House Rule: Fixing 'High' Attributes?

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Randyman

<IMO> This is a feature, not a bug. Character creation *should* require that conversation, and should ultimately be a group conversation as well. </IMO>

Failure of a "meeting of the minds" will screw up ANY game regardless of rules.
Even D&D needs pre-game discussions, if only to keep one player from creating an ultra heroic fighter, another a Leroy Jenkins murder-hobo, another still a pure role-playing courtly intrigue fop, and the final one a back stabbing everyone for themselves thief.
That game limped along but a little pre-play compromise would have helped a lot.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

Your opinions? Will this break things? Will it solve my issue or am I missing something fundamental?

Not really, it just changes the maximum value everybody buys their attribute up to, and 16 is still quite high. It may help some, but the only real fix for this sort of thing is to not have attributes modify skills, or at least have the modifier be so small it's nearly negligible.

Some games do that - FUDGE totally divorces them, Chaosium BRP systems mostly use the negligibly small modifier versions - and it works fine. But while you sometimes see it proposed for GURPS (usually as some (or all) skills are based on 10 or 12) it's quite a radical change.

And of course if you are leaving in Talents, well, all IQ or DX are as skill modifiers are 20 point Talents. A slightly different game design could've called each non-overlapping Talent an attribute, so have you done anything but move the problem from the attributes to those Talents?

[LemmingLord]

More and more I think we just need to throw away points completely. Just come up with a character concept you want to play for my game; we can make tweaks to fit my game; then make the character with whatever statistics meet the character concept we agreed on. As a corollary, if you think your character has gained skill, let me know, if we agree based on what's happened in the game, bing, your skill improves. No points. No problem.

[weby]

I have normally limited attributes to below 20 in most games.

So overall I do not see any problem with the limit.. but I would just call the limit what it is..

In my current high power fantasy game the basic attribute limit is 15+racial mods. They can however raise one attribute above that at a raising extra cost(+1/+5/+25/+125...).

There are couple of extra wrinkles too:
It is possible to raise other attributes than the one by 1-2 over the limit by paying obscene amounts of money in addition to the extra cost(I think two of the PCs have +1 in one other attribute too).
ST limit also modified by SM.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by LemmingLord

More and more I think we just need to throw away points completely. Just come up with a character concept you want to play for my game; we can make tweaks to fit my game; then make the character with whatever statistics meet the character concept we agreed on. As a corollary, if you think your character has gained skill, let me know, if we agree based on what's happened in the game, bing, your skill improves. No points. No problem.

That's wasting a lot of time that could be much more gainfully spent exploring the characters and the world that they are in. The whole point of having well-designed rules is to reduce the need for yakking between the GM and the players.

[doulos05]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

That's wasting a lot of time that could be much more gainfully spent exploring the characters and the world that they are in. The whole point of having well-designed rules is to reduce the need for yakking between the GM and the players.

Minor quibble. The whole point of having well-designed rules is the reduce the need for arguing between the GM and the players. The system he described may be nearly frictionless in his group. My group used points like we were on "Whose line is it anyway?" (The show where everything's made up and the points don't matter). The only point I would insist on at this point is spacing advancement out so you can't advance too quickly for intrinsic attributes (skills and attributes). But I handed out tons of points and we were generally comfortable with their rate of advancement. But my gaming style closely mimics the format of the TV Show Flashpoint. The players are decidedly superior to 90% of their opposition. If/When they pull the trigger on whatever direct confrontation solution they've come up with, they are going to win. The gaming tension comes about because they don't want to pull the trigger on the direct confrontation because of external factors.

For example, the merchants in my Traveller campaign walked around with Gauss PDWs and the skills to use them. They got in 4 significant firefights (significant here meaning more than 2 rounds) over the course of an 18 month campaign, and handily won 3 of them (the 4th one, they won but the other guys got away). But the game was structured such that the firefights aren't what my players talked about afterwards. We talked about the machinations they were using to trace down the rogue elements of the Vilani government trying to trigger the next interstellar war without accidentally triggering said war themselves. But to each their own, I'm also not a fan of killing PCs, hence why I disliked D&D so much (I kept nearly losing/losing PCs).

[simply Nathan]

Originally Posted by LemmingLord

More and more I think we just need to throw away points completely. Just come up with a character concept you want to play for my game; we can make tweaks to fit my game; then make the character with whatever statistics meet the character concept we agreed on. As a corollary, if you think your character has gained skill, let me know, if we agree based on what's happened in the game, bing, your skill improves. No points. No problem.

It'd be really hard to play Dungeon Fantasy that way, I think. And that's where 99% of my "potential interest in campaign" focus lies.

[LemmingLord]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

That's wasting a lot of time that could be much more gainfully spent exploring the characters and the world that they are in. The whole point of having well-designed rules is to reduce the need for yakking between the GM and the players.

Those thirty seconds to talk to your GM about raising something would, in a points based game, be used to - talk to your GM about raising something. Same conversation, less accounting. Win-win.

Originally Posted by simply Nathan

It'd be really hard to play Dungeon Fantasy that way, I think. And that's where 99% of my "potential interest in campaign" focus lies.

Point taken. (Get it!). That "no points" ruins the min/maxing experience presented by dungeon fantasy only strengthens my resolve to use it in games where the focus is on storytelling, role playing or simulation.

[martinl]

Originally Posted by LemmingLord

More and more I think we just need to throw away points completely. Just come up with a character concept you want to play for my game; we can make tweaks to fit my game; then make the character with whatever statistics meet the character concept we agreed on. As a corollary, if you think your character has gained skill, let me know, if we agree based on what's happened in the game, bing, your skill improves. No points. No problem.

I've done this. It requires higher GM-Player trust than is usual, but it works fine.

[Nereidalbel]

There's also the suggestion of attributes costing double to raise once play starts. Mages would still want to raise IQ above individual skills, but, mages really should be the "smart" ones anyway in most settings.