[freeroleplay] Attribute Advancement (was [Fringe] New

[Samuel Penn]

On Fri, June 30, 2006 10:52, Ricardo Gladwell wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-06-28 at 20:31 +0100, Samuel Penn wrote:
>> Not enough to represent the increase in body mass caused by 10 years
>> of intensive body building.
>
> But with enough training you could go from Athletics 0 to 5 which would
> give you an advantage over someone with high Strength but who hadn't
> trained.

What I'm not clear on[1], is how do you determine a character's body
mass? (I'm concentrating on Strength here, since it's the easiest
to imagine and describe).

A 'strong' person will have more bulk (in the form of muscles etc)
than a 'weak' person. In something like Yags, you can take a look
at a character's Strength attribute and it will give a good
indication of their general overall bulk. High physical skills will
also help, but a single attribute can be used as a good approximation.

In your system, what would you use? It would appear that you would
need to use Strength + all the skills that are based on Strength.

How also do you determine encumbrance? Is it strength + athletics?
How many athletics skills will there be? A gymnast[2] might have a
high athletics, but their general lifting ability will be less
than a weightlifter with a high athletics. If strength never goes
up, then a gymnast may end up just as good at weightlifting as
a weightlifter who started life with a low strength.

To get around this, you'd need a much larger set of skills (e.g.,
to differentiate between weightlifting and gymnastics and running).



[1] I'm asking all these questions to try and pin things down, so
    hopefully I'm being constructive rather than negative.

[2] In Yags, Athletics is used for both strength based and agility
    based activities, just using a different attribute based on
    what you are doing. I do this to keep the number of skills down.


-- 
Be seeing you,            Web: www.glendale.org.uk
Sam.                       IM: samuel.penn at gmail.com