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[Egan_BW]

Perhaps it could be made so non-combat skills have combat applications? Like Handi letting you tinker or maintain your weapons, giving you a slight edge over combat only characters, or Med allowing you to judge potential weak points?

Building on this, you could make all your skills wierd so that they each have both combat and non-combat applications, so your [Bladed Melee] skill is also your [Medical Surgery] skill, and you call it something strange and edgy like [Perseverance] or whatever.

[Doomblade187]

My Stat Suggestions:
Have each weapon type be it's own skill. i.e. Light Melee or Polearm or Marksman. Would force specialization if you wanted. Alternately you could just do a con/uncon/exo skill group like in ER.

As for physical, I suport having the ability to level the equivalent of stamina to allow for longer missions. This is partly because I want to play a scout who goes on rather unsafe long-distance missions and who may die and never be seen again as a human. Speaking of which, are the PCs going to be human? I was assuming so, but just wanted to check.

On the corruption front, I support the idea of being able to cleanse corruption, but never fully- once you'receive tainted, you always will be, save for miracle equivalents.

[Radio Controlled]

How will the leveling process work, anyway?  We were only going to have one mission at a time, and each mission would only have a handful of the players on it--if we use ER's level system, where you gain a level after each mission, then I could easily see some people still being at level zero or one or so when we start raising the starting level due to progress.  But if we use a system where you levelup by practice or something, this could result in lots of absurdly high-level people existing because they just skipped all missions and spent all their time training.

Not there yet but I hope to have it based on something related to kills and what you kill.

As people said, if it's only/mostly kills that grant xp then you might get that thing like in online shooters where people only care about their K/D ratio and don't play supportive roles or even pretend to do the map objectives.

I think party wide xp bonuses based on what objectives were accomplished might work better (fosters teamplay), though great individual accomplishments could still be rewarded (though I'd reward those more with money or loot than with xp/levels).

[Moopli]

Most XP through completing missions/sub-mission objectives, some XP for impressive feats and general skill use. I'd prefer that killing generally gets rewarded mainly with loot (not money, because I doubt monsters are composed of fungible, liquid units of economic exchange).

Maybe someone who crafts new weapons could gain some experience in their crafting skill(s) not only by making stuff, but more importantly by seeing their stuff in action, or seeing the results, and learning from it all. This could extend to other skills too, to essentially give you a training system where you only get real results from your training once your training proves useful in action. It could work for fighting, where you spar, or practice shooting, etc, but you don't really know if you will hold up well under the pressure of real fights until you try, etc. It could also work for medical skill, or scientific skill, or other more cerebral skills, where you might have found a book somewhere and studied it but putting it in practice is key to actually getting better.

As for how granular skills should be, maybe you can do something kinda like Omega Legion, with general skills and more narrow specializations.

On an unrelated note, thematically, why do we need to have a 'holy city'? I'd much rather that the home base be just one of many villages of people scrabbling to survive within the city, instead of some special place that sends forth crusaders to conquer the fell forces of chaos. I guess our players could still affectionately call their home village the 'holy city', maybe it's the kind of thing that gives them a feeling of having a purpose; but I don't want it to be some amazing place or anything.

[Xantalos]

Maybe levelling up should be more deeds-based? Like the more outstanding deeds you do, the faster you level up, but that puts you more at risk. It could grant some level of play-based customization if you, for example, killed a bunch of creatures by throwing rocks at them or something and then any objects thrown by you became more deadly. Or if you were the medic and did a lot of stitching people together and eventually became able to make use of other things than just needle and thread to fix up people or do exotic transplants and stuff.

[MidnightJaguar]

That could produce some interesting results: Oh you need a new leg? Well hold on a sec while I go fetch a bunch of rusty cans and spare parts... What do you mean I can just use one of the pre made ones, do you want me to kill you? I built my first robot leg out of rusty cans and spare parts and ever since then I just can't bring myself to use the inferior equipment that the store sells… Wait why are hopping away I still need to put on that new leg.

Not to say that conversation would be bad. 

[Ozarck]

NJW, the problem with that is the fact Tinker is exceptionally sporadic and random in its power creep.  You can go a long time with no real improvement, only to have a burst of vastly more OP stuff all at once.  It's not stable enough to use as a game mechanic.

Piecewise, as we get deeper into the city, will loot quality improve, enabling us to make better equipment?  Or will we prefer to stay in the outskirts during loot-collection missions?

Also, for a site I'd like to see... a legitimate grand holy cathedral, of massive proportions.  Especially if it's unusually pristine, and seemingly uncorrupted at first.  Or perhaps it could be the central hive of evil in an area, which we'd usually destroy in some fashion, but the church commands us to purify it due to its significance as a holy site.

a formerly beloved location, renowned for it's charitable work and defense of the doctrines of holiness in an era of greed and indifference, turned to the enslavement of the destitute who sought her for aid, and providing justification for all manner of wickedness in a city of licentiousness. Holiness calls us to bring Glory to the name that is Good by casting out wickedness from such a site, restoring the dignity of the cathedral and the Honor of the Good. that'd be cool with me.

