Hello all I am new to the board and have seen a bit of good feedback and decided to look for some feed back on a task resolution scheme I have been working on.

Before I get into the actual mechanic let me tell you what I was hoping for in the system. I, and I am sure many of you have seen systems where an attribute or skill level is favored. There is also systems where a Target value is what is needed on a dice roll. All these systems have their good and bad points.

What I am hoping to avoid is a person with a lot of "raw talent" represented by an Attribute but little skill, represented by a Skill from pasting someone with less raw talent but greater skill. While this has multiple considerations and arguments for and against either what I have come up with is this...

Attributes and Skills range in the 1-10 range. A typical starting character should be around a 5 in either for proficiency. Dice used will be 10 sided.

1. Determine the Attribute and Skill for the Task. For the example we will say shoot a gun and will use the terms Coordination (attribute) and Firearms (skill)

2. Take a standard starting base of 10 and subtract the Attribute, and this is the target number.

(this was chosen to represent that someone with a superior Attribute should have an easier time to perform the task.)

3. Roll the Skill level in Dice against the target number and count successes. Any die that shows a "10" is re-rolled. Any 1 that is rolled is placed aside for a more nefarious purpose.

4. While in most cases only one success is needed but more success increases the result such as faster repair time or in our example extra damage.

Note: This is a more heroic style game, so no matter what everyone gets 1 die to roll even if unskilled.

That is pretty much it, there will be some meta-gaming modifiers for things such as range, wounds, and situational modifiers.

This to me seems pretty sound for what I want to do. It allows more a more skilled person a greater chance to have better success but it makes allowances for those with great raw ability.

The main problem that jump up is in a long story arc / campaign where characters Attribute and Skill levels can become quite high. Giving the character a large number of dice (from skill) at a very easy target (from attribute). I intend to have advancement of attributes a bit slower than skills and with the more heroic feel it may not be a problem, longevity however might be the issue.

Brian T.

Sounds like a cool system. It's totally different from mine, so I can't say I have experience here, but I'll throw out an idea for the longevity problem.

I assume you don't have levels for characters?

If you don't, you might want to consider having a point (based on attribute and skill levels) where a character reaches the "Next Level" so to speak. You could call it something like "Hero" or "Champion." Now this doesn't change their dice rolls or anything under most circumstances, but when they're up against another "Champion" class opponent, both the opponent and the character get their skills and attributes divided in half (but only as applied when fighting each other).

This gives a cinematic type of realism to the system, where a Champion character is really tough, but against another champion, they come down to a more mortal level.

Anyway, just a suggestion.

Instead of "subtract attribute from 10, roll equal to or above," you might consider "roll equal to or under attribute." Identical probabilities, less math.

Cheers,
--jeff

Brian T wrote: What I am hoping to avoid is a person with a lot of "raw talent" represented by an Attribute but little skill, represented by a Skill from pasting someone with less raw talent but greater skill. While this has multiple considerations and arguments for and against either what I have come up with is this...
(...system described...)
This to me seems pretty sound for what I want to do. It allows more a more skilled person a greater chance to have better success but it makes allowances for those with great raw ability.

Brian T wrote: What I am hoping to avoid is a person with a lot of "raw talent" represented by an Attribute but little skill, represented by a Skill from pasting someone with less raw talent but greater skill.

I would make raw talent a bonus of some sort toward raising the skill.

Hey thanks for all the feedback so far some good points and new thoughts are mine to mull over.

John Kim your statistical examples helped put numbers to what I was certain could be an issue. I am not proficient in math in that capacity. I thank you.

Let me give those that have been following this thread an example of what I am trying to avoid.

In an example game system they use a 1-5 scale for attributes and skills. In their system as skills levels increase the skill is considered exponentially better than the previous level with level 5 placing the character in the "best in the world" category.

Now lets take an example of two characters, in the exact same situation, one possesses a Dex of 2 and a Firearms of 5 the other the opposite D5/F2.
While the higher skilled person should have ability that is a few times exponentially greater they possess the exact same odds to succeed because their pools are the same.

