WOIN Idea for an optional skill-emphasized/attribute-deemphasized character creation & advancement path

[TheHirumaChico]

Let me emphasize again that this is just a purely an optional idea that I'm kicking around for discussion potential future use in WOIN. I'm not suggesting that WOIN be officially modified based on my upcoming suggestion. I am a GM who has been running my campaign using WOIN NOW for just over 5 years. I have not run NEW or OLD, so my perspective is distinctly through the NOW lens, though I do cross-reference the other two core rulebooks pretty frequently. My preference and desire is to run a relatively realistic modern action RPG set on essentially modern day Earth. My players and I do like our action cinematic, so we're fine with Cinematic Mode and LUC and many of the somewhat reality-stretching, but trope-consistent exploits. But while my game world has some super-science stuff, there is no supernatural/magic/mystical stuff, so that also means no CHI and no bullet-catching or walk-on-water type exploits. OK, enough background.

What has been bugging me a bit is how on p. 16 in the NOW Core Rulebook there are a couple of sentences about benchmarks for attributes, "with a score of with 4 in each physical, mental, and personal attribute being roughly average for an adult human." It goes on to say that "An attribute of 12 typically represents performance exhibited by top world-class athletes or legendary geniuses. Einstein and Sherlock Holmes exhibit a score of 12 in their Logic attributes, while Adolf Hitler and Rasputin have scores of 11 or 12 in Charisma, although player characters and NPCs in N.O.W. sometimes exceed these values." Remember that an attribute of 10-14 means 4d6. Yet, as my players' human characters are currently Grade 10 and on the cusp of Grade 11, two of them have at least two attributes at 12+ while the other has one attribute at 15 (!) and another at 10. Two of them also have a 3rd attribute at 9, so when they go to Grade 11, that will mean 3 attributes at 10+. NOTE: These are not scores in REP or LUC, but what I call the core 7 physical attributes of STR, AGI, END, INT, LOG, WIL, and CHA. This means that the PCs are generally always better than the avg. human at any skill check that uses one of their peak attributes, and much better with 1-6 skill ranks, making them seem more like Khan Noonian Singhs than Kirks. So, the current career path progression makes the PCs Einstein-level paragons in not one, but two going on three, physical attributes, which seems less realistic than I had originally intended for my setting.

Therefore, in my future plans for potentially new campaigns using WOIN NOW, I'm thinking of making the following adjustments:
- Heritages will probably be unchanged and still add 3 Skill ranks (must be 3 different).
- Origin careers can only be taken once and will provide 4 Attribute points (3 core physical plus 1 LUC/REP/CHI) and 4 Skill ranks (must be 4 different), and will age at 1d6+12 instead of the more common 2d6+6.
- All other careers after an Origin career will add 2 Attribute points and 4 skill ranks (must be 4 different).

This means a Grade 5 character using my optional path structure will get 13-19 Attribute points (15 for human heritage) and 23+ Skill ranks vs. 21-27 Attribute points (23 for human heritage) and 13+ Skill ranks, not including the base 27 attribute points for starting at 3 in each Attribute except CHI. It will still allow for some wonky focused builds where a Grade 5 character could get 1-2 Attributes up to 10+, possibly even one at 14. Example for the 14: A human heritage PC with CHA +2 and one other +1, an Origin with CHA +1, and 4 subsequent Careers with CHA +2 (i.e., Diplomat, Performer, Socialite). But that will be a more narrowly focused character with not nearly as much going on in other Attributes. Compare this to the standard path in which it is possible to have a Grade 5 character with two Attributes at 10+. With my suggested optional change, at Grade 10, a PC would have received 23-29 Attribute points, roughly what a PC receives now at Grade 5 using the standard path, but with 43+ Skill ranks, as compared to the standard path where a PC would have received 41-47 Attribute points and 23+ Skill ranks. *I say 23+ Skill ranks because of exploits that give bonus Skill ranks.

The optional path will still allow for an Usain Bolt-type character build, but this will equate to a character that has put some serious Skill ranks into running, along with their best attributes being STR and AGI. To my mind, this better equates to the Olympic sprinter that has had to work hard and focus their training to achieve paragon-level capabilities, like moving Speed 10+. It also allows for more opportunities to take advantage of Equipment Quality bonuses by having more Skill ranks to utilize.

OK, enough for now. I will end this long wall of text and open the floor to the comments of my fellow WOIN GMs and players, hopefully without too much derision. Thanks for reading this far.

