Enviornmental Stat Modifiers

[Water Bob]

I was reading in one of the supplements, about a town I'm using as my PC's home village, that the people who live there are typically taller and more hardy than others, even when compared to other Cimmerians. Some believe this to be due to the blood of the Titans that Crom defeated there, soaking into the ground and mixing with the water and the earth a the food and such. The skeptics believe that it might be due to the abundance of fresh water wells, rich earth, plenty of game, etc.

I took that and ran with it a bit and declared that the PCs would get a Titan Bonus, which is either a +1 STR or a +1 CON, player's choice.

What about adding other environmental modifiers to your game? This could be used to differintiate your "sandbox".


For example, the racial modifiers in the game are already good enough for general purposes. But, let's say you set up your sandbox in Cimmeria, the way I have, where your game is focussed in one general location. You can use enviornmental modifiers like this to make groups different from others.

Maybe the more savage hill clan, who've been known to be cannibals in the winter, get a -1 CON but a +1 DEX and +1 STR (player's choice). Then, there's a southern bardic type, known for their stories, who get either a +1 WIS or a +1 CHA,due to their culture.

See where I'm going with this?

Thoughts?

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

First off, I'd say that odd ability bonuses are a major faux pas. Either the difference is big enough to warrant a full +2, or it's not worth tracking.

Otherwise, what you're really doing is creating human subspecies, which is totally okay in my book.

 

[Water Bob]

First off, I'd say that odd ability bonuses are a major faux pas.

I don't think so. I didn't want the benefit enough to always inflate modifiers. If the PC is lucky, and his +1 gets him to an even number, he'll benefit from the bonus.

There is a choice to be made, so chances are that at least one of the stats is an odd number.

Plus, there are some pre-requisets for combat maneuvers that require a 13+ stat. This might help a character get that requirement.

Either the difference is big enough to warrant a full +2, or it's not worth tracking.

There's no tracking. This a permanent bonus to the character's stat, just like his racial adustments.

Otherwise, what you're really doing is creating human subspecies, which is totally okay in my book.

Excactly. The racial bonuses are on a macro level. What I'm talking about here is on a micro level and should be ignored if you have a normal campaign where the PCs are mobile, running across the lands of the Hyborian Age.

But, if you focus on a specific area for a while in your campaign, as I am doing with Cimmeria, then the differences in culture and peoples might be worth the trouble to specialize them with a +1 here and a -1 there.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

I don't think so. I didn't want the benefit enough to always inflate modifiers. If the PC is lucky, and his +1 gets him to an even number, he'll benefit from the bonus.

I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but this is really poor 3.X-era design; +1/-1 modifiers to stats immediately trips my "Doesn't understand the system" flag.

There's no tracking. This a permanent bonus to the character's stat, just like his racial adustments.

You misunderstood my point. When measuring racial modifiers, the game asks, "Is [Race A] meaningfully [better / worse] at [Stat] than [Race B]?"

Race B is usually the standard human baseline.

If the answer is "Yes, better, absolutely," then they get a +2 (or larger) bonus to that ability score.

If the answer is, "Well, they're really just a little bit better," then they get no bonus to that ability score.

They do not get a +1 to that score, because ability modifiers in the +1/-1 range should not exist; either the difference is meaningful, and deserves the full +2/-2 treatment and the attendant change in modifier, or it is not, and gets nothing.

EDIT: And, hey - this is just one guy's opinion on the internet. I won't be playing in your games, so if your players love the idea, go hog wild with it.

 

[kitcik]

I agree that this was the thinking used in creating 3.5 races, but I nonetheless agree with the OP's thinking that, in this case, +1 can work and I see no reason not to use it. The difference being, here you have a choice of stat to put it in, so you can on average generate an increase in bonus from one of the stats (based on random stats, it is 75% likely that at least one of them will be odd, and most times stats aren't random in that you can either point buy or assign random rolls to specific stats).

 

[Water Bob]

They do not get a +1 to that score, because ability modifiers in the +1/-1 range should not exist; either the difference is meaningful, and deserves the full +2/-2 treatment and the attendant change in modifier, or it is not, and gets nothing.

I do understand the system, and I didn't misunderstand your point.

But your comment about a +1/-1 modifier shouldn't exist is a bit extremeist, I think.

I know in my Conan d20, the RAW has the characters gaining +1 to any stat of the player's choice at 4th level. At 6th level, all six stats go up by +1. This cycle repeats at 8th, and 10th, and so on.

Are you saying that the game designers didn't understand the system are applied bad game design because they chose "+1"modifiers?

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

An odd number of ability increases is matched by an odd number of allowable inherent bonuses to stats, such that, at 20th-level, a character would have an overal +10 to 1 ability.

And this has always been a kind of kludgy fix, anyway - this is one point where the designers didn't do it right; they broke their own rules.

If Conan did away with the inherent bonuses, then they've missed the "evening" part of the assumed 3.X bonus structure.