Attributes or No?

Ganymede

Can you elaborate on what about Silhouette/L5R's attribute system you like?

It's honestly been so long, I'd have to go back and look at both. What I recall of the former was a single, simple roll where Attributes add to the die results and Skills determine how many dice are rolled. With the latter, you had a pool of dice determined by Attribute + Skill, but you kept a number of dice equal to the Attribute, and then compared against a difficulty number.

Lithium

@Coin said in Attributes or No?:

@Lithium said in Attributes or No?:

I am a fan of them but I've been quantifying them more objectively.

You have physical, mental, and social categories and then in each three categories you have three traits or attributes that are Power, Finesse, and Resistance.

The skills are also broken down via mental, social, and physical but are used by the skills differently depending on what you want to do:

Brute force punch or slam or grapple: Physical Power + Unarmed Combat. To try and dodge that same attack it'd be Physical Finesse + Unarmed Combat.

I am trying to avoid power skills like 'Dodge' because honestly avoiding getting punched is a lot different than avoiding being shot, but if you are good with guns then you know how to also take cover and avoid being shot with guns as most people aren't going to be dodging bullets due to relativistic speed differences between a person and a bullet for example.

If you were to use a martial arts attack it'd be Physical Finesse + unarmed combat rather than power.

So far it's working out pretty reasonably in my testing.

This is basically what CofD does. Those are even the same cross categories. I mean, you're obviously aware of it, but you may want to be wary of it, as well.

Also, why is "martial arts" Finesse and Unarmed Combat isn't (or vice versa)? There are a lot of martial arts that I would argue are a lot more about physical power than finesse. If you're going to go into that sort of separation, you might benefit from letting people decide whether their unarmed combat is Power- or Finesse-based from the get go and applying different penalties in that vein.

Why is martial arts finesse? Because that's how it's defined arbitrarily by me, the system make on the game. Are there martial arts that use raw power over finesse? Sure, maybe, but I am not trying to quantify every individual martial art. If someone wants to be highly skilled at a more brute form of unarmed combat then they'd use Power instead of Finesse. I don't really see that as a problem. You use whatever stat that makes sense for how your using the skill.

Coin

@Lithium said in Attributes or No?:

@Coin said in Attributes or No?:

@Lithium said in Attributes or No?:

I am a fan of them but I've been quantifying them more objectively.

You have physical, mental, and social categories and then in each three categories you have three traits or attributes that are Power, Finesse, and Resistance.

The skills are also broken down via mental, social, and physical but are used by the skills differently depending on what you want to do:

Brute force punch or slam or grapple: Physical Power + Unarmed Combat. To try and dodge that same attack it'd be Physical Finesse + Unarmed Combat.

I am trying to avoid power skills like 'Dodge' because honestly avoiding getting punched is a lot different than avoiding being shot, but if you are good with guns then you know how to also take cover and avoid being shot with guns as most people aren't going to be dodging bullets due to relativistic speed differences between a person and a bullet for example.

If you were to use a martial arts attack it'd be Physical Finesse + unarmed combat rather than power.

So far it's working out pretty reasonably in my testing.

This is basically what CofD does. Those are even the same cross categories. I mean, you're obviously aware of it, but you may want to be wary of it, as well.

Also, why is "martial arts" Finesse and Unarmed Combat isn't (or vice versa)? There are a lot of martial arts that I would argue are a lot more about physical power than finesse. If you're going to go into that sort of separation, you might benefit from letting people decide whether their unarmed combat is Power- or Finesse-based from the get go and applying different penalties in that vein.

Why is martial arts finesse? Because that's how it's defined arbitrarily by me, the system make on the game. Are there martial arts that use raw power over finesse? Sure, maybe, but I am not trying to quantify every individual martial art. If someone wants to be highly skilled at a more brute form of unarmed combat then they'd use Power instead of Finesse. I don't really see that as a problem. You use whatever stat that makes sense for how your using the skill.

Yes. I went on to clarify this in the post after that one.

tragedyjones

Theno, you dummy, Storyteller used Perception as a base attribute. Your silly mistake has invalidated all your intelligent arguments. I am sorry, this is the internet.

Thenomain

@tragedyjones said in Attributes or No?:

Theno, you dummy, Storyteller used Perception as a base attribute. Your silly mistake has invalidated all your intelligent arguments. I am sorry, this is the internet.

Did it?

Shit, that was a stupid decision.

Almost as dumb as arguing over which skill matches with which attribute in a not-realized game system in a thread meant to discuss the general merits and drawbacks of any general system setups. I'm sure Lithium and Ganymede can go make out in their own thread. I'd say Coin could go join them, but his contribution would just be hate-sex.

