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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 5674665" data-attributes="member: 26473">As [MENTION=66434]ExploderWizard[/MENTION] already mentioned, Pendragon does this. 2e Boot Hill is similar: a character's attributes are Speed, Gun Accuracy, Throwing Accuracy, Bravery, Strength, and Experience. Five of the six affect how well your character fights; the sixth, Strength, determines how much damage you can take.It was because of Boot Hill and that Bravery attribute that I began adopting a somewhat iconoclastic view of character stats. The five attributes, including Bravery, which affect combat include modifiers to a character's speed and/or accuracy with various weapons; the character's Bravery score may increase or decrease a character's speed and accuracy, for example.Now here's the thing: the Bravery attribute score has a discrete, quantifiable impact on the character's performance in the game - it represents the character's cool under fire. But here was the kicker for me: should Bravery also affect how the character is played? For a long time I assumed, "Of course!" but the more I thought about it,, the more I realized that wasn't necessarily so.Consider a player character who is a town marshal with a Coward Bravery rating and no Experience; maybe he got the job through a political connection, or maybe the townsfolk stuck the badge on him because no one else wanted it and he didn't have the guts to say no. Now a gang of bank robbers come to town, and it's the marshal's job to confront them. The conventional wisdom is, the character is a coward and should be played as such.But here's the thing: there's nothing about the attribute itself mechancially which determines if or how the marshal will confront the robbers; the attribute modifiers only speak to what happens if he tries to fire his gun at them. The attribute and the modifiers influence how successful the character is in a particular task; they say nothing about when or how the character decides to attempt the task.So the marshal checks his six-shooters, grabs a double-barrel from the rack, and walks into the dusty Main Street to face-down the robbers. Now some gamers will cry foul here: "That's not roleplaying the character! He should be running for cover or something!" to which I say, malarkey. The marshal's hands shake like he has the palsy, sweat pours off his brow into his eyes, and his mouth is as dry as an arroyo in August so that when he shouts, "Throw up yer hands!" it comes out as little more than a hoarse whisper, and that is what is represented by the Bravery attribute modifiers, not the decision to confront the gang - that decision is solely the province of the player, who's decided that the reason the marshal accepted the badge in the first place is that he is determined to overcome his fear, no matter what it takes, and is roleplaying that aspect of his character.In thinking this through, I came to a conclusion, one which seems to get under some gamers' skins: by treating character attributes as a nothing more than a rules interface and not a determinant of personality, roleplaying and character stats may be wholly independent of one another. Put another way, roleplay your character as you like, and let the stats take care of themselves.For me, this does away with the tension of, say, the loquacious player who used Charisma or Charm as his dump stat; whether you're using something as simple as a reaction roll-plus-modifier or something as complex as Duel of Wits, let the player be as charming and as eloquent as he likes, and let the dice handle the actual result. If the player wants the character to be better at something, then it's on the player to choose that for the character, by whatever means the system supports, whether that's adding skill points, raising an attribute, or whatever - a would-be Cassanova with a 5 Charisma needs to invest skill points in Bluff or Diplomacy or whatever, or accept that he's only going to get play when he's really, really lucky. (Reminds me of a guy I knew in real life - he'd ask out every girl he met, firm in the belief that the law of averages would eventually work in his favor.)Here's something else to bear in mind: 'DM fiat' is a system. In this system, the rules interface between the character's attribute scores and referee's judgement of the situation. A referee is perfectly capable of weighing the argument made by the player and the influence of the character's attributes to determine success or failure. (And [MENTION=4475]Sammael[/MENTION], in my experience most referees over the age of, say, fourteen or fifteen are capable of making consistent, fair judgement calls, and there are very few games out there which don't allow for referee discretion - no amount of rules can save you from crappy gamers.)So my feeling is, let the players play how they like, and let the rules do what the rules are intended to do.</blockquote>

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