Recent content by Thomas Shey

What in the world made you think I was only talking about D&D? And as far as that goes, its not like no D&D edition has never done a point purchase for attributes; both 3e and 4e did. I gather 5e has at least arrays, which are a more rigid point distribution.

Because mine had the problem, and as I recall I bought that hardcover as soon as it was available to do so. I wouldn't say it was impossible that there were two print runs in very short order and I got the second, but they'd have had to sold out on the first printing astonishingly fast for it...

Yup. And some people avoid games with psychological disadvantage mechanisms for the same reason. I think I'm going to present my position on this clearly because it may have gotten lost in the weeds along the way. 1. People who have extremely low attributes in an area (lower than some games...

Well, in some cases, its not a hypothetical. People trying to sidestep their in-character social or intellectual lacks has not exactly been a massive rarity in the hobby. At least in my case, those are the only cases I'm really talking about.

I'll note you've hopped systems and made an assumption I was never making in my posts ("rolled"). I again ask, how intrinsically is a Hero player who takes a Disadvantage and one that sets an attribute low different? In both cases they've supplied themselves with more points for some things...

Wisdom was always the oddest-man-out of the traditional D&D stats anyway. Its not a coincidence you virtually never see it in systems that aren't D&D derivatives.

As I averred, its a particularly dumb or uncharismatic character who is regularly being played as smarter or smoother than they are because the player took advantage of them as a dump stat, but doesn't want to reflect that in any way. Now if the table expectation is "they just get to", that's...

I suspect its only going to be viewed as relevant in most cases in extreme cases, some of which may not even be able to occur in many modern games.

It does have virtues and flaws, however, which can still force players to play their characters in ways they wouldn't, which was my point. "Only the player should decide how their character decides things" is a position any number of games do not share in various places; they aren't usually...

I must point out this thread is not only about D&D.

The problem is always going to be that in the D&D sphere at least, combat usually takes up too much of the play-space to leave too large a gap amonst characters. The whole approach the game has taken for a very long time would have to change to make leaving the fighter too far ahead of that.

My guess is it would be the first printing, but if I even still have mine, gods know where it is.

If I recall, it wasn't so much individual pages separating as the bundle of pages partially or totally separating from the cover.

How is that functionally different from the way Psychological Limits or things like Berserk could force behavior, though? Both of them are traits on a character that can force behavioral actions. The psych limits may be spelled out more, but in the end they're still things a GM has a right...

There's almost always more splitting you can do with attributes if you're of a mood; my college roomate and I once sat down and split out the original D&D set into, I want to say something like 21 attributes? I know there were at least three for each one.