 

[lichmaster]

If it's just a matter of perspective (i.e. how goods character of a certain grade are wrt the "standard" population), wouldn't it be much simpler to increase the threshold of peak human prowess?
For instance, you could say that Einstein would have a LOG score of 15 or even 21, and similarly for his physics skill. This way you only change the context but leave everything else as it is.

If instead you'd like the equipment to be more prominent by having more ranks in skills, you could also try allowing the characters to use a quality bonus of 1 or 2 tiers above their skill (e.g with 2 dice you could allow for +3d6 items instead of just +2d6).

 

[lichmaster]

The other thing you could do is to give "legendary NPCs" some unique exploit that boosts their skill to the moon on some occasions. For instance, Einstein could have some exploit that turns every dice of his physics skill into an exploding dice, or such that each die counts at least as a 4

 

[TheHirumaChico]

Those are good suggestions @lichmaster, all worthy of consideration as ways one might address my observations. However, there is still the issue of the high attributes making characters very broadly competent in any situation where a check using one of their peak attributes is called for. If one wants their campaign's PCs to be really good at many things with little to no training, then the R.A.W. is going to be just fine. But it's not quite as realistic as I'd like my setting to feel.

I do want my players' characters to be awesome and enjoyable to play, but in ways that don't break the overall feel quite as much. I want my PCs to continue as an interdependent team, so in the future at higher levels, I don't want them each to evolve into individual hypercompetent James Bond's or Ethan Hunt's. In their current form, the attribute dice are making up the significant majority of their overall dice pools, where I feel (and I admit it's just my feeling and desire for my setting) that reaching or exceeding their MDPs should require more training.

 

[Suskeyhose]

Something I'd like to point out is that while 4 is the "average" score, that's likely in the sense of the "median" score. That is to say: for any given specific attribute, the majority of humans have a score of 4.

Critically, that does not meant that any human is 4s across the board.

The guidelines that are given for skills and attributes indicate that an average unexceptional person a couple years into their chosen profession that they have trained for will have 3 points in one or more relevant skills, and will have a score of at least 6 in the relevant attribute for their job. This results in the average unexceptional person in the age range from 20 to 35 having 5d6 in their profession.

If you then take into account that most NPCs are accredited with not taking their careers at a fast pace, this likely means that the average joe off the street won't be much better than that unexceptional person, even as they reach a greater age. But that "unexceptional person" is just going to be a 55 year old plumber who was content with his paycheck who never put great effort in, never got promoted, never tried to start his own business, and is looking to just coast on by to an uninspired retirement supported by social security. Anyone who is more motivated than that will have less or no time between their career grades. A woman born into the middle class in a racial minority who rose to become a CEO likely has no time between career grades and likely rolled low on most of her age rolls, because she had to fight against the systems to get to where she is.

If you look at the types of people that an adventurer is likely to run into, they are extremely likely to skew towards the higher end of the spectrum, with attribute scores in the 10-14 range for even secondary attributes, and 6-9 points in at least one relevant skill to their job. And the level of this just goes up as the players make themselves particularly exceptional.

A relevant thing to remember here is that PCs have two advantages over NPCs in the "default setting," both of which will skew them towards being exceptional characters at young ages, if you don't change your GMing style. First, PCs always have the option to have their careers "densely packed," they don't have gap years after chargen. This will skew them towards the best of the best NPCs. Second, they get adventure experience, and generally at a pretty good rate with about 4 sessions required to get a new grade if you are following the basic guidelines for XP.

It also appears that NOW in general is somewhat outdated in various ways. If you look at the "What Attribute Scores Mean" sidebar in OLD on page 17, likely Einstein would be considered an "Exceptional Genius" and be attributed with a score from 15 to 20 in LOG, with a REP score in the same category or even higher, and likely a similar score in physics.

If you put this all together, I think this paints a picture where the PCs are still most definitely exceptional, but not quite as much as it might feel given the OP's math.

Personally, I have a few small recommendations for how to GM WOiN and one houserule for how to make player characters feel a little less exceptional, without removing the feeling of growth that players get.

First, the houserule: no career except an origin can give +2 to a single attribute. All careers which currently give +2 to an attribute need to have it redistributed by the GM and documented before character creation. The only way to boost attributes faster than this should be through exploits like you see with the Diabolist in OLD where it grants +2 to MAG but makes you take 1 point of damage any time you do something magical. Maybe the existing careers that give +2 should pick up a similar exploit.

Next, give your adventures some space. Between individual arcs allow years to pass, and let your players buy grades with time. If you're feeling generous then allow them to pack that time tightly with careers, but if you want your players not to feel particularly exceptional then have them pre-roll the time for the next career before they choose it and if that'd take them beyond the number of downtime years you have planned, don't let them take the career. Only fudge this if the spread of MDP values between your players gets to be more than 1. It's OK to have even many grades' worth of difference, as long as that MDP value doesn't get out of whack, then you start to see the balancing issues you get in other games when dealing with wildly imbalanced characters.