This is what I am trying to avoid. In the heroic theme of the game I want those with a good attribute to have some benefit but I want greater skill to generally be able to accomplish greater and more frequent success than someone with lesser skill. I want a little realism without overburdening the system with too much simulation.

Brian T.

Have you considered simply putting the attribute on a different scale (say 1-5) than the skill (0-10)?

Have you considered an augmenting system? That is, in this case, the skill would be the primary consideration and the stat secondary. What you'd do is roll the secondary, and get a result. That, in turn, would add some number based on the result to the original skill. Basically the one adds to the other with a diminished return. The advantage of doing this with a roll is that you don't have the problems that you have with dividing to get a diminished return (breakpoints).

The second roll at first seems like a lot of extra work. But it does have the advantage that it implies that you can add any two things together be they stats or skills, or whatever. In fact, using such a system, you can get rid of the delineation between them altogether. Which usually has some nice benefits as well.

What happens if you don't have any skill? You roll against a zero, and can augment that with the appropriate stat. Not great, but better than nothing.

For an example of how this can be made to work well, see Hero Quest.

Mike

Brian T wrote: Now lets take an example of two characters, in the exact same situation, one possesses a Dex of 2 and a Firearms of 5 the other the opposite D5/F2. While the higher skilled person should have ability that is a few times exponentially greater they possess the exact same odds to succeed because their pools are the same.

This is what I am trying to avoid. In the heroic theme of the game I want those with a good attribute to have some benefit but I want greater skill to generally be able to accomplish greater and more frequent success than someone with lesser skill. I want a little realism without overburdening the system with too much simulation.

That last post of John's makes me think that my Rant about Stat/Skill systems might have something of use. Possibly not if you don't use a point pool or anything. But who knows...

Mike

Mike beat me to the punch on that--why do you have attributes involved at all?

I'm not saying that there aren't good reasons for a system in which both attributes and skills contribute to success; Multiverser is such a system. However, you need to have some reason why you would use both, or you generally wind up in a game in which building up attributes gives greater return for less investment than building skills.

To look quickly at Multiverser, this is handled (in brief) this way.

Attributes contribute directly to chance of success. They are difficult to raise, and grow geometrically more difficult to further increase as they advance. Far short of the theoretical ceiling the character will reach a point at which he must go beyond normal human means of improvement, because he is attempting to achieve superhuman attributes.

Skills contribute directly to chance of success. However, they also contribute to speed of performance, which attributes do not--the more skilled character can do things faster than the less skilled character, even if the less skilled character has the higher chance of success for a high attribute. Further, skill contributes more to quality of performance than attribute, often permitting success which is of a higher order (such as producing a product of superior quality); attributes only contribute to this in the sense that they allow a character to get a higher successful roll. On top of this, skills are far easier to improve initially, and although they do become more difficult to improve as they rise, an ordinary human dedicated to advancing a particular skill will eventually reach best of the best, doing things others didn't think were possible.

Thus even though you can improve your chance of success for a broader range of skills by investing in attributes, your investment will get you more for less if you put it in skills in both the short term and the long term.

So, why is it that you are including attributes in the system at all?

--M. J. Young

Consider Perks/Abilities or even call them skills if you want

Fast Draw is good for those never-miss gunslingers, but could be generalized to 'Fast' and would cover anything involving precision, fast manual dexterity, but keep in mind 'Firearms' involves dexterity, speed, precision AND... AIM - good perception (usually) - so you'll need to figure out just how fine you want to split hairs. I do think its unnecessary and cumbersome to detail things too much, especially in a cinematic game.

Raw talent ADDS to or enhances a skill, or allows you to take the skill in the FIRST place, but it shouldn't let you DO the skill with no training, unless that is part of the scenario or is in the character's past or something - no matter how 'fast your hands' are, you are NOT going to pick up a revolver and start picking cherries off a tree with it if you have no training.

