Thinking about Attributes

Minimalist
Body
Mind
Heart

That's about as simple as you can get with abstracted quantitative measures of pretend humans. Some might say that you don't need Heart, but they're probably not much fun to play with.

Classic
Strength
Dexterity
Constitution
Intelligence
Wisdom
Charisma

These six attributes are like a beautiful nerd haiku. They not only carry tremendous nostalgic weight, but they're pretty brilliantly flexible. This is the porridge Goldilocks ate.

Extended
Strength
Agility
Precision
Endurance
Reason
Knowledge
Intuition
Awareness
Presence

Yech. Anytime an attribute list gets too long, I start backing away. This is a more accurate depiction of the sort of competencies I test for in my games, though.

Á la Carte Expendable Additions
Luck
Power
Sanity
Will
Resources

Depending on the campaign, one or more of these might be helpful. These can be used as roll-under attributes, but points from them may also be expended. F'rintsance, You may roll Resources to generally see if you can acquire the items you need, but your castle burning down may cost you several points, or you might willingly spend points to acquire something rare and remarkable, like a magical artifact. And, of course, you lose Sanity points when you fail a Sanity check, and can probably spend Sanity to gain insight into horrible things.

Minimalist Divided
Body (Strength/Dexterity)
Mind (Awareness/Knowledge)
Heart (Social/Will)

This takes a page from Star Frontiers, with its paired attributes.

Roll 3d6 for each root attribute. Exchange as many as two points between attribute pairs. Maximum of 18.
or
Assign 8, 10, and 14 to each root attribute. Move as many as four points from one half of a pair to another. So the maximum spread might looks like:
Body: 8
Strength: 4
Dexterity: 12
Mind: 10
Awareness: 14
Knowledge: 6
Heart: 14
Presence: 18
Will: 10

Just thinkin'.

Comments

Knave 2e Alternate Attributes

Sometimes, I'm exactly in the mood for the classic simplicity of defining characters entirely by D&D's six attributes, as Knave does. But sometimes, I want the players have have just a little smidge more to fiddle with.

Reviewing Rules for Play-by-Post Optimization

I’ve played a lot of PbP games: all your favorite flavors of OD&D, AD&D, and their retroclones, Call of Cthulhu, Marvel Superheroes, Traveller, Dungeon World, etc. ad nauseam. In almost every instance, I forgot what ruleset we were using at some point. Which is a good thing. Once chargen is over, you spend a lot more time describing your characters actions and poring over the GM’s descriptions than you spend interacting with rules. When you do roll, it’s usually a combat to-hit roll, which you’ve probably programmed into the online dice-roller as a macro. Pretty much any game will work for PbP. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t points of possible optimization. Point 1: Resolution. Anything that can keep the action moving is a boon to PbP. A game that requires a back-and-forth exchange of information to resolve an action is going to progress very slowly. A good rule of thumb is that it’ll take 2 or 3 days to get a response from any given player. At that pace, an exch...

Maze Rats by Post

In my previous post , I reviewed a bunch of my favorite rulesets for optimization for Play-by-Post. It occurred to me almost immediately that I hadn't really thought about Maze Rats enough. In fact, I'd mis-remembered and mischaracterized it. Upon reflection, one of the mechanics I took issue with is actually a big strength. Re-reading the rules, it seems like just a few very simple hacks could make it a highly-optimized PbP game. As follows: Danger Rolls are rolled by the GM. Danger rolls usually fail, so it is in the player’s interest to describe their actions plausibly and mitigate as many risks as they can, in the hopes that they don’t trigger a danger roll. 2d6 + ability bonus ≥ 10 If you have taken enough precautions to have a distinct advantage in an action, but not enough to have eliminated the distinct possibility of danger, the GM will give you a roll with advantage. 3d6 keep 2 + ability bonus ≥ 10 Because each character only has 3 ability scores (S...

An Abominable Fancy

Search This Blog