Will there be a way to play Defiance with a GM, who could write their own campaign for the players, and allow the players to make their own heroes? Cant seem to find any info on that E.g an Adventurers Companion book like Dungeon Saga Cheers
It's probably one of the many discussions buried in the kickstarter comment section. The problem with rules for custom heroes is that unless you spend a lot of effort on them, you end up with something like the Infinity Spec Ops rules (or the Battletech mech design rules...)*. If you want custom heroes that are relatively balanced compared to the box heroes, you have to be willing to adjust things by hand, and for something like that it's less work and more fun for everyone else if they just produce more heroes that you can use for examples. * The Spec Ops rules are fine if everyone has a spec ops, so they're all getting the same options. But all of the effort spent in building a spec ops is in finding the useful combinations, particularly the ones that work better. With that sort of system you can't really say "The box heroes are comparable to X number of design points." Disclaimer: I haven't seen Adventurer's Companion, and apologize in advance and/or retroactively if that system looks like Infinity's Spec Ops system.
It looks like most of the character advancement comes through the "talent trees" so homebrewing characters should be fairly easy. Want a Dao Fei hero? Take Qiang Gao and swap the leadership skill tree for Uma's Camouflage & Stealth tree. Crane? Swap his heavy weapons tree for Cadin's close combat.
It's fairly simple. Just use the profiles already in place but apply it to a custom hero (They seem to be covering archetypes). If you want more custom heroes, just follow the same rules and style used for the actual heroes. Combat would be settle using the Defiance game itelf, the GM would controll all enemy actions. You can even look up the RPG for more inspiration and ideas. As a dungeon crawler, it's relatively easy to build a story around it. Not like trying to make a full campaign from Monopoly.
The difficulty here is that somewhat invalidates the Agro system which is the basis on which the Alert level increases and is key to the behaviour of some enemies and heroes. I'm not saying that it's a bad idea but the rules would need a reworking in order to accommodate a GM taking control of the enemies instead of the AI deck.
I'm reminded of the old rationale used by Privateer Press on custom warcasters. Either they end up too powerful for whatever reason and no one uses the regular ones. Or the system is so watered down no one bothers to use the custom ones at all. Remember: When everyone is special, NO ONE is special!
Once we have everything in hand, which I think is up to 12 or 16 heroes. Creating a relatively balanced hero ought not to be to hard. As pointed out above, you can borrow much of what you need.
If the Kickstarter gets to 850.000€, the Platinum pledge will come with 16 heroes (unless there are more to be unlocked). It will indeed be a sample big enought to give us the tools to design our own heroes.
I'm hoping that in addition to the host of heroes to compare, they will also provide some base graphics (card format & background) for making your own heroes, equipment, etc.
