'Bastards 0.2 - Attribute/Skill Change Discussion - Feedback Wanted.

[Agamemnon]

One of the biggest changes we've been chewing on has been an overhaul of how our skills and attributes work, both independently and together. I'm going to attempt to lay out the case as we see it currently and see what you guys think.

Notations in italics signify considerations that aren't really mechanical in nature, but aesthetic.

The current setup (X+Y, 1-5 Scale)

• Attributes and skills are rolled in pairs, with either two separate attributes being rolled together, or an attribute being rolled with a skill. In either case, the two functions independently contribute to the pool for the challenge.
• Everything is rated on a scale from 1-5, with 6s being reserved for player characters who chose a Tier 5 priority at character creation. Anything higher is animal/monster scale.

Pros:
More flexible overall.

• Skills can be meaningfully and mechanically contorted in different ways based on the attribute being used. For instance, adding Social+Blacksmithing to represent contacts made as part of your experience in that trade.
• Combinations of skills/attributes can be used to resolve situations we might not even think of.

It's dead easy to stat NPCs, as each level of the dots has a very specific definition.
Doesn't require change.
Has dots. (Henri loves dots)

Cons
Less granularity (and thus mechanical weight between characters). 1-5 base scale creates a whole mess of problems.

• The difference between a novice and a master is small enough that an errant die or two can make the former beat the latter. Equally, a master with a low attribute is quickly matched or exceeded by a high-attribute novice.
• SAs are also on a 1-5 scale, so any time an SA fires for a skill check, their SAs Low-skill+SA will generally beat high skill.
• All of the above inherently devalues "skill based" characters, to a degree. Particularly when compared to Attributes (which are universally more valuable) or Proficiencies (where the difference between a low-prof and high-prof character can't be as easily overcome by SAs).
• Less room to improve over time. Because characters can easily start with 4s and 5s in the skills of their choice, the thief-like character can max out his skill set at character creation. This is great for the "play the character you want" concept, but it means while his swordsman friend can continue becoming better at swordsmanship, the thief has to become broader and branch into other skills instead of becoming better at the thing they wanted to do in the first place.

Requires everything to be rolled in pairs

• An additional layer of mental calculation for the GM to constantly spot-call what any given situation requires.
• An additional layer of mental calculation for the player in assembling their pool.
• Creates the odd situation where we effectively have to have a derived attribute for anything attributes are supposed to do. Most hilariously, Strength has really only the one prominent application and it doesn't actually do that because it requires stamina for the pool.

What we are thinking of replacing it with:

• Skills and Attributes are both rated on a 1-10 scale and rolled separately.
• Skills will get their starting value based on the attribute to which they are tied (at 1/2 or 1/3 the value, we haven't settled on this yet.)
• Rearrange and condense the attributes down so each attribute has more significance. The current idea is to bring them down to Agility, Brawn, Cunning, Perception, Social, and Will. Three derived attributes would sit along side of them: Reflex (the average of Agility and Cunning), Trauma (the average of Brawn and Willpower) and Body (1/3 of Brawn, serving both as the damage mod and as an indicator of the physical mass of the character).

By way of illustration, the new attribute scale would be (using Brawn as an example)
1. Small animals.
2. Children, the disabled.
3. Sedentary office workers
4. Average, active people. Farmers, laborers
5-6. Professional athletes.
7-8 Professional Strongman types. The height of what normal people can actually achieve.
9-10. Genetic freaks. Tier 5 material. Andrey the Giant. Hafthor Bjornson.


Pros:
More granularity between characters

• Bigger mechanical difference between less skilled and more skilled characters
• SAs are less capable of replacing skill/attributes
• More room for characters to grow and having ridiculously high attributes becomes a much larger investment.
• Scales are weighted towards the low-end, so we mathematically wind up with smaller average pools and thus we get slightly more use out of lower obs than we did before.

Skills and Attributes are rolled by themselves.

• Simpler to call as the GM - I'm never debating whether the lockpicking is a product of Cunning or Agility at the table, and it doesn't invite a player to disagree with that assessment.
• Removes one step of calculation for the players - they aren't looking up A then B then adding them together.
• Makes the individual attributes stronger and more valuable as character resources as they aren't reliant on some other attribute to function.
• Skills can't simply be replaced by going all-in on attributes, as they could before. You actually need to invest in them.

