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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wulf Ratbane" data-source="post: 1563995" data-attributes="member: 94">Although it certainly wouldn't have fit my design criteria for Grim Tales, I'll consider a few things for the future that are a bit further outside the existing structure of d20.But consider, any description you add as a "hand wave" will still have the underpinnings of d20. There are some things in the combat summary that might work-- fatigue/exhaustion/nausea-- but nothing as granular as ability scores. You've got a sliding scale between very crunchy and very descriptive, but to be fully utile, even at the most descriptive end of the scale you probably want some crunchy d20 "compatibility," for lack of a better term.I think the many strata of Insanities listed in the book demonstrate this design constraint. Grainy crunch is part and parcel of  d20; and Grim Tales is particularly so. Not a lot of fluff in there covering up the rules. Stripping away the descriptive to lay bare the rules beneath is pretty much the driving philosophy.Definitely a concern, though I am not sure that every wannabe spellcaster will have the luxury of pumping their Strength. You can control this early on by keeping the point buy low (personally I like to just hand out the elite array and be done with it) but you can also control it very effectively just by keeping magic so rare that it's impractical to assign a big Strength score to a Smart hero (or vice versa).You could tie the spell burn to Wisdom or Charisma (to represent a slow withdrawal into catatonia or loss of sanity) but then you double penalize the divine and wild adepts.Of course then instead of the muscle mage syndrome, you have the wise mage syndrome, or the pretty mage syndrome, or the fast mage syndrome, tough mage syndrome, etc.This sort of brings us back around to Bryon's dissatisfaction with tying it to attributes in the first place... Wulf</blockquote>

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