If you use attributes and skills, both rated at 1-5 (my personal favorite rank for rpg stats, by the way), you could simply do something arbitrary like subtract 3 from the requisite attribute, and add the result to the skill level - so if you have a 3, you're not all that and a bag of chips like you think you are, and are just relying on your skill and are lucky you aren't a 2 dex, which would PENALIZE your gunslinging ability - this leaves 4 giving you +1 and 5 giving you +2 to the Firearm skill. Simple, not necessarily pretty, but it works in a pinch, in my opinion.

Again lots of great feedback, I appreciate it.

To Answer M. J. Young’s question of why have abilities allow me to further give my insights on why I am using an Attribute/Skill system.

In the game I am designing there are attributes, one named Might to represent Physical Power. (not necessarily size mind you), there is also a trait called Prowess to represent coordination, speed and overall agility. I wanted to keep the number of attributes small to represent the abilities of the characters untrained capabilities. Perhaps that is not the best description but let me continue.

For my argument lets compare a 70 years old man with a Prowess of 2 (in a 1-5 scale as from feed back I have considered that my be better than a 1-10 range) In his youth this man may well have had a Prowess of 4 but that’s not the focus. Compare him to a young 20-something with a Prowess of 4. In a situation where skill levels are equal the young man would have an advantage.

However things are never so simple and the older gent has a higher skill in say the skill Athletics (for the example lets give him a 7). The younger has an Athletics of say 3.

When the task is rolled using the system I described in the original post the Older gent gets 7 dice against a difficulty or 8 (10-attribute) and the younger gets a roll of 3 dice at a difficulty of 6.

Now while the younger man has a better chance of getting successes because of the lower difficulty at best he can get is 3 successes. Granted while the older gent has a higher diff his greater skill allows him the chance for greater success than the younger can achieve.

The older gents body (if you will) represented by the lower Prowess limits his ability to perform the skill to the best effect. The younger has an easier time succeeding but it limited by his lack of skill. At least that’s how it looks to me I am not skilled enough at math to see if this is actually accomplishing what I think it is. In my mind if the older gent had a Prowess of say 3 his chances against the younger would be greater as he is not as limited by his skill level.

As mentioned the greater skill is intended to provide greater results, in speed, quality and what not. That aspect is also desired.

My goal is to have skill the primary factor with modification from attribute that assists (or perhaps hampers) the character. Perhaps having a base diff of 10 (on 10 sided dice) is too great.

The relation of advancement of skills and attributes will be in contrast. Raising skills will be far more rapid than attributes. Attributes will have a geometrically higher cost making it more expensive to raise than the skills.

I also have attributes in the system because other scores are determined such as damage taking capacity and such.


Hope this gives a clearer idea into my desire.

That tells us what the system is like, but not why. The only reason you gave for having a split is:

I also have attributes in the system because other scores are determined such as damage taking capacity and such.

The relation of advancement of skills and attributes will be in contrast. Raising skills will be far more rapid than attributes. Attributes will have a geometrically higher cost making it more expensive to raise than the skills.

Thanks for the response Mike,

Alright looking over the past few responses I have to admit that I perhaps am not providing enough information about the system. Let me list some of the basics here so maybe what I am asking for is more clear.

There are five attributes I will list them here with a very brief general description: Might (physical strength), Prowess (physical speed), Vitality (health and heartiness), Cunning (Intelligence and problem solving), and Charm (force of personality).

Each of these have other specific uses outside of modifying skill rolls. For example Vitality is used to generate health levels, Cunning is used to generate something I call “down time improvement pips” as well as modifier to number of starting skills, and as a last example Prowess will be the starting base (modified by an athletic skill) to determine movement rates.

Good attributes would be desirable for a number of reasons but will not allow a character to in any sense of the word accomplish much more than innate/natural abilities.

It is this innate “potential” that I want to be able to modify skills. This will differentiate and modify chances from two equally skilled characters in task. This innate/natural ability is the basis for other game system needs.