Body as a 1/3 stat handily solves the recent naked dwarf arguments, though even at 1/2 Brawn, it reduces the effective range from 1-6 to 1-5 and only 2-4 among healthy adults.
Skills and Attributes are now effectively on the same scale as proficiencies, meaning we no longer have to halve proficiency to use it as a skill and (more excitingly), Skills could be used as proficiencies (allowing us to make melee-like split combat mechanics for debates or large-scale warfare -ships, land battles, etc).
Technically makes this sheet easier to make in Roll20, but that's hardly a universal benefit

Cons

• Less flexible overall. The stat does what the stat does, rather than mixing-and-matching as appropriate.
• Requires the calculation of derived attributes -- though, if we're being honest, we're already doing that by requiring them to be rolled in pairs, just without division being involved.
• Skills will have to be permanently tied to a governing attribute and some calculation made to determining their starting value. This combined with Body and the derived attributes could create dead levels.
• Change always annoys a fan base no matter how you do it. Some people will be excited and some people will hate it no matter what you do.
• Henri likes dots better than numbers

[hector]

Interesting. I can definitely go with Brawn as a combination of Strength and Stamina - the two are so closely related in real life that it's very rare to find somebody with high amounts of one but low amounts of the other relative to their size.

[Korbel]

I like the new set of Attributes.
Smaller average pools? Now SAs will replace skill even more, right?
What about all these dead levels? Do you want majority of the characters be Brawn 6? (if Brawn is divided by three, that's gonna happen)

[Benedict]

Wow.

Now some feedback.

1. I love dots too, like Henry does.
Joke aside, I always felt that systems caping at 5 (with the optional 6th+ dot reserved for special cases) serve me better and it's easier for me to play, both as GM and player. This however is only my personal preference, what works for me could be utter rubbish for others.

2. One of the things I love in Bastards is that you can mix Skills/Proficiencies with Attributes. That is an element I love in RPGs and I believe it brings out creativity in the table making the game more fun, intuitive, and flexible for everyone involved. Sure, it can lead to debates, but if participants are willing to hear each other out, it's one compromise I'm willing to make. Heck, we used to house rule that feature to late 80s D&D sessions, it's too good to miss.

3. Regarding granularity, I feel the main problem as you correctly point out is skills. I even voiced some concerns in the past, fearing that skill OBs are too high. Yes you can have an SA fire, +1 die from Expertise, your friends assist you, but let's face it. If you want to conquer Russia during winter the odds are against you, no matter what your stats are. While on the other hand you can duel three competent opponents and overcome them unscathed. Proficiencies can get larger than life, or to put it into context, in the realm of swashbuckling high adventure. With skills its a lot harder to get there.

One thought to fix this is to expand Expertises: Instead of providing a flat +1 bonus, an Expertise can be rated at 1-3, or whatever cap works better, even 5 if its to be brought up to Proficiencies. Each Expertise dot provides +1 die. At character creation you should get Expertises based on your Priority (maybe one per priority rank?), not a flat three. Additional expertises at character creation are bought with skill points, and finally an expertise should not exceed its parent skill. To sum it up, this approach makes a thief with Agility 2 and Larceny 4 (Lockpicking 3, Burglary 3) a lot better at thievery than his swordsman pal who has Agility 6 and invested heavy on Proficiencies and close to nil in Skills. The only con is that it requires some definite Expertises to be written per Skill as guidelines, and adds another step in character creation, as Skill assigning becomes more complex.

4. As for SAs affecting play. Like thirty33 already said, I believe that some mechanics should be there regarding social interraction, or social combat as the hype is these days.

SAs are a defining feature of the character core, and the only player-exclusive asset so far. The only way to lose SAs is to work against them. A system allowing others to "damage" your SAs and/or bend them against you through social interraction would be great. Combined with skill and expertise expansion it allows for playing your foes against each other like the Count of Monte Christo did to his enemies, something that is not really viable now. But I haven't figured out any specific mechanics yet.

5. A final note. What really got me into Bastards is the "play the character you want from the start" concept. Not something you encounter everyday. In my mind this is your strongest feature of all. I'm unsure if these changes can retain that concept.

