Basic Roleplaying: Universal Game Engine

[ffilz]

Oh, and as an interesting aside, I ran one RQ campaign with point buy. I think players got like 130 points for attributes. The ability bonuses weren't tied to attributes though (which made point buy work, otherwise everyone tries to maximize INT because it affects so many ability bonuses). The characters also got an array of (+5, +10, +10, +15, +15, +20, +20, +25) to assign to ability bonuses with the admonition, don't put your +25 in Manipulation if you have poor DEX etc. This actually worked great. Every attribute still had plenty of meaning, roughly equal and was supposed to inform distribution of the ability bonuses.

STR - what weapons you can use, damage bonus, encumbrance
DEX - what weapons you can use, strike rank
CON - hit points
SIZ - hit points and strike rank
INT - how many spells you can memorize
POW - magic points and spirit combat, qualifying for Rune Priest
CHA - OK, this attribute as is didn't necessarily come into play, but could still inform role play, not every character made this a dump stat

Any attribute was also possibly used for a roll under some multiple of it.

 

[Fritz]

If we don't want attributes to matter at all, why bother having them?!

I'm all for removing attributes.

 

[JAMUMU]

I'm all for removing attributes.

Attributes, skills, powers, feats. Players, characters, pencils. Fucking dice. Tear it all down man, tear it all down!

 

[Endless Flight]

And do you really want to screw that STR 3, DEX 3, SIZ 18 character? 15% or 18% cap on combat and athletic skills would suck to play. Even without caps, that character sucks to play in any system where attributes actually matter.

So you’ve got someone there who can barely carry the Pathfinder core rulebook, moves slower than a turtle and is a huge person, which has its disadvantages in certain movements. I think an 18% athletic skill seems fair.

 

[JAMUMU]

So you’ve got someone there who can barely carry the Pathfinder core rulebook, moves slower than a turtle and is a huge person, which has its disadvantages in certain movements. I think an 18% athletic skill seems fair.

That's still nearly a 1-in-5 chance to get the top off the cookie jar first time!

 

[Lofgeornost]

That's still nearly a 1-in-5 chance to get the top off the cookie jar first time!

 

[sharps54]

I'm all for removing attributes.

The Troubleshooters works fine without them.

 

[Mankcam]

I thought Mythras capped the highest characteristic x 5%, not the lowest, but I may be mistaken.I may quite possibly be running that wrong.

As far as no Characteristics goes, I am also running Cypher System at present and it works fine. However it’s a very broad system, it’s more aimed at the pulpy action end of things, rather than the realistic and gritty flavour that BRP and WFRP has.

 

[ffilz]

I thought Mythras capped the highest characteristic x 5%, not the lowest, but I may be mistaken.I may quite possibly be running that wrong.

As far as no Characteristics goes, I am also running Cypher System at present and it works fine. However it’s a very broad system, it’s more aimed at the pulpy action end of things, rather than the realistic and gritty flavour that BRP and WFRP has.

Highest x5 is a bit better. But you still need an 18 to be able to be a Rune Lord in RQ or be able to teach skills. But truth is s change like that means adjusting everything to the way the caps work.

 

[Triumvir]

And do you really want to screw that STR 3, DEX 3, SIZ 18 character? 15% or 18% cap on combat and athletic skills would suck to play. Even without caps, that character sucks to play in any system where attributes actually matter.

Well, yes I do think they should be screwed. After all they are 1 person in (216^3) or about 10 million (on a straight 3D6 roll, no re-rolls). There should only be about 3 such people in the UK. (On the admittedly questionable assumption that PC stat generation is supposed to mimic the distribution in the whole prime-age adult population, rather than the subset that might go adventuring.)

I didn't want to get too hung up on the 3/3/18 thing as a practical point, as it will only come up vanishingly rarely. If it ever did happen, a) it would be pretty damn spooky after this thread*, and b) I would also allow the player to reroll.

I was using this extreme case to help show why I think it is weak design to delink skills from attributes. But it goes without saying that's only my view, and millions of satisfied CoC customers can't be wrong.

