Add assets

[sixfold-origami]

What problem does the current design create?

There isn't a good system to represent "things that a character has access to, or is otherwise connected to"

For example:

• Having contacts in the city underground
• Owning a laboratory
• Being in good standing with the church
• Owning a car

What solution would you like?

• Add an "asset" system
• Each character may pick up to 2 at character creation
• These can be changed during rolling respec, just like any other character option
• Provide a fairly robust list of sample assets to choose from, but allow custom assets with table approval. (In theory, these should be fairly easy to pick if you have a good idea of your character's backstory.)
• Both the players and the worldspeaker may invoke these to cause things to happen
  • For example, a player may have their contacts in the city underground help them find a skilled lockpick in the city
  • But, the Worldspeaker may have those contacts drag the player into a gang territory skirmish at an inopportune time

What alternative(s) have you considered?

• Making these invokable only by the player, but having a point system for their size. This has several problems
  • Very difficult to rigorously define how "big" or "influential" a given asset is. Both in general, and for any campaign in specific
  • Leaves money on the table: the symmetric approach serves the secondary purpose of giving the WS interesting tools to use that relate to the players' backstory.
  • The symmetric approach is better in line with the general philosophy of the system

Additional context

It would be easy for this system to get confused with exploration feats/features, so some space in the rulebook should be dedicated to clearly defining the difference.

• Exploration feats/features are things you can do, or things that you know. They're inherent to your character, and they can't just be taken away or lost
• Assets are things that you have, have access to, or are conencted to. They are external to your character, and can be gained and lost
• Provide The Rosharan Test for assets and features: if your character was transported to Roshar (or any other arbitrary fantasy world) with only what they can carry, would they still have these things? If yes, then they're feats. If no, they're assets.

Open questions

• What to do about gaining/losing assets during a campaign? This is a very natural thing to do, but do we need to provide balance guidance for this?
• Party assets are a natural pattern- these are things that the party has access to collectively, but not necessarily individually. Personally, I don't think this is actually very interesting. The distinction mostly boils down to tracking minutiae.