The character generation system is a mix of points with some things left to chance to keep things from being “cookie cutter”. Granted I could drop “attributes” and represent them with “skills” but I feel it would add greatly to a list I have kept short as possible without sacrificing setting.

Speaking of setting the game is perhaps strongly Narrative but I am not looking for feedback on G/N/R, I am still reading through all the threads on that subject. I want the game to play with the heroic feel so for most tasks if a character lacks a particular skill they get a single die with a modifier based on the “attribute”. In some cases a desperate attempt but one that fits the setting.

I did read your rant and I agree with many of your points. The system I have put into work is one that should allow players to pick (and in some cases hope to get) traits, be it attributes or skills (and backgrounds/edges/merit flaws/what have you) to have a character that is good at their chosen “field” but perhaps lacking in others to promote the teamwork I desire for the setting.

If there is any more information I can provide to help those following this thread let me know, and Mike I hope I am understanding the questions you are asking. As for the best strategy I have not played a game myself where a player lacked choices to mold the type of character they wanted, admittedly I have not played a very large assortment of games.

Brian T.

Brian T wrote: When the task is rolled using the system I described in the original post the Older gent gets 7 dice against a difficulty or 8 (10-attribute) and the younger gets a roll of 3 dice at a difficulty of 6.

He several times wrote: I want the game to play with the heroic feel so for most tasks if a character lacks a particular skill they get a single die with a modifier based on the ?attribute?.

I think what is apparent from this is that your system not only is not intuitive, it does not create the differences in ability that you're expecting. Frankly, as one who plays percentile-based games (really speeds up this kind of thing--I think dice pools were devised to obscure the odds from the players) I don't find five percentage points a significant advantage or disadvantage when you're at that end of the scale. Both of these guys are going to succeed far more often than not, and you're not really going to have much on which to distinguish them. Of course, if the point of the system is to obscure who really is better at any given task, you've succeeded admirably--only someone with the math skills to do what I just did would be able to work it out, since it's unlikely to be apparent in play.

Why are you so committed to a dice pool system, particularly when you don't understand the math behind them? That may be a personal quibble of mine, but I'd think anyone who wants to design mechanics would do so in a system in which they, at least, can work out what happens when you change things. Dice pools usually have a lot of dials--what's the range of the dice? what's the target number? what's the number of dice rolled? Changing any one of these alters your probabilities rapidly, and often in unexpected ways.

Brian T wrote: ...Mike I hope I am understanding the questions you are asking. As for the best strategy I have not played a game myself where a player lacked choices to mold the type of character they wanted, admittedly I have not played a very large assortment of games.

I want the game to play with the heroic feel

As for the best strategy I have not played a game myself where a player lacked choices to mold the type of character they wanted, admittedly I have not played a very large assortment of games.

First of all, to Brian T -- I think you misunderstood the point of the Mr Jack's and my suggestion, re: 1-5 for attributes and 1-10 for skills. The suggestion was assuming a mechanic like Storyteller or many other games. Your effective value is based purely on attribute + skill. This could be rolling attribute + skill as dice in a dice pool, or it could be adding attribute + skill + 3d6 vs a difficulty.

This has the simplicity of those other systems, but it also achieves the primary purpose you expressed. Attribute makes some difference, but not an overwhelming one. Someone with a world-class attribute (i.e. 5) has an advantage over a less-talented person, but requires skill to be effective.

Mike Holmes wrote: Interestingly, we've postulated a lot about games that don't allow player choices in chargen. And there are the cases of playing with pregen characters that most of us have encountered. But you miss the point. I'm not saying that your system is problematic because it leaves players choices. No, I'm all for that.

It's problematic because it takes away sensible choices. That is, there's an apparent choice to go with increasing attributes or skills. But given the system you're describing, for a given character it's always going to either be more efficient to raise the stat behind a group of skills, or to raise the skills. Given that fact, you'll only see one behavior in play for a given character.