* If it happened in a CoC campaign, would it mean I should never play CoC again, or that I should only play CoC from that point on to propitiate the Old Ones? Hmm. Cross that bridge when I come to it...

 

[Triumvir]

View attachment 59111

Down with characteristics, I say! And then kick 'em into the gutter!

I'm too set in my ways to dump attributes - I like the thumbnail sketch of the PC they provide.

But I have sometimes wondered why bother with STR, DEX, INT etc. if what you really want are category modifiers for Manipulation, Physical, Perception etc. Why not just have the skill categories as the attributes?

That is rapidly veering off into "what is a good set of attributes for a game" which is way off topic and probably not that useful anyway - at least whenever I have tried to come up with my own clever-clever revamp, I have ended up with six stats that are basically synonyms of the original D&D 6.

 

[CRKrueger]

Well, the thing is, someone of SIZ 18 wouldn't be STR 3, ever.
Why?
Because their body has to be capable of carrying itself around. Look at your powerlifters, they have the body of a bodybuilder, with layers of fat. That fat and the thicker cross-section of their torso and limbs gives them more leverage and helps support their muscles.

Even a full on couch potato can generate force through pure size and mass.

 

[ffilz]

Well, the thing is, someone of SIZ 18 wouldn't be STR 3, ever.
Why?
Because their body has to be capable of carrying itself around. Look at your powerlifters, they have the body of a bodybuilder, with layers of fat. That fat and the thicker cross-section of their torso and limbs gives them more leverage and helps support their muscles.

Even a full on couch potato can generate force through pure size and mass.

Well, it could depend on what STR actually means. I have seen definitions of STR where it's sort of some kind of "excess" STR. Or maybe it's a horribly unhealthy person who actually really can't lift their own weight.

But yea, it's a weird outlier edge case. The system doesn't absolutely have to work for all edge cases. So I think we are getting overly hung up.

I agree that if you have attributes they shouldn't be totally divorced from skills whether that connection is by providing a bonus, a cap, or making it easier/harder to improve.

But it's a good point that maybe the thing to do is have category modifiers instead of attributes.

Except that in most games that have attributes that have meaning, at least some contribute to things that we usually don't try to measure with a skill rating.

Skill caps certainly make a certain degree of sense, but if they are used, they obviously have to be integrated into the whole system. Capping skills at 5x attribute and needing 90% skill for certain things, or even 100% (multiple attacks in RQ) is not exactly compatible.

 

[Spellslinging Sellsword]

Same issue. So the guy with Strength 8 Dex 16 can never have more than 72% skill? Casanova needs high Charisma?
Also, base percentages in BGB were fixed, IIRC, but that's a separate issue. If someone finds a character sheet for BRUGE,

Yeah, sorry, guys, but that's simply not even close to realistic.

I think your reality and mine must be different, because yes a high charisma person would need high charisma. Everyone has a limit to their ability. Some people are just naturally more gifted and have a higher ceiling than other people. And a STR 8 and Dex 16 person being capped at 72% in a historical setting is fine. In a historical setting I interpret the skill value as percentiles. So 99% means you are in the top 1% of people in the setting.

 

[Endless Flight]

Using my modified formula for max skill of Attributes x3, you could have a skill of 100+%, but you would need the two relevant attributes to be over 17 each. Seems fair to me.

 

[AsenRG]

I think your reality and mine must be different, because yes a high charisma person would need high charisma. Everyone has a limit to their ability. Some people are just naturally more gifted and have a higher ceiling than other people. And a STR 8 and Dex 16 person being capped at 72% in a historical setting is fine. In a historical setting I interpret the skill value as percentiles. So 99% means you are in the top 1% of people in the setting.

Definitely divergence, and I can tell you why: because I view attributes as percentages...of the odds to roll them on 3d6 or 2d6+6, respectively.

Thus someone with Dexterity 16 is better than over 98% of humans. Imposing on such a person any hard limits in what is an activity that depends heavily on the attribute in question? When there are strategies that make said attribute the most important one, and assuming he's willing to invest in the learning?

Yeah, that would be ridiculous!

 

[Mankcam]

BTW it looks like the Sanity Rules in this