As a conclussion, if you ask me "current or new", I'd say "current with tinkering". The X+Y each caping at 5 is my preferred MO in RPGs for the past 25 years (been playing VtM since day one).

[taelor]

All of the above inherently devalues "skill based" characters, to a degree. Particularly when compared to Attributes (which are universally more valuable) or Proficiencies (where the difference between a low-prof and high-prof character can't be as easily overcome by SAs).

I've definitely noticed this when I've tried to make skill based characters, both purely for my own edification, and also for the (apparently abortive?) Release The Hounds campaign. Regardless of what you end up doing, I hope you get this issue fixed.

Henri likes dots better than numbers

I've never understood the appeal of dots. I think I've ended up just writing in numbers on my character sheet for literally every game I've played that used them. At some point, you're going to have to count up the dots in order to know how many dice you need to roll; seems easier to just do that from the start instead of all this dot funny business.

[dra]

Overall I like it. Attributes are cool. Still I'd miss Int and Dexterity for testing purposes. I love derived attributes though. Dead levels are completly unimportant for me.

Dislikes:
I too prefer 1-5 scale although it is not really that important either
Fixed skill rolls are less creative for both GM and a player as you wrote.

Questions:
If I raise an attribute, does it raise skill as well?

Possible ideas:

If SAs being too high are a problem for regular rolls, why not set them in scale of 1-3? And possibly allow for firing few of them during important combat scenes with +1 per every additional SA over highest one? Character progression could be done by prebuing some points on certain attributes/skills?

[Agamemnon]

Interesting. I can definitely go with Brawn as a combination of Strength and Stamina - the two are so closely related in real life that it's very rare to find somebody with high amounts of one but low amounts of the other relative to their size.

My thoughts exactly.. and in the existing system, the only thing that Strength is really doing is damage. It comes up in the odd skill roll (namely Athletics), but it seems more like having Strength and Stamina was just serving as a fighter-tax of sorts. Even people on here have commented it's generally better to favor stamina than strength because they go into the same pool for actual strength (Feat of Strength) and one of them keeps you alive more.

Smaller average pools? Now SAs will replace skill even more, right?

Yes and no. We effectively move from a 2-10 scale of normal rolls to a 1-8 scale of normal rolls, so 1-5 SA dice will weigh slightly heavier on the overall pool, but because that 1-8 is all coming from a single source the source is now way more important than it was before. Before, your skill was worth a third of the total possible pool (X+Y+SA). Now it's closer to two-thirds of the total possible pool.

What about all these dead levels? Do you want majority of the characters be Brawn 6? (if Brawn is divided by three, that's gonna happen)

It's possible. But that also depends on how we weigh the thing in character creation. Depending on how the attribute point spreads are weighed out, that might be a significant investment. If Body is Brawn/3, then you're spending 3 points into an attribute to get an MoS1 worth of damage/protection. You might be better off spending those same points in Agility, Cunning, or Proficiencies which would increase your damage but also make you more likely actually be able to inflict it or defend yourself. A hard swing is AC1 for +1 damage. That's 1CP for +1 damage vs investing 3 points into Brawn.

I'm also thinking about tying Brawn into an encumbrance system as well if I can think of how I want to do it, so between that and it coming into skills there should be other reasons to want Brawn other than your damage mod. On the other hand, I also rather like the idea of your physical size being directly correlated to your Body stat as I always get irked when someone plays D&D, has 18 strength but wants to play themselves off as a hundred pound girl. You're built like a gorilla. Stop it.

1. I love dots too, like Henry does.
Joke aside, I always felt that systems caping at 5 (with the optional 6th+ dot reserved for special cases) serve me better and it's easier for me to play, both as GM and player.

They definitely have the advantage of making things fit into nice categories.

2. One of the things I love in Bastards is that you can mix Skills/Proficiencies with Attributes.

I agree. It's one of those things that feel kind of clever and dynamic and fun.

3. Regarding granularity, I feel the main problem as you correctly point out is skills. I even voiced some concerns in the past, fearing that skill OBs are too high.

