04-04-2017, 02:06 PM | #1 |
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: U.S.
|
The Rules of 14, 16, & 20
Are there any reasons or justifications beyond game balance for The Rules of 14, 16, & 20?
__________________
And all should cry, "Beware, beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice & close your eyes with holy dread for he on honeydew hath fed & drunk the milk of paradise" |
04-04-2017, 02:17 PM | #2 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
|
Re: The Rules of 14, 16, & 20
The rule of 16 makes sense to me, in that anyone, no matter how skilled, may once in a while fail at performing a task. If you want to have any failures at all, an 18 has to fail; if you want to distinguish ordinary and catastrophic failure, an 18 needs to be catastrophic and a 17 ordinary. The odds actually give you far more failures than are realistic; I tend to think of them as "this is the time when the heroes are on camera, and interesting things will tend to happen," and to assume that the time when they're not being roleplayed is time when everything is going smoothly.
If you had a story where the heroes always succeeded at their main skills, and were defeated only by hopeless odds, that wouldn't make a very interesting narrative or drama, I think. As for the rule of 20, if you look at defaults, a character with attribute 20 defaults to 16 for Easy skills, 15 for Average, and 14 for Hard. All of these are greater than ordinary professional competence. You're not quite looking at Clark Savage, Jr. or Bruce Wayne, but you're not far short. That's already pushing at the limits of believability. If it were up to me, the rule of 20 would change to rule of 16, with defaults of 12, 11, or 10—still pretty good, but not "trained professional" as default. But imagine letting it go higher—IQ 22 would make you the equally of a highly skilled professional at Artist, Diplomacy, Engineer (all specializations!), and Physician, among others. The limit helps lessen the strain on the players' disbelief suspension. I don't think these narrative concerns are the same as "game balance."
__________________
Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
04-04-2017, 02:20 PM | #3 | |
Wielder of Smart Pants
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ventura CA
|
Re: The Rules of 14, 16, & 20
Quote:
|
|
04-04-2017, 02:24 PM | #4 |
Join Date: Oct 2014
Location: Chicagoland
|
Re: The Rules of 14, 16, & 20
Looked at from the other direction, if the game balance premise is accepted for the Rule of 20, then one could conclude that the value is set about high as it can be and still serve the function. As you point out, Bill, it would be easy to argue for setting it lower. I assume the reason it's set high is to provide as wide a range of useful trait values as possible. Certainly, I appreciate it when games have more than a few realistic and mechanically differentiated trait values.
__________________
GMing Since 1982. Last edited by GM Joe; 04-04-2017 at 02:40 PM. |
04-04-2017, 02:29 PM | #5 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
|
Re: The Rules of 14, 16, & 20
Yeah, that's the one I know of as well. In any case, I can't think of a non-balance reason for any of those rules, and the rule Bill is talking about has more to do with "should you really be bothering to roll when the odds of failure are so low?" than reality, plenty of things do have success chances well over 98%.
|
04-04-2017, 03:04 PM | #6 | |
Join Date: Mar 2014
|
Re: The Rules of 14, 16, & 20
Quote:
Rather not getting better at defaults no matter how much your intelligence increase seems to me to run into far more problems with suspension of disbelief (one might argue that such general increases to intelligence should have the enhancement which makes the rule of 20 inapplicable, but such an argument leaves quite a lot to be desired, especially since the authors of GURPS books often don't bother to include it in templates and effects which improve intelligence). In my experience that is actually very common in narratives. Heroes pretty much never fail in tasks which they are exceptionally skilled at unless the circumstances are such that the task is much harder than usual. Last edited by Andreas; 04-04-2017 at 03:13 PM. |
|
04-04-2017, 03:17 PM | #7 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
|
Re: The Rules of 14, 16, & 20
Quote:
__________________
Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
|
04-04-2017, 03:23 PM | #8 | |
Join Date: Mar 2014
|
Re: The Rules of 14, 16, & 20
Quote:
Why would one argue that those people had such high levels of IQ if they don't have such breadth of competence? More narrow competence is what Talents are for. Last edited by Andreas; 04-04-2017 at 03:26 PM. |
|
04-04-2017, 03:24 PM | #9 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
|
Re: The Rules of 14, 16, & 20
Quote:
Then they didn't have that much IQ, they had something else. The rule of 20 is a patch for attributes being broken. |
|
04-04-2017, 03:25 PM | #10 |
Join Date: Jan 2017
|
Re: The Rules of 14, 16, & 20
If we are allowing IQ (or DX) to go above 16 (or even 14), the GM should really require mandatory incompetencies or "anti"-talents if they don't want characters to be good at everything by default.
|
Tags |
rule of 14, rule of 16 |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|