Finally, consider using the slow XP progression by making grades cost 20 times the new grade instead of 10 times. This will mean that it will rapidly become far too expensive to use XP to grade up, and a better use of XP will be to patch up holes in characters by taking new skills or bumping the occasional focused skill or attribute up, while grades will be provided by the downtime between arcs.

 

[TheHirumaChico]

Thanks @Suskeyhose for the well-thought out response and insights. Once again, interesting to see another difference between NOW and OLD, this time in terms of what is considered an "exceptional genius".

 

[Suskeyhose]

I think the last thing I'd have to say to wrap up my contribution to this discussion on what "vanilla WOiN" gives you in terms of what NPCs can do based on attribute and skill levels and how that stacks up to PCs is that if you take the attributes and skills that I listed above, that gives you that the attribute contributes slightly more to the rolls than the skill does, usually by about 1 die. That means it only takes high quality equipment for skill+equipment to equal or outshine attributes, and if you take into account the -2d6 for improvised equipment more often, I think you'll find that skill is more relevant than talent in a lot of things.

A player making a lockpicking roll with a hairpin taking -2d6 with a score of 10 in AGI and 6 in lockpicking is going to have more contributing to their dicepool from their skill than their attribute. A player making a physics check without access to a library of physics whitepapers is going to have the same penalty, so their LOG score hitting a level similar to Einstein still won't get them anywhere close to producing the theory of relativity on their own.

 

[TheHirumaChico]

A player making a lockpicking roll with a hairpin taking -2d6 with a score of 10 in AGI and 6 in lockpicking is going to have more contributing to their dice pool from their skill than their attribute.

Hmm, not sure I'd quite interpret it that way. The character would have 4d6 (AGI) + 3d6 (lockpicking skill) for a pool total of 7d6, then they lose the -2d6 due to improvised equipment, bringing the pool total to 5d6. The AGI was still the largest contributor to the initial pool. But this doesn't matter too much to the overall discussion.

 

[TheHirumaChico]

I would agree that a theoretical WOIN-created Einstein not only has 12 (or 15 in OLD) in LOG, but also 10-15 Skill ranks in physics, plus the benefits of a top-notch university library, facilities, and peers, which one could argue might give an "equipment" bonus of Exceptional or better when trying to develop new theories in the field of physics. But benchmarking Exceptional Geniuses and other paragon examples at an Attribute of 12 in NOW and then making it relatively easy for any PC to have not just 1, but 2 or even 3, paragon-level Attributes is the situation I'm aiming to change in my optional path concept.

 

[lichmaster]

Something I'd like to point out is that while 4 is the "average" score, that's likely in the sense of the "median" score. That is to say: for any given specific attribute, the majority of humans have a score of 4.

By definition median means that 50% of the population will have a score higher than 4 and the other 50% lower than 4. If instead of median you mean that 4 is the mode of the distribution, then this means that 4 is the most common score (not 4 or higher, but exactly 4), which is probably what you intended.

I personally think none of these make particular sense and the indications regarding the general populations are quite misleading, especially if one is tending towards a mechanistic or simulationist approach.

By this I mean that even discarding careers, just heritages put ANY character with a minimum score of 3 and a couple at 4 or 5 (if we restrict to NOW only the human heritage makes sense in this discussion, because if we talk about Augmented, Chosens or Mutants it's quite clear these are not ordinary people by definition). Add any origin on top and you'll either get more scores at 4 or one or two at 5+. And this reflects a character that's a teenager at most. So either the character creation rules do not apply even in principle to NPCs (and thus PCs are born special and shouldn't be compared to ordinariy people), or if they do a not-yet-adult can have scores that most likely exceed 4 and relatively easily go to 6. Without any training, i.e. careers.

At the other side of the spectrum, a "focused" grade 5 NPC can get to LOG 10 at no later than 42 and typically much much earlier. Even assuming a slower progression it seems reasonable that what are described as Average Joe middle aged people can get their best score at 10 without too much difficulty, and will probably have a few at 6-8 and maybe a couple at at 4 or less. In perspective, and comparing to the above, it looks like in some aspects this character hasn't evolved past his teenage years (which may or may not be plausible).

All this is to say: if you enjoy tweaking the rules (it's part of the hobby) by all means go for it. But I wouldn't do it in order to fix a perception of relative power, especially to conform to what I think are examples inconsistent with a mechanistic/simulationist approach.