Funnily enough, one of my frequent experiences was that the obs weren't high enough. Generally, when a roll was going down at my table the player either had a really high die pool for the thing outright because it was something their characters were good at, or they had an SA firing and someone helping. Die pools were almost always enough to make most tasks trivial. I'd have to get into ob4 and ob5 checks before anything was worthy of doubt.

This is actually kind of a shame, in my book, because failure is when the interesting stuff comes up.

One thought to fix this is to expand Expertises: Instead of providing a flat +1 bonus, an Expertise can be rated at 1-3, or whatever cap works better, even 5 if its to be brought up to Proficiencies. Each Expertise dot provides +1 die. At character creation you should get Expertises based on your Priority (maybe one per priority rank?), not a flat three. Additional expertises at character creation are bought with skill points, and finally an expertise should not exceed its parent skill. To sum it up, this approach makes a thief with Agility 2 and Larceny 4 (Lockpicking 3, Burglary 3) a lot better at thievery than his swordsman pal who has Agility 6 and invested heavy on Proficiencies and close to nil in Skills. The only con is that it requires some definite Expertises to be written per Skill as guidelines, and adds another step in character creation, as Skill assigning becomes more complex.

That's a possibility, but also makes kind of a mess in some ways.

• Recording that will be weird on the sheet (you'd have to do some kind of nesting lists and then rewrite things to adjust when you get a new expertise unless you're doing it digitally)
• It adds another step of calculation
• It helps skills, but now we have to figure out what to do with attributes. If skills and attributes are still paired, both need to be on the 1-5 scale. Which means attributes need to be rolled in pairs, which means we need strength and stamina as separate things again, which brings us back to the argument about whether stamina is OP or not and strength goes back to being dead weight by comparison. Alternatively, we could keep the new attribute list and just.. double attributes when necessary.. but that seems even clunkier, somehow.

4. As for SAs affecting play. Like thirty33 already said, I believe that some mechanics should be there regarding social interraction, or social combat as the hype is these days.

I already have some thoughts on that, but they are part of the skills mechanics overhaul, rather than the bit we're chewing on here.

5. A final note. What really got me into Bastards is the "play the character you want from the start" concept. Not something you encounter everyday. In my mind this is your strongest feature of all. I'm unsure if these changes can retain that concept.

I don't see why not. The "play the character you want from the start" concept is a function of how many points you can get at character creation. If you want to start as a really good thief you can still start as a really good thief. You just wouldn't start out as the maximum possible theif mechanically possible, unless you wanted to put everything you had into that.

and also for the (apparently abortive?) Release The Hounds campaign.

Not so much abortive as my life getting complicated. I want to go back to it after this release (probably with the characters remade accordingly).

I've never understood the appeal of dots. I think I've ended up just writing in numbers on my character sheet for literally every game I've played that used them. At some point, you're going to have to count up the dots in order to know how many dice you need to roll; seems easier to just do that from the start instead of all this dot funny business.

I have no opinion on dots, really. Some people really seem to dig them. It just seems like an aesthetic choice to me.

Questions:
If I raise an attribute, does it raise skill as well?

That's a good question. I'm not sure. It'd be more consistent to say yes, but it might not be worth the recalculating, depending on whether the skills are 1/3 or 1/2. This is one of the rather annoying drawbacks of moving to a 1-10 scale.

Possible ideas:

If SAs being too high are a problem for regular rolls, why not set them in scale of 1-3? And possibly allow for firing few of them during important combat scenes with +1 per every additional SA over highest one? Character progression could be done by prebuing some points on certain attributes/skills?

I've thought about reducing the SA range, though it didn't seem to be a particularly popular suggestion. Mechanically, we'd need to reduce the cost of character advancement fairly well across the board. It'd also mean that SAs would be tighter in general. When character advancement did happen, it would deplete more resources. Players would be burning SAs less often, and so on.

[taelor]

and also for the (apparently abortive?) Release The Hounds campaign.

Not so much abortive as my life getting complicated. I want to go back to it after this release (probably with the characters remade accordingly).

Awesome.

[Benedict]

3. Regarding granularity, I feel the main problem as you correctly point out is skills. I even voiced some concerns in the past, fearing that skill OBs are too high.

