Keywords are yet another approach to the problem of describing character skills.
In the very early days, in old D&D, we started out with the three basic character classes of Fighting Man, Cleric and Magic User. The level of skill was determined by the character's level in his profession. There is a sense in which Fighting Man, Cleric, and Magic User were the first keywords.
In the interests of allowing for variation between fighters, etc; skill based subsystems were quickly added. This culminated in the conceptually elegant, but in practice complicated, RQ/Chaosium and GURPS systems that had nothing corresponding to character class. The problem with this was that both GM and player had to more or less on the fly make sure that characters were balanced and had all the skills. The skill list had to be reasonably comprehensive. This turned out to be a substantial burden for both GM's and players, resulting in character creation taking a long time, etc.
For Hero Wars/HeroQuest, the designers wanted character creation to be fast and simple. It also had to be something the new player could easily understand. So they brought back the "package of skills" concept that lay beneath the original D&D concept of character classes. When you say that a character has a certain keyword, like "Lunar Citizen", you're really saying he has the skills {and attitudes} of a typical lunar citizen. This means that the player creating the character doesn't have to know at the time of character creation exactly what these skills and attitudes are, and he doesn't have the bookkeeping problem of tracking them individually. Unlike the original D&D character class system, a character can have multiple keywords - Lunar Citizen, Soldier, Deezola Novitiate, etc.
So that, as I understand it, is the game design reason for the concept of keyword skills. To use them, instead fo a skill name such as spear and shield combat, call for either spear and shield combat or soldier as the GM, or ask if the keyword applies if you are a player.
ttrotsky2 <TTrotsky_at_...> wrote: Jane:
When I'm writing them for Heroes of Malkion, or whatever, I tend to think along the lines of 95-99%. Abilities that it would be quite unusual for someone not to have, but acknowledging that exceptions will always exist. 'Drive Car' for modern European/American society would be an example.
> You can
> always explicitly not take them, after all: the
> typical Heortling may have "fear dragons", but how
> many PCs choose to take it?
Personality Traits are different, in that they are explicitly optional, so I don't regard those as anywhere near universal. Those I use for stereotyping. For instance, it would be far more common to encounter a Seshnelan who is not Pious than one who cannot Assess Social Standing (an ability it would be unhealthy to lack in Seshnela, one suspects).
--
Trotsky
Gamer and Skeptic
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