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Old 06-02-2021, 07:03 AM   #28
Emerikol
 
Join Date: May 2021
Location: Eastern Kentucky
Default Re: Skill Advancement

Quote:
Originally Posted by Anaraxes View Post
Any system with a small number of attributes means those stats each cover a lot of ground.
This is probably the bottom line. I've always seen stats as more innate talent or ability and skills as learning on top of that. Again with ST being an obvious exception.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Anaraxes View Post
DX is certainly improvable in the real world. There are exercises to improve hand-eye coordination (one of the reasons you play catch with kids, but there are also exercises for adults. I'm studying guitar, and despite having had a profession that exercised my manual dexterity, I've still made a lot of improvements over that starting ability in controlling my fingers (especially with the left hand). That's certainly gotten noticeably better in less than a year. Stretching exercises improve range of motion and flexibility, both in exercise (yoga), PT, or athletic training.
So for my real answer read above. For a fun (I hope) dispute on stats continue on...

Let's use my playing pickleball as an example. I can make shots and react to shots far better now after a year than I could when I started. I attribute this to my pickleball skill rising and not me becoming more dextrous. When a really good player, begins to age and lose some of his edge in pickleball, I attribute that to declining DX and not declining pickleball skill. When someone shows up and takes to the game almost instantly that is their innate DX but from there as they improve I see it as their pickleball skill.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Anaraxes View Post
Stats aren't divine gifts fixed at birth. They change throughout life.
I agree they change but I also think we can't change them by our activities all that much. We might move HT a little by eating better and ST could be if we built it up by weightlifting. I theorize that how long we live has a lot more to do with genetics than anything else.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Anaraxes View Post
And when it comes to game stats -- even if you believe there's an inherent natural limit, why assume that the numbers that a character happens to start with are actually at that limit? That hero might have an impressive ST or DX already, but their full potential has yet to be realized or revealed.
Well of course there is a natural limit. In the real world that would be indisputable. Nobody can lift a car overhead and throw it across the road.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Anaraxes View Post
The main reason I can picture for prohibiting stat increases is a purely gamist one. It will always cost more to raise a bunch of skills than it will to raise the base stat. Therefore, the minmax thing to do once you have five skills at the 4 CP level (or ten with just 1 CP, so the next level would cost 2) is to just keep bumping the stat. In practice, it's not quite that bad, because players also think some skills are more important than others, and will run them up a little higher. But there's a point that's not hard to reach where a reasonably experienced character is mathematically better off just by raising their stats. In some genres and stories, even the omnicompetent hero isn't a problem -- even a trope -- but at lot of people tend not to like their games to get that extreme.
Well the whole point of buying stats is to have characters of similar ability in the group. Fairness if you will. It's why when I generate NPCs I won't buy stats in that sense. I will compute a probability for any given stat and generate NPCs that way.

I wouldn't have a problem saying that whatever you spend on your stat initially cannot be more than doubled. So if you go with a 12 IQ then you can never get above a 14 IQ. If you spend nothing on a stat then maybe you can only add +2. That would encourage higher stats initially which if you like the zero to hero concept for play would work out.

Again I am just theorizing and discussing at this time. I will not do anything until I have a few games under my belt and I see what my PCs actually do. I think having 20 be the human max is reasonable in a non-wuxia game
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