Funnily enough, one of my frequent experiences was that the obs weren't high enough. Generally, when a roll was going down at my table the player either had a really high die pool for the thing outright because it was something their characters were good at, or they had an SA firing and someone helping. Die pools were almost always enough to make most tasks trivial. I'd have to get into ob4 and ob5 checks before anything was worthy of doubt.

This is actually kind of a shame, in my book, because failure is when the interesting stuff comes up.

I should have explained that I erroneously located the problem in the Obs, while it is in the dice pools.At an average pool of 5d10 passing Average Obstacles is bit above 50%. Dunno, maybe my GM should have called them Routine instead. I have no problem with failure. But compromise after compromise after minor complication after compromise (and resorting to violence after every instance) feels a bit too much.

One thought to fix this is to expand Expertises...

That's a possibility, but also makes kind of a mess in some ways.

• Recording that will be weird on the sheet (you'd have to do some kind of nesting lists and then rewrite things to adjust when you get a new expertise unless you're doing it digitally)
• It adds another step of calculation
• It helps skills, but now we have to figure out what to do with attributes. If skills and attributes are still paired, both need to be on the 1-5 scale. Which means attributes need to be rolled in pairs, which means we need strength and stamina as separate things again, which brings us back to the argument about whether stamina is OP or not and strength goes back to being dead weight by comparison. Alternatively, we could keep the new attribute list and just.. double attributes when necessary.. but that seems even clunkier, somehow.

Most of the above are 100% true. I'll explain.

1. The way I see it the worst beast to tackle is the record sheet. There are some approaches to this.

• 2-3 lines with respective dots to be filled below each Skill where you write up the expertise(s). Takes monstrous space, useless to non-skill based builts. One can argue though that the second page of the current sheet is useless to non-combat builds.
• A seperate section dedicated for Expertises, 10-12 lines with respective dots, at the end of skill section. Again takes more space (less than solution 1), but at the added con of having to go back and forth between Skill and respective Expertise.
• Ditch the skill list as it is all together. Instead make Skill blocks (similar to Weapons/Armor blocks). At the top of the Block you record the Skill and fill up the dots. Below that there's space to record Expertises. Imho that's the most elegant aesthetically and practical game-wise solution. I'll cook up a sample when back home if you want, no dtp utilities where I am now.

2. True, it adds another level of calculation, but the trade-off is worth it imo. With a proper recording method I believe it can be solved. Wait till I send a draft, then have at it.

3. Attributes. Yes, that's a toughie. I'll take em from the bottom up.

• Doubling them is awkward, clunky, and bad.
• One thing about rolling attribute+attribute. I always felt it should be rolled primary Atr + secondary Atr, and the secondary Atr can be replaced with the appropriate skill when the skill is higher than the secondary Atr. For example. A weight-lifter obvioiusly uses ST+SM to lift weights. Both these Atrs represent his inborn capacity and result of training. Let's say he has ST3+SM3=6. What about the guy who has the same Atrs and also has Athletic 4? Doesn't he has better technique than the other? can't he lift the weights better? Ofc this approach opens a new world of pain as one must come up with associated skill per Atr+Atr combination. Don't know if its worth the effort honestly, just thinking out loud.
• As for ST being a dump stat compared to SM. Let's compare what they do.

Strength

• DR.
• Feat of Strength.
• Knockout.
• Knockdown.

Stamina

• AV.
• Feat of Strength.
• Health.

That's 4 vs 3. If weapons and shields get CP penalty like armor ST can get even more useful. Nemedeus suggested earlier that if the total CP penalty exceeds ST score it should be doubled to represent encumbrance. Just a thought.

In all honesty the real dump Atr is SP. It should be used in some physical skills (it's not), preempting should use a different formula (ie SP + 1 die/2CP spent), and maybe even used for movement in combat.

• About merging ST and SM to one Atr, namely Brawn. The idea has merit. With a small asterisk. There are people who don't have outstanding muscle power, but they do have excellent health, pain thresholds, or endurance. Most women weighting a lot less than well built men for example have substantially greater pain thresholds, where men have greater muscle power. Brawn creates the situation where one is both very strong and enduring at the same time. Ofc it comes down to what one wants to model and compromises he is willing to make.

Sorry if I forget something, its 5 am here, and waiting to go to sleep (1 more hour at work).

