CAREER PATHS
In addition to specific professions (see below), you can choose whether you want to play as a Freelancer or a Fellowship or Guild member. Just as your career is constantly evolving throughout the game, so might your career plans as well. Thus, if you ever decide that being a lone wolf isn't fun anymore, you can apply to join a fellowship or a guild or even choose to start your own. Similarly, if you're fed up with being a fellowship or guild member, you can go back to basics and become a solo thief again. All three possible career paths have their advantages and disadvantages, obviously, but the even more important thing to remember is that neither a freelancer, nor a guild, could survive without cooperating with each other from time to time. As with many things in the thieving world, it's often a matter of balance and interconnectivity…
The Three Choices
Freelancer
- For the lone wolf in every one of us, it might be desirable for
some people to focus on working as independents. On the plus side, no
hierarchy and no responsibilities to others will be dragging you down
in your professional thieving career. On the downside, you're
predictably all alone for everything and have to fend for yourself
and your daily needs without any hope of external backup. There's
quite a few freelancers operating in Melza and Aporue, but being one
is not as inexpensive or easily manageable as it might look at face
value, so the absolute numbers of such thieves are actually quite
small. Long-term veterans are quite few and far between, since most
freelancers either retire early, join a group of thieves, or… well,
just don't make it.
Fellowship
- Fellowships are something of a middle ground and halfway house
between being a complete freelancer and being a member of a guild.
They can most easily be described as “clubs of professional
thieves, smaller than established guilds, and lacking the more
official structure of guilds”. Fellowships are thus much less
formal in their power structure and hierarchy(-ies) than a real
guild, and this goes hand in hand with the number of their members
usually being in the single digits. Even the biggest fellowships
never exceed more than 15 or so members. Fellowships are inherently
small organisation. And while it might not seem like that,
fellowships can be quite numerous, generally much more than guilds
(due to lower demands for infrastructure) and quite a bit more than
freelancers (as freelancers have it tough, due to not being able to
rely on the advantage of numbers). If you're unsure of running a
guild from the get-go, or you simply prefer the greater simplicity
and casualness of a looser club, a fellowship might be the right
choice for you. As you'd expect, there are both advantages and
disadvantages to a fellowship. The plus side is that it has actual
membership (impossible with a freelancer) and this allows it to be
more sustainable in times of need, when mutual assistance among
thieves can prove absolutely crucial. In addition, the informal and
more relaxed nature of a fellowship makes it somewhat easier to
govern and its members often tend to have a greater sense of “being
like a family”. However, the often overlooked but ever-present
downside to a fellowship is that exact same low number of members,
which can make a fellowship vulnerable to a better organised rival,
especially if it's a gang or other criminal organisation from outside
the more tolerant thieving underworld. And last but not least, the
much less formal structure can make fellowships die prematurely due
to infighting and other internal power struggles, as well as more
vulnerable to the aforementioned external efforts at breaking it up.
Guild
- Guilds are the largest, most institutional and economically and
power-wise most stable organisations of professional thieves in
Aporue, Melza included. There is some overlap between a fellowship
and a guild, but to be perfectly frank, it's purely a matter of
developmental stages of such organisations. Some successful or
expansion-minded fellowships tend to increase their membership and
influence over time, to the point where they are simply too big to
function in the established ways of a fellowship. At that stage,
sooner or later, one has to cave in, do some changes, maybe establish
an in-guild charter, secretly buy new safehouses for the increasing
membership, “move upmarket” in a city's thieving underworld, etc.
Times change, conditions change, decisions need to be made. If you
make it all the way to establishing a guild, congratulations ! But
it's not so straightforward a thing: While on the plus side,
establishing a guild means an extra haven of stability to
professional thieves, the obvious downsides are that such an
organisation needs to be fairly long-lived already at its start, and
as a larger body is harder to manage, more difficult to keep alive,
and is even more prone to attract the unwaned attention of rivals in
the thieving business - or worse, attract the attention of other
organisations in the criminal underworld, one's often seeking to
blunt a guild's influence and successes. Pick your poison. Running a
guild is great, it can be a real passion, but it always comes with
more than one catch and one has to learn how to fend for his
organisation and fellow members.
----
PROFESSIONS
Unlike in most RPGs and RPs, your profession (a.k.a. specialisation) is not the usual rigid "class". It's more of a “school of specialisation” and will be among those things that will evolve the most during a game (even moreso than your decision of whether you want to partake in a guild or do your job alone).
a.) The concept explained
Professions evolve...
Professions are rather flexible in this RPG. You can take as many as three professions for your own character, and he or she will specialise along those lines. However, the best numerical choice is just one or two professions at any given time. You can go for whatever professions combos you want, but certain combinations offer certain advantages (not endless ones, but they are still advantages). Just as with your general career path choice, you can decide to alter the course of your professions at any time during the game. Just don't forget that it's not an instantaneous process. If you've played the entire RP up to that point as a bureaucrat of your thieves' guild, you won't change into a skilled cat burglar over night because you've decided to.
Professions all have their place...
Do not underestimate the less flashy seeming professions. Every single profession has its place in this RP's world, and in the more teamwork-focused segments, the “badass field agent” thieves will often be crippled without the “mission command” ones who do all the brainy and planning stuff.
b.) Player character professions
This
page provides an overview of all specialisations and professions that
are available to player characters. As the game/RP focuses on
characters from the world of professional thieving, these occupations
have their place primarily within the workings of a freelancer's or
guild's mundane chores and missions.
For basic information on how specialisations work, see Specialisations Explained.
Work in progress.
Žiadne komentáre:
Zverejnenie komentára