Just going over OLD and NEW and confused about the races attribute stat modifiers

Stacie GmrGrl · Nov 25, 2017

I'm really just now looking at these and I'm seeing that most of the races in OLD have a lot more Stat modifiers than their NEW cousins. Orcs and Smallfolk get a total of +7 to their modifiers (and the average of the OLD races seems to be +6 to their total modifiers), and the Spartans in NEW get a +3 total and most races in NEW have a total of +4 to their stat modifiers.

This leads me to asking a design question but what goes into why these races seem to have a bit of a disparity between them. And Orcs really get a +3 modifier to INT?

Fortuitous · Nov 25, 2017

I can't speak on the reason for the disparity but I can attest as to why Orcs get a +3 to Int. Int isn't Intelligence. It's intuition. As in a quality that a tribe of hunters and gatherers and barbarians would have in spades. I don't think by default orcs are supposed to be the dumb brute race - they're just primal and primitive.

And it's always worth remembering that OLD and NEW are both generic systems designed to be customized to the world they are being run in. Honestly, one of the first things you probably should do is take a pass over the races and restat them to suit your own world and campaign.

Morrus · Nov 25, 2017

Yeah, orcs are cunning, and perceptive; and they have a great sense of smell!

Initial attribute adjustments of a point or two are very, very minor. There's not much difference between a race with +4 total and one with +7 - an extra attribute point doesn't mean much. Far less than an exploit (which in the Racebulding Engine costs 4 attribute points). It's the cumulative total of race and careers where it starts to mount up and make a difference. For that reason, it's more telling to look at what the race's largest attribute adjustment is.

For example, Clones (in NEW) get +1 to all attributes except LUC, PSI, and REP. That sounds like a lot, but it's only +1 in each - it doesn't make that much difference. A race with +3 in one attribute is more powerful than one with +1 in each of five attributes, because that +3 makes more of a difference than the +1s do.