[ChaosFarseer]

[*]Skills will get their starting value based on the attribute to which they are tied (at 1/2 or 1/3 the value, we haven't settled on this yet.)

Maybe I'm missing something, but if a skill's starting value being 1/2 of its attribute, wouldn't it be the same as the current system?

Old:
Attributes range from 1-5, Skills range from 0-5. Range is 1-10 dice, plus miscellaneous modifiers like Expertise (which really should be worth more than 1 die).
Average people range from 3-4 dice in attributes, 3-4 in skills. Total is 6-8 dice.

New:
Attributes contribute 0-5 dice, Skills max out at 10. Range is 0-10 dice, basically the same as above.
Average people range from 3-6 in attributes (or 1-4 after halving). 'Average people' ratings are defined as 3-6, so if you get 1-4 dice from attributes, you need to put around 2 points into your skill to be professional.

Formerly, if you didn't have any training in a skill, you'd roll dice equal to your attribute, which is half of the dice you'd expect a trained person to have. With this, you'd roll dice equal to half of your attribute... which is also half of the dice you'd expect a trained person to have.


If you make the attribute contribute 1/3 of its rating instead of 1/2, that fixes the problem a bunch. It would add to the feeling of dead levels, though. It also reduces the impact of having a high attribute score, in my opinion. While I haven't played the system, I'd imagine that pure attribute checks are less common than skill checks. Attributes tend to have value by increasing a number of other stats on your character. Decreasing its bonuses to other places (by making it a 1/2 or 1/3 exchange rate) makes it less valuable to boost the attribute, and more valuable to boost the skill itself.


If it's a granularity problem, perhaps consider making the maximum 'normal' attribute or skill a 6 (with 7 becoming the new superhuman level). This would require rebalancing all the numbers, which would suck, but it would suggest that the range of professional values expands by 1 (to 3-5). I also kind of liked how everything seemed to operate on a 1-6 scale, which armor values did and attributes and skills seemed to (but attributes and skills operated on an effective 1-5 range). Or, if skills need more room to grow, expand the range for skills to be 1-7 or something like that. It breaks consistency, but it would suggest that superb training in (say) lockpicking can achieve more than the most dexterous untrained person can do.


On another note, is there an upper limit to proficiency? At character creation you can go up to 11, and the number 12 comes to mind for some reason. I ask because the old skill + attribute total dice pool and the new skill dice pool should have the same range as proficiencies. Maybe that's just a desire for consistency. The automatic-successes-if-you-have-more-than-ten-dice rule suggests that the intended maximum dice pool is 10, though.


Overall, I'm all in favor of improvement. You guys have done a great job so far (and I'm itching for a chance to use this in a campaign).

[nemedeus]

I'll try to be as concise as possible.

1. Stats

I think, keep them as they are now.

How to fix Strength:

a) tie an encumbrance system to it. The encumbrance system replaces CP penalties from Armour (and weapons, like 33 said if that is gonna happen in the future). Not having the strength to carry your equipment around should be a big problem.

b) might want to rethink about what Stamina actually is supposed to represent. Taking less damage is AWESOME, i always loved the idea of a stat that directly reduces damage. In my own game, i had a Toughness stat that did exactly that, SEPARATE from "Endurance". Although there, endurance tied into the weight system instead of Strength. blah blah blah. We can figure this out.

How to fix Speed:

a) Apply Speed as a base for Positioning and Movement rolls

b) Use the same thing i suggested when we discussed Feat of Strength and Wrestling: if you have higher speed, you get advantage in preempting. This seems ugly, though.
EDIT: Benedict's suggestion for +1d per 2CP is definitely the way to go, imo. Great idea man.

Bonus: Balance = Speed + Agility (or, call it Mobility? Either way, while i can see why you made this the same as the CP base--we might as well call it "coordination"--i don't get why you named it BALANCE instead of coordination. I'm entirely not sure this helps much, i just find it more intuitive).

As a last resort, yeah you could merge Stamina and Strength to Brawn, and Agility and Speed to... well, one thing. BUT! please, PLEEEASE no divisions. This deserves an heading of its own:


2. Divisions and Averages

In short, THEY FUCKING SUCK.

