can use that ability in a combo with a different ability to do some pretty cool stuff. With these things in mind, it will be much easier for people to understand your viewpoint when they attempt to explain theirs. The Peer Review forums are phenomenal for an outside eye to look over your work, catch things that you missed, and point out things that might not be as obvious as you thought they were.
You might even be able to launch discussions in the Peer Review forums with vague ideas about an ability. For example: you might start a topic about an upcoming ability where you want to, in some way, augment your character’s ability to block. Maybe you just got a new shield and you want to make that more important to the character’s play style or even personality. Or maybe you have just been having issues with being ineffective at blocking and you want to improve. In either case, bringing a very undefined desire could potential result in suggestions and discussion about what this new block ability could be. Keep in mind, when posting or reading these suggestions, that since you do not technically have that ability or have not officially declared that as an ability, the “no copy” rule is a little cloudy at this point. If a player intentionally and obviously snipes an ability from your thread, his idea can be shot down, but since the ideas are a little more nebulous than an actual ability, it might be difficult to draw the line.
There is nothing to say that you cannot have discussions like this with people in the chatrooms or through the forum’s instant messaging as well – especially if you are still in the idea stage. Please note, first off, that you should not interrupt a developing session with an OOC discussion about an upcoming ability, and secondly, don’t ask a Staff member “will this be accepted” because, quite frankly, it isn’t up to us, it is up to your peers that take the time to review and critique your ability on the forums.
Exceptions to the Rules!
If there weren’t exceptions, they wouldn’t really be rules, now would they?
The first exception comes to the “no copying” rule. There are two ways to legitimately circumvent this rule. The first is through a master/apprentice relationship. If you spend at least 10 levels under a master’s tutelage, you can spend a Special Ability to get one of his Special Abilities. Now, this cannot be a direct, word-for-word, copy; however, it can do the same thing. Specifically, the mechanical purposes can be copied over, but the flavor text – like how you came to learn it (under your master, obviously) – must be different. The name of the ability can be the same or it can be different; if it is different, it should probably note in the description something along the lines of “and he learned this ability studying his master’s use of his [Master’s Special Ability Name] during training”. The master’s player MUST agree to let you have one of his abilities before you can get it. You can put off learning a Special Ability if your 10 level study is soon coming to a close. (For example: you get a master at level 18. You can wait to get your level 25 Special Ability until you are level 28 for your copy instead of having to wait for the next Special Ability Level Guide perk at level 35.)
The second way to break the “no copy” rule is through character blood relation. For example, you may make an upgrade character that is the offspring or sibling of one of your own or a friend’s character (with your friend’s permission, of course). Blood relatives can share one ability. Unlike the previous example, sometimes it would make sense for the two abilities to be a pure copy-paste in Special Ability name and description.
The other rule that can sometimes be overlooked comes with Signature Abilities. A character only gets one of these, and at a ripe old level of 95! Many characters use this ability to make a powerful Action Ability that shows his true power through dominance of the physical world or a violent explosion of force. Signature Abilities can sometimes break the “no undodgable abilities” rule. This, of course, will be a matter of discussion on the Peer Review forums and will have to be okayed by a Staff member.
Absolute No-No’s and Things to Remember
Some of these have been mentioned above, but here is a more concise list of things that you cannot make as abilities!
You cannot copy any ability from another player, race, job class, elemental perk, or anywhere else! Your ability must be original.
You cannot have an ability that has more than one mechanical purpose.
You cannot make an ability specifically designed to counter another character or another character’s ability.
All abilities must be easily classified into one of the six categories described above. The classifications are Action, Reaction, Passive, Utility, Interrupt, and Preset.
You cannot use an Action Ability as a Special Attack that is unable to be dodged, even if the ability does not damage but only status.
Special Ability descriptions must be of sufficient detail. Shoot for at least 100 words, as any less may be denied due to description length alone.
All Special Abilities must be posted in the Peer Review forums for a period of no less than 72 hours. All complaints and critiques must be either sorted out or waved by a member of Staff before it is to be posted in the Pending Sessions forums.
No ability can permanently give you additional AP, increased SM, permanent boosts to Hit or Dodge SVS, permanent boosts to base or bonus damage, or a permanent boost to Physical Damage Reduction.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when writing or doing descriptions.
“Energy” and “elements” are different, and “forces” describes them both.
“Dodging” and “parrying” are different, and “avoidance” describes them both.
All rules that apply to Special Abilities also apply to Companion Abilities.