(Note: "Perception" as a base attribute wasn't a horrible idea, I just forgot the power/finesse/resistance breakdown was from the Storytelling System. So much from Storyteller System were bad ideas that you just had to shrug after a while and say, "Sure, what the hell.")

(Second note: Imogen Heap, "Hide and Seek", makes it impossible for me to feel anything but relaxed and maudlin.)

Lotherio

My two cents of preference, I'm good with attributes + abilities/skills. I do like the preference to choose if needed whether strength is helping intimidation by breaking something or charisma by mad-dogging and talking.

My favorite things when WEG d6 came out was the 'you have every skill in this category at the base attribute level' which made a lot of sense. Instead of taking tons of skills, you bought the skills that where above and beyond your natural talent/inclination.

I prefer some weight towards the trained skill over natural talent and it was always odd to me (probably from my enjoyment of WEG d6), that in some systems, the 3-4 pips 'expert' in a skill could still be less than someone with more pips in the base attribute who has no training in said skill. It just doesn't quite jive in my mind; I still play those games and enjoy them the same, but as far as preference goes, I prefer attributes that contribute in some way to skills or abilities in some way and are not just a nice stat to help with like health or something.

Coin

@Lotherio said in Attributes or No?:

My two cents of preference, I'm good with attributes + abilities/skills. I do like the preference to choose if needed whether strength is helping intimidation by breaking something or charisma by mad-dogging and talking.

My favorite things when WEG d6 came out was the 'you have every skill in this category at the base attribute level' which made a lot of sense. Instead of taking tons of skills, you bought the skills that where above and beyond your natural talent/inclination.

I prefer some weight towards the trained skill over natural talent and it was always odd to me (probably from my enjoyment of WEG d6), that in some systems, the 3-4 pips 'expert' in a skill could still be less than someone with more pips in the base attribute who has no training in said skill. It just doesn't quite jive in my mind; I still play those games and enjoy them the same, but as far as preference goes, I prefer attributes that contribute in some way to skills or abilities in some way and are not just a nice stat to help with like health or something.

This is one of the reasons the system I am working on works the way it does.

You essentially Roll [Skill] dice of [Attribute] value. Sure, the higher your attribute, the higher the die can go, but the higher your Skill, the higher your minimum is.

If I am rolling 1d12, I am a super talented person who is barely trained, and my range of success is anywhere between 1-12; but if I am rolling 3d4, I am nowhere near as talented as the former, but I am much more trained, so my actual range is 3-12. Same maximum, different minimum.

Of course, with just a LITTLE more training (+1 to the Skill) the extremely talented person suddenly has 2d12, which makes their range 2-24, which is insanely better than 3d4, even if the latter has a better minimum.

To me, that represents how in fiction, very talented people achieve very good results with little training, while people who have trained all their lives are perhaps not as potentially good, but are much more consistently proficient.

At least, it works for me.

Pyrephox

I like attributes. However, I would increasingly like to see them do something different than just add to skills and then you use the total as your TN.

I've been thinking about a system where your TN is derived from skills along, but your attributes give you perks per level which make the application of relevant skills and talents more effective. For example:

Let's say you have attributes on a level of 1-5. Four attributes: Strength, Grace, Presence, Intelligence, just to pull a few out of a hat. Unlike most systems, each of these start at 0 - a 1 or higher represents a degree of the attribute that is above the humdrum, ordinary baseline. However, each time you buy a level, you can also choose, say, one of two perks that will give you a special thing.

Strength 1 might open two potential perks:

Heavy-handed: A successful melee attack has a chance to stagger an opponent, applying a penalty to their next action roll.
Walk It Off: Character takes reduced wound and environmental penalties.

Meanwhile, skills are their own thing, rolled exclusively from their own ratings. But higher stats will definitely affect what you can do with those skills, and how they're likely to be applied. A character with Presence 3 might have an perk array of Taunt (roll Persuasion in battle to force a targeted character to attack you with a melee attack next round), Never A Stranger (Your character knows Someone in every social venue - they can get themselves and one other person into any social or entertainment event without a roll), and Negotiator (Costs for equipment and services are reduced by your Presence level.) Another character, with the same Presence level, might instead have: All Eyes on Me (With a successful social skill roll in a non-combat situation, the character can dominate a target's attention - they automatically fail rolls to notice anything but the character until the character is gone or their spiel is interrupted. If there are multiple targets, the effect is reduced by 25%. I.e. two targets now have a 75% chance to fail to notice things, 3 a 50% chance, 4 a 25% chance.), Con Man/Woman (Your character has additional income, proportionate to their Presence, which comes from running low-level scams, grifts, and hustles off-screen.), and Wordsmith (As long as your character can make themselves understood in the language at hand, they do not suffer from untrained penalties for social skills.)

Note, none of those are at all balanced or thought through. But I'd just like to see something along those lines, where attributes open up more possibilities and special actions, while skill rolls govern success or failure.

ThatGuyThere

@Coin
I like that basic system, and more importantly it to me mimics the expected results from those situations, barely trained but greatly talents becomes very scattershot, as there is not bell curve to the results you get. Conversly the well trained but not talented is less likely to produce the maximum result. 1 time out of 64 compared to the 1 time out of 12 of the talented person, but does have the bell curve so his results will settle into the median ranges most of the time, showing a base competency but a lot of true gift.

Lithium

@Pyrephox There was an old TT RPG that had a system similar to that, in that the baseline attribute was 0 and you got modifiers based on race etc.

I think it was called Talislanta. I remember it having a /huge/ chunk of races, and being unusual in that every race in the game, was available as a PC iirc. Not sure why it died, but I'm pretty sure it's out of print now.

faraday

@ThatGuyThere said in Attributes or No?:

@Coin
Conversly the well trained but not talented is less likely to produce the maximum result. 1 time out of 64 compared to the 1 time out of 12 of the talented person, but does have the bell curve so his results will settle into the median ranges most of the time, showing a base competency but a lot of true gift.

It kinda depends on whether you think that's appropriate or not, I guess. Should someone with barely any training but natural talent really be 8 times more likely to score an A+ / hit a home run / hit the bullseye / whatever the max result is than the guy with a lot of training who's not especially gifted? Eh... doesn't seem quite right to me. It reminds me of the WoD problem, where the Mind5+Medicine1 guy (smart guy who took a first aid class once) was better than the Mind2+Medicine3 guy (average medical doctor). I also think you'll get some weird effects at higher skill levels, because the bell curves will become so concentrated around average that you might as well not even bother rolling at all because there's so little variation.

Ganymede

@Coin said in Attributes or No?:

This is one of the reasons the system I am working on works the way it does.

Based on what you wrote, why don't you just adopt Earthdawn's Step system?

Coin

@Ganymede said in Attributes or No?:

@Coin said in Attributes or No?:

This is one of the reasons the system I am working on works the way it does.

Based on what you wrote, why don't you just adopt Earthdawn's Step system?

a) because I've never read it;
b) because I want as much of it as possible to be my own idea before I start actively mining other systems.

Ganymede

@Coin said in Attributes or No?:

b) because I want as much of it as possible to be my own idea before I start actively mining other systems.

Then you have unintentionally mined another system.

faraday

@Ganymede said in Attributes or No?:

Then you have unintentionally mined another system.

There are so many skill systems in the world, it would be difficult to come up with one that bears no resemblance to anything that's come before. @Coin's system is similar in principle to Earthdawn, but different in execution. Does that count as mining?

Ganymede

@faraday said in Attributes or No?:

@Coin's system is similar in principle to Earthdawn, but different in execution. Does that count as mining?

It's not really that different in execution, from what I can tell.

I'm not accusing him of doing anything wrong. I'm suggesting that he look at a pre-existing system which closely resembles his. It may help him tweak his system to where he wants it to go.

Lithium

@Ganymede I kind of agree here. I wanted to make an Earthdawn game way back when before I even knew how to code much of anything at all and step based system seemed impossible. Not so much anymore now that I have a tiny inkling of what I am doing.

Step based system from Earthdawn was something I really liked, @Coin might take a look just to compare and contrast maybe refine his own idea one way or the other.

Learning a new system can't really hurt regardless imho.

faraday

@Ganymede -- Coin described rolling [Skill] dice of [Attribute] value. So skill 2 might roll 2d4 or 2d6 depending. Skill 3 would be 3d4 or 3d6 or 3d8.

Earthdawn is way different, with a base die modified by the steps. For those unfamiliar, your attribute may start you off at 1d8 but then a skill of 2 would bump you to 1d12. Or your attr starts off at 1d12 and you get bumped to d8+d6.

Those sound very different to me, personally, but to each their own. Anyway, I like Earthdawn's system.

Lithium

@faraday They are different, but there is also some similarities there too. I just find that it can't hurt knowing other systems. Might give ideas, it's a difficult thing to find the balance between swingy and bell curve.

Little things like 1's removing successes can dramatically alter the outcome of dice rolls for example.

Packrat

The dice system they are using on Arx seems interesting, it is not documented but they did explain it on channel at one point.

Attributes are 1 to 5, Skills are 1 to 6. When you roll, you roll a number of 1d10 equal to Attribute + Skill +1, with 10's exploding infinitely (Roll a 10, roll another 1d10 and add, etc).

You then keep Skill+1 of these dice, the ones that rolled the highest results, combining them for your final result.

Skill levels are thus huge and by far the most important part but natural talent does help, especially when it comes to getting consistent results at low skill levels.