I used to have them in my games, but now i try to avoid them. Division and averaging just doesn't work on a 1-5 scale, and i definitely want to keep that scale.
Also, one of the things that made me fall in love with Bastards was definitely the absence of divided and averaged Derived Stats.

This is less of an issue with bigger scale numbers, like Proficiencies, but "using Proficiency as a skill" is kind of a niche case anyway.


3. Numbers

1-5 for Stats is gold. Combining them to stat pools is gold.

We can have skills go a bit above that. It might break pretty symmetry, but it makes sense.
Beyond that, I think it might make sense to reduce the randomness of high skill, thus...


4. NEW THING:Mastery Ranks

Mastery Ranks are extra dots. You need to have the skill at 5 already to obtain them. They range from 1 to 3.
Mastery Ranks are NOT ADDED AS DICE. They are ADDED TO THE SUCCESS TOTAL

Effects:
- skill master gets up to 3 auto successes in his best skills
- can (and should) have higher Skill Ob
- technically, in terms of dice rolled you still have the skills on the same scale as attributes

In the priority table: maximum Skill rank tied to Tier.

Tier 1 -> max 3
Tier 2 -> max 4
Tier 3 -> max 5
Tier 4 -> max 6 (read: max 5, max mastery 1; also skill points increased from 25 to 26 to compensate)
Tier 5 -> max 7 (read: max 5, max mastery 2; also skill points increased from 31 to 33, both and to honour our Great Editorial Inquisitor.)

Across the board, Mastery ranks cost 2 points.
Also, Mastery Ranks completely replace the extra dot that we previously got from Skills Tier 5, for simplicity's sake.

Alternatively: only 2 mastery ranks, BUT EXPERTISES now also grant an autosuccess instead of +1d. I kinda like this variant.

[*]One thing about rolling attribute+attribute. I always felt it should be rolled primary Atr + secondary Atr, and the secondary Atr can be replaced with the appropriate skill when the skill is higher than the secondary Atr. For example. A weight-lifter obvioiusly uses ST+SM to lift weights. Both these Atrs represent his inborn capacity and result of training. Let's say he has ST3+SM3=6. What about the guy who has the same Atrs and also has Athletic 4? Doesn't he has better technique than the other? can't he lift the weights better? Ofc this approach opens a new world of pain as one must come up with associated skill per Atr+Atr combination. Don't know if its worth the effort honestly, just thinking out loud.

I like it in principle, but i'm not sure that a skill that could replace an attribute should even exist. What i mean by that is, if Attributes have any trained/learned component at all instead of being defined as purely innate, then these skills can simply be redefined as attribute pools (they kinda are as it is).

[*]As for ST being a dump stat compared to SM. Let's compare what they do.[/list]
Strength

• DR.
• Feat of Strength.
• Knockout.
• Knockdown.

Stamina

• AV.
• Feat of Strength.
• Health.

That's 4 vs 3. If weapons and shields get CP penalty like armor ST can get even more useful.

Yes. This is why i corrected myself in the Wounds thread. You don't want to totally neglect STR because it's in all these pools. This is a good thing.

Nemedeus suggested earlier that if the total CP penalty exceeds ST score it should be doubled to represent encumbrance. Just a thought.

Thanks for mentioning it.

In all honesty the real dump Atr is SP. It should be used in some physical skills (it's not), preempting should use a different formula (ie SP + 1 die/2CP spent), and maybe even used for movement in combat.

As i said, I agree completely (also because increased CP cost is significantly less ugly than doing "Speed x2 + CP" would be, even though the result would be practically the same).

Attributes contribute 0-5 dice, Skills max out at 10. Range is 0-10 dice, basically the same as above.
Average people range from 3-6 in attributes (or 1-4 after halving). 'Average people' ratings are defined as 3-6, so if you get 1-4 dice from attributes, you need to put around 2 points into your skill to be professional.

I had that in my own game, although i didn't add them together there.

[taelor]

By way of illustration, the new attribute scale would be (using Brawn as an example)
1. Small animals.
2. Children, the disabled.
3. Sedentary office workers
4. Average, active people. Farmers, laborers
5-6. Professional athletes.
7-8 Professional Strongman types. The height of what normal people can actually achieve.
9-10. Genetic freaks. Tier 5 material. Andrey the Giant. Hafthor Bjornson.

