Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dethklok" data-source="post: 6148186" data-attributes="member: 6746469">Disagree. A game with skills like "Bloodrage, Shadowwhisper, and Seek" could be quite specific, give lots of weird options, and be full of flavor. I'm not saying it would necessarily be any good, but I think it's quite easy to make a simple system handle a specific world with flavor. Making such a system broad or generic as well would be more tricky.No, it isn't, but that example is closer to what most gamers will be familiar with.Agreed - but I also think games with large numbers of attributes also strain believability. It is not, for instance, believable that a large, healthy character not be strong, or that a healthy, agile character will not run quickly, or that a beautiful, wise character not be socially adroit.After designing several RPGs, I can agree with Bagpuss and say that the optimal number of attributes is close to six; four is starting to get pretty spare, and eight begins to jostle with redundancy and clutter. Still, you can get away with more and fewer, and I've seen games I like that use no attributes at all.I've seen (and designed) games that allow you to combine attributes. Come to think of it, classic Dragon Warriors does this - Intelligence modifies your ability to attack and defend, and if I recall correctly, some ability checks might require you to take two abilities and roll on the average.TWERPS? Arguably, most editions of D&D do this! Because in D&D, there is indeed one primary stat which overshadows all others. That stat is called "Level."In real life, natural ability overshadows training in importance. A 2003 Study in the journal Intelligence by Hambrick (et al.) titled <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000421" target="_blank">"Deliberate Practice: Is that all it takes to be an expert?"</a> looked at chessplaying ability and musical ability, and found that practice and training could only account for about a third of individual variation in either skill. One way to think of this in game terms would be to imagine that characters should start out at a level equal to their Prime Requisite -7, and then be allowed to increase only about 7 levels from there. That's right, roll a thief with 16 Dexterity, and he starts at level 9; another thief with 8 Dexterity will never be able to catch up.Would this be fun? Probably not - the overarching Level characteristic common to RPGs looks like an example of popularity and fun outweighing realism. But it's not at all beyond the pale to consider weakening the importance of experience - or even tacking it into the attributes themselves, and doing away with both classes and skills completely.Imagine a game where everyone started at 2d6 in their six attributes, and then instead of increasing in "level" they increased an attribute by 1, to a maximum of 18. It's almost never done, but when you think about what fighters, runners, or gymnasts are really doing, most of their training consists simply in improving their physical condition (be it body mass, flexibility, coordination, or stamina).</blockquote>

Verification