[Toaster]

What about a merit-based XP system, not unlike the token system in (early) ER?  Give everyone an "at least you tried" minimum, but the people who do well get more.  Would you as GM be willing to stick to that system?  With the smaller active player count, it'd be easier to administer.

[Whisperling]

You could spin the death-based leveling as more of an exposure type thing. So, killing demons would release a sort of energy which affects everyone in the vicinity rather than just the guy who dealt the killing blow.

If you wanted to give individual exploits extra significance, the aforementioned energy could have a tendency to stick to those the demon hated most in life, whether that was the big, tough guy who crushed its head or the medic who saved the day by preventing a bunch of deaths.

[piecewise]

Man, I'm getting tired of having teeth drilled out.

Hmm.  If the basis is primarily kills, then will combat-focused characters have an advantage over support characters like medics?  Or will you award XP for successful skill checks done for something useful, like a medic healing a buddy, or a handiwork specialist opening an alternate route?

Honestly I don't know if there will be dedicated non-combat units or what. It doesn't make much sense to send a medic into a world where everything wants to kill him. Makes more sense to train a soldier to patch himself up. I dunno though, thats still in the distance.

My Stat Suggestions:
Have each weapon type be it's own skill. i.e. Light Melee or Polearm or Marksman. Would force specialization if you wanted. Alternately you could just do a con/uncon/exo skill group like in ER.

As for physical, I suport having the ability to level the equivalent of stamina to allow for longer missions. This is partly because I want to play a scout who goes on rather unsafe long-distance missions and who may die and never be seen again as a human. Speaking of which, are the PCs going to be human? I was assuming so, but just wanted to check.

On the corruption front, I support the idea of being able to cleanse corruption, but never fully- once you'receive tainted, you always will be, save for miracle equivalents.

The idea I'm toying with right now, without any real depth of thought, is having weapon damage related to the weapon and your stats, while you get different abilities based off weapon skill, which is broken up into categories like sword, spear, polearm, fists, etc. Higher skill means better special moves you can do. That and maybe some innate moves. Like, weapon moves would require you to be using the weapon to use them, but innate ones could be done whenever. For instance, I had an idea for a class called a "Zealot"  who fought with their fists, wore no armor and had massive faith reserves. So they might get the innate skill "Bulwark of faith" which let them divert damage from their HP to their faith instead, and the weapon skill "Fist of god" that lets them drain faith to directly power up a blow.

But this is all just me brain storming so don't take anything as final.

As per corruption, The idea is that you only get corrupted if you hit 0 faith. But faith can be regen'd via killing monsters or using specific items, or by just returning to a safe zone and resting a while. Maybe hitting up the church, you know. But corruption takes the form -as I'm considering now- as a permanent physical mutation. And with that mutation comes an innate ability. The idea being that the demon you become is the sum of all your skills and mutations (plus a little bit extra oomph, from ORO)

[syvarris]

Even if all support units are essentially multiclass people, taking support skills would come at the cost of killing power, thereby limiting XP.  If I have a choice between getting the ability to have a +3 to stabbing, or a +2 to stabbing and a +1 to healing, the latter is generally worse for me personally.

A system I've always liked is the one we used after the Heph Defense and Boarding.  We listed what useful things we accomplished, and were awarded tokens based upon that.  I think this would be a good way to award XP--after a mission, people can say what they did which was helpful, and you can award XP based off of that.

Alternatively, seperate combat skills and support skills, so that everyone gets equal numbers of both.  That way we're guaranteed not to end up having only two medics out of forty players.

[Corsair]

could do it similar to battlefield where medics/engineers/snipers get points for revives/repair/spotting which are comparable to getting a kill in points so could those support type actions have similar Xp rewards for a standard kill or something. The use of people who are specialised in providing those sorts of roles in ORO would be justified by having instead of a good soldier who dabbles in herbalism you have a good herbalist who is a dabbling soldier; competent but not what they are there for. Same could be said for those with armouring skills to repair weapons/armour on the fly; a good soldier with no weapon won't be very good would they?
An alternate way of doing this is to have sub-classes like herbalist, smith and so on. These could be primarily used in the down-time between missions and sometimes on missions as well giving more flexibility in character builds and customization.

[Aigre Excalibur]

Even if all support units are essentially multiclass people, taking support skills would come at the cost of killing power, thereby limiting XP.  If I have a choice between getting the ability to have a +3 to stabbing, or a +2 to stabbing and a +1 to healing, the latter is generally worse for me personally.

A system I've always liked is the one we used after the Heph Defense and Boarding.  We listed what useful things we accomplished, and were awarded tokens based upon that.  I think this would be a good way to award XP--after a mission, people can say what they did which was helpful, and you can award XP based off of that.

Alternatively, seperate combat skills and support skills, so that everyone gets equal numbers of both.  That way we're guaranteed not to end up having only two medics out of forty players.

Performance should be evaluated as a team. A medic shouldn't be missing out for patching people up rather than actively beating things to death.

[Egan_BW]

Alternativly, we have no medics, and everyone speciallizes in murder.

[AoshimaMichio]

Alternativly, we have no medics, and everyone speciallizes in murder.

Seems sensible approach. Because everyone's goal is to murder the city.