This is almost exactly the scale that Burning Wheel uses (though stats are usually capped at 6 at character creation, and in practice, 90% of all characters, PC and NPC alike, end up with stats in the 3-6 range).

[*]Skills will get their starting value based on the attribute to which they are tied (at 1/2 or 1/3 the value, we haven't settled on this yet.)

Maybe I'm missing something, but if a skill's starting value being 1/2 of its attribute, wouldn't it be the same as the current system?

Old:
Attributes range from 1-5, Skills range from 0-5. Range is 1-10 dice, plus miscellaneous modifiers like Expertise (which really should be worth more than 1 die).
Average people range from 3-4 dice in attributes, 3-4 in skills. Total is 6-8 dice.

New:
Attributes contribute 0-5 dice, Skills max out at 10. Range is 0-10 dice, basically the same as above.
Average people range from 3-6 in attributes (or 1-4 after halving). 'Average people' ratings are defined as 3-6, so if you get 1-4 dice from attributes, you need to put around 2 points into your skill to be professional.

Under the old system, each additional point in a skill adds one extra die to checks of that particular skill, whereas each additional point in an attribute adds an extra die to multiple skills checks. The result of this is that if you want to build a skill-based character, you should, on the margin, favor putting priorities into attributes, rather than skills. Under the new system, attributes only contribute (on average, because of dead levels) half a die to skill checks.

[dra]

If SAs being too high are a problem for regular rolls, why not set them in scale of 1-3? And possibly allow for firing few of them during important combat scenes with +1 per every additional SA over highest one? Character progression could be done by prebuing some points on certain attributes/skills?

I've thought about reducing the SA range, though it didn't seem to be a particularly popular suggestion. Mechanically, we'd need to reduce the cost of character advancement fairly well across the board. It'd also mean that SAs would be tighter in general. When character advancement did happen, it would deplete more resources. Players would be burning SAs less often, and so on.

Two things to consider here:

1. Actual cost of advancement in points?
2. Loosing all extra dices for important fights?

If 1 than you can always go old school on that and deduct Int from cost of aquiring skills. If no Int, you can go with Cunning but it is kinda overused stat anyway.
If 2 than, well, it is kinda zero sum game. When players run into climatic fight with badass antagonist, GM of course can predict, SAs will be firing. Therefore he will adjust opponent's stats to get a hard to overcome to but beatable opponent. If players decide to burn some SAs for advancment, GM just decreases stats of opponent and we still have exciting, yet possible to win fight. Same goes for roll obstacles and so on.

Having said that, I still think it is not necessary to ask player to pay everything at once. You can make a tiny square next to stats for advancement purposes and whenever he wants he can spend some points in order to build up advancement pool for this particular stat. This way player can save up to increase some stats and still keep his high rolls (which are still just an illusion)

[dra]

If it's a granularity problem, perhaps consider making the maximum 'normal' attribute or skill a 6 (with 7 becoming the new superhuman level).

or 1-8
and 1-5 skills + this 3 levels of masteries written above.
Some masteries could also be considered in profficiencies department.

[Korbel]

so 1-5 SA dice will weigh slightly heavier on the overall pool

That's exactly the beast you wanted be dead a couple of weeks ago, right? And now you feed it to grow even bigger?
Not that it's a problem for me (as I'll probably stick to my homerule - "SAs give Advantage" - and won't give a single fuck about pool sizes), but what about you? It doesn't bother you anymore?

then you're spending 3 points into an attribute to get an MoS1 worth of damage/protection

And better lifting, KO/KD/Trauma, healing... and maybe some other things, like encumbrance rules you mentioned, or better grappling (alternative).
And bows! Don't forget the bows, they will require high Brawn. Bows are cool.

On the other hand, I also rather like the idea of your physical size being directly correlated to your Body stat

That's similar to what I was thinking in the previous topic about "Naked Dwarf Syndrome".
You want better "natural" damage modifiers? You must be big.
You play a 45 kg girl? You deal less damage and take more, deal with it.
Three options, meaningful choices. Most of the characters will be just regular 150-200 pound men with no modifiers to wounds.