Fiddling About with Stats (long)

[Darren Hill]

First - I don't know if the following is of any interest to anyone else. But I can hope :)
I've read about the problems some people have with STR and TOU (my problem in this area is mainly the possibility of a character having a STR of 2 and a TOU of 7 and vice-versa), and the near-uselessness of Health.
My problem is the preponderance of health-type stats: of the physical stats, you have AGL, STR, and 3 stats which relate to health or fitness - and the fact that you could have, say, 7 in one of them and 2 in the others.
So, I had two ideas for fiddling about with stats.

Idea 1: several stats are linked into pairs - for a give score in the first stat, the second stat must be within 1 point of it. So, for example, you can't have a STR that differs from TOU by more than 1 point. This would allow a character to have a STR 5 and TOU 4, or vice-sa, but not a TOU 6 and STR 4.
Given the low number of stats in TROS, this is a very potent tool for controlling lopsided characters, and it also requires no changes to the actual system. But I haven't thought through all the possible pairs because I had a second idea I like better.

Idea 2: Change several existing stats to derived stats.
In this system, you only have 3 physical and 3 mental stats, and all the other stats are turned into derived ratings.

Physical: STR, AGL, HLT
Mental: WIT, PER, WP

TOU becomes the average of STR & HLT.

Endurance becomes the average of HLT and WP (your healthy, and you when the body weaks, you have enough willpower to drive yourself on).

SOC becomes the average of WIT & PER. If you're perceptive, you're more likely to pick up on the feelings of the people you're interacting with and are then able to respond appropriately. If you have Wit (mental reflex and sharpness), you think on your feet and can take advantage of the constantly changing social situation.

MA is a bit less obvious. It seems to me that Wit and WP are most likely, but a case could be made for Per, or even AGL. (There's apparently a correlation between hand-eye coordination and learning ability, perhaps because good reactions suggest a better working brain, but I'm no neurologist. So AGL + WIT could work! However, AGL is probably powerful enough.)
Since WP is already pretty useful, and WIT and PER are more nebulous and depend on GM judgement for when they apply, I'll use them.

I like these stats, but one area that needs looking at, though, is the original derived stats:

Knockout and Move are the only one that include new derived stats.
Knockout would now be (STR+HLT+WP)/2, since TOU equals (STR+TOU)/2. That looks okay to me.
Move, if left as listed, would be (STR/2+AGL/2+HLT/4+WP/4). I don't think WP should really play a part here, so changing it to (STR+AGL+HLT)/2 looks okay.

The sorcery stats may be a bit more problematic.
KAA: (TO+HT+WP)/2. Here, strength plays a part which, since I imagine it as being correlated with weight to a degree, I don't mind. Health plays a bigger part than WP, which I'm unsure about. But in the end, WP still contributes the same value to the total, 1/3rd, so I'm likely to leave this as is.

Form, and Draw: no derived ratings here, so fine. Draw also has a STR component, suggesting that allowing a STR component in KAA isn't so bad.

Discipline: (WP+EN)/2 which is WP/2+HLT/4+WP/4. This makes up for the low proportion of WP in the basic sorcery pool (which could probably be increased).

Art: oh oh: (MA+EN)/2, which equals (WIT+PER+HLT+WP)/4
Each stat becomes a little diluted here. And I'm not sure how to 'fix' it.

On the whole, I'm not too happy with the stat allocations this caused for the sorcery stats - but since I don't plan to have sorcery in my game to start off with, I don't need to worry about it yet.

Oh, and I need to figure out how many stat points people should get with only 6 stats. Having fewer stats allows people to focus more, so higher averages should be avoided. Then again, in creating the derived stats, you round down, so there will possibly be 'lost' points here and there, so lower averages should also be avoided. My current list:
Priority A: 28, B: 26, C: 23, D: 21, E: 19, F: 17
By direct conversion, B should be 25, but there's already a strong incentive to go for an A attribute pick. I thought B could be made a little more attractive.
It's also tempting to go for A: 28, B: 26, C: 24, D: 22, E: 20, F: 18. It shouldn't make the higher picks less attractive, since you can always do with an extra stat point or two!

Any comments?

Darren

[gmouser]

Indeed I prefer idea1. I don't want to change all these things in the rules. I usually prefer to add new details and new rules instead of altering exsisting ones (unless they are flawed).

However here it is my personal approach to the subject of TO and STR:

I prefer to add 2 new derived statistics:

BRAWL = (STR+REFLEX)/2 which I use instead of pure strength in combat
RESISTANCE = ( TO+REFLEX)/2 which I use instead of TO, unless the character is immobilized or unconscious in that case, naturally RESISTANCE is TO/2, for REFLEX is zero.

I apply the classical full TO only against energy attacks, when reflex isn't important at all.

If you don't like a derived stat into another derived stat you can use AG instead.

In this way a TO of 7 isn't so hard to beat in combat and anyway it counts only 3 when the character is 'out of order'.

I imagine everyone has a personal way to deal with this.

Grey Mouser

[Morfedel]

Another post had a solution i really liked.

Just have toughness stop strength, 1 for 1, but not effect weapons.

So, for instance, if someone hit you with a long sword, and a strength of 5, and you have a toughness of 7, it stops the 5 strength, but doesnt touch the weapon.

I really liked this solution, aside from the fact that monstrous creatures would be adversely effected, if you even use monsters. such as trollspawn.

[Lance D. Allen]

With monsters, Morf, you could simply declare that some of their TO is converted into a natural armor, where appropriate.

Also, to this "issue" (which I personally consider a non-issue) Durgil had some interesting suggestions. Workable, and a good balance, but it adds another two rolls to each hit scenario, which would turn a lot of people off of it.

[gmouser]

With monsters, Morf, you could simply declare that some of their TO is converted into a natural armor, where appropriate.

I have a character with an hard skin, I call it 'scale skin', and that would be a nice solution to handle his natural properties

Grey Mouser

[Callan S.]

I suggest you play Rifts for a year or so, work out house rules for that. When you get back to Riddle of steel or other games, you'll find yourself happy and content. What seemed like problems before will now seem like endering little characteristics of the game.

I'm serious though. It's all too easy to up your standards of 'At what quality things should be' and hurt the game for it out of restless house rule inventions. House rules are just too tempting to fiddle with all the time. The more of them you have, the more you fiddle with them and the less important any rule feels to players. They are there for structure and to support the players role in the game. In other words, your mucking your players about to some degree every time.

I'm not against house rules, I have around 2000 words of them for rifts. But that taught me somthing about holding back as often as possible.