How should attributes apply modifiers to skills

[hannibalisfun]

          So, I have been playing in my friend's home-brewed roleplaying system for about a year now.  Over all I have been really impressed with it.  It is essential a mix of 2nd and 3rd DnD with no classes.  The only thing that is in the system that I really question is how he does the bonus from your stats to skills.  it follows the normal range of stats from DnD with 10 being average and 18 being the highest a character starts out with and 3 being the lowest a character could start out with.  the way the current system is set up the are not modifiers to skills until the stat is bellow 7 or above 14 and these modifiers decrease or increase, respectively, each time a the stats is incremented past these points.  This way I think the bonus from stats should be done is the way 3rd edition DnD does it. where you start at 10 and every two increments changes the bonus by 1.  Also,  I should mention all skill roles are done with a d20 compared against a target number  this target number is modified by the rank of the skill on the bonus from the stats mention earlier.  I was just wondering what peoples thought on this are?

thanks for your time,
Nik

[Vulpinoid]

Do the attributes do anything else in the system?

Maybe the values between 7 and 14 have other effects that he has thought abut, but which you aren't thinking of?

Do the attributes set the difficulty numbers when other people are rolling against a character?

Personally, this sounds a lot like the Palladium system where attributes don't really do anything unless you manage to have a score of 15 or higher (and players often go out of their way to earn scores of 15 or higher through purchasing physical skills to beef up the numbers).

I prefer all of my numbers to be meaningful in a game. If a score of 8 is exactly the same as a score of 13, why bother having the two different values? With this in mind, I'd tend toward agreeing with you. But without further information from the designer about what he's trying to achieve (or how other elements tie into the game), I can't give a full and balanced opinion.

Tell us some more about what impresses you with the system?

V

[hannibalisfun]

While, I don't mind tell what I was impressed with in the system.  I feel like I can't get into the specific of what impressed me with out my friend's permission because it is kind of his.  A brief summery would be he has a interesting system for building spells on the fly, the priestly magic is much different than the arcane magic, combat is more interesting than DnD although that is not hard to do and also the flexibility of his skill system. 

As for other uses of the attributes, There are time when the attribute it self is used to make a check as if the attribute it self was a skill for example to avoid tripping, catching a disease, or to resist a magic compulsion. So, there is some difference between a attribute with a value of 8 and a value of 14 but it still seems weird to me that there is no effect on skills until it passes those values.

Nik

[Callan S.]

Hi,

This way I think the bonus from stats should be done is...

How do you mean 'should'?

If you reflect on it, how it seems it 'should' be done is just an invention of your own mind. Your friend invented one way, you invented another. There is no 'should' - there's only personal preference occuring so far.

[hannibalisfun]

If you reflect on it, how it seems it 'should' be done is just an invention of your own mind. Your friend invented one way, you invented another. There is no 'should' - there's only personal preference occuring so far.

Maybe this is different for most people but I think that is what I mean when say 'should' almost all of the time.  the original reason I made this thread was to see if there how people felt about it either way.  Although, I am sure the way i worded this was a little biased.

also, i got permission to talk about some of the stuff from his game more in-depth.  So, sometime in the day or two.  I will give a little more detailed write up.