[freeroleplay] Attribute Advancement (was [Fringe] New

[Samuel Penn]

On Wednesday 28 June 2006 14:36, Ricardo Gladwell wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-06-28 at 13:32 +0100, Samuel Penn wrote:
> > Character A starts with a Strength of 5 and Athletics skill of 3.
> > Character B starts with a Strength of 2 and Athletics of zero.
> >
> > During the game, character B does a lot of intensive training. He
> > can get his skill all the way up to 5, but he's never going to be
> > as good as Character A since his dice pool for any Strength related
> > activity is always going to be less than half that of A.
>
> I probably didn't explain it very well but that is sort of the point of
> the rule. The idea here is that attributes represent raw talent and
> skills represent whatever you can build on that. Some people can train
> for years and increase they physical ability but they'll never compare
> to someone who has a natural talent for Strength and who trains.

An idea I've seen suggested for attributes is that they have no effect
on rolls made during the game, but do affect learning skills. You might
have a Body attribute and a skill called Strength. Two people with a
Strength of X are identical in that they can lift the same, and hit
just as hard regardless of their Body attribute.

However, the difficulty to go from Strength X to X+1 is harder for the
character with the lower Body. However, if you want a good idea of how
well built and tough the character is, you can simply compare their
Strengths.

Obviously this wouldn't work with your system as it stands since the
attribute does have an affect on rolls.

You can't compare the Strength of two characters with your mechanic
to decide which one is the most well built, since it will have to be
a mixture of Strength and all Strength related attributes (athletics,
brawling, weightlifting etc).

> The only problem with this is that developing your Athletics skill won't
> improve your Strength when checking for damage to hit, for example.
> Perhaps some sort of sympathy bonus could apply for related activities.

Which adds another layer of complexity which you may not want for Fringe.

> > Simply putting up the
> > Athletics skill isn't going to be enough.
>
> Enough for what? The Athletics skills can be enough depending upon the
> range of difficulties you choose for your game.

Not enough to represent the increase in body mass caused by 10 years
of intensive body building. You can't even move from average (2) to
above average (3). Though I'm happy with this limitation as a game
concept, it doesn't feel realistic to me that all progression is
limited to the skills, especially when the attribute has such a big
effect on rolls.

Something I used in Myths, which I probably stole from RoleMaster, was
the idea of potential attributes. Each attribute had a value, but you
also had a potential maximum which was some random amount above the
starting value. You could raise your attribute up to its maximum
potential, but not beyond. This gave a balance between the two options
(attributes are fixed, and attributes can be raised), though is an
added layer of complexity.


Something I've been thinking about since we started this discussion
was allowing attributes to be raised at certain points. Once a chapter
of the campaign comes to a close, every character gets the option to
raise one attribute by one point. This could be done at the end of
each major plot thread, whenever a big goal has been achieved, or
simply whenever there is a large block of downtime.

-- 
Be seeing you,                         http://www.glendale.org.uk
Sam.                        
              IM: samuel.penn at jabber.org or samuel.penn at gmail.com