Attributes or No?

[ThatGuyThere]

@Lithium said in Attributes or No?:

@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.

Don't remember a whole lot about the system but I did like the setting for Talislanta.
Yes, it is out of print but also available from the author free and legal on his website. All editions.

[Ominous]

@Packrat

It is essentially L5R's roll & keep only they keep skill value rather than attribute value.

My favorite stat system is Runequest 6's. All skills are two attributes added together. Though, I would eject the d% roll under vs skill value and use the computing power available to simply make every roll a ratio d% roll under.

[Ganymede]

@faraday

@Coin said in Attributes or No?:

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.

This is what I was hooking on to. In Earthdawn, a step might give you 1d12 to roll, but with the addition of a skill, that might become 2d6. Plus, there's the potential for an exploding die, which is how one could explain how an unskilled, super-talented character might take down a dragon in one shot.

[faraday]

@Ganymede said in Attributes or No?:

This is what I was hooking on to. In Earthdawn, a step might give you 1d12 to roll, but with the addition of a skill, that might become 2d6. Plus, there's the potential for an exploding die, which is how one could explain how an unskilled, super-talented character might take down a dragon in one shot.

The addition of a die is only true at very specific skill brackets though, like the difference between d12 and 2d6 (step 7-8), or between d20+d12 and d20+2d6 (step 18-19). In general, though, it's weighted so there's a linear progression of averages. It also caused some quirky results, like when someone would avoid raising a skill from step 13 to 14 because the die swings became less predictable. Earthdawn was weird

[Ganymede]

@faraday said in Attributes or No?:

Earthdawn was weird

I'm sorry, I believe you meant to say awesome.

Earthdawn was epic stupid fantasy before Anime made it super, super stupid.

[faraday]

@Ganymede Oh Earthdawn was an awesome game and I love the system overall. But its dice had some weird effects.

[Thenomain]

It'd be cool if we could let computers do the math on some kind of RPG system and not be limited to the physical awkwardness of Euclidean solids.

[faraday]

@Thenomain Actually I did that in FS3 1st Ed and people were really thrown off by it because they had a hard time grasping what the skill numbers meant. Not even my pretty skill distribution graphs seemed to help. YMMV.

[Thenomain]

@faraday

I'm also describing pretty much all cRPGs. There's no small reason why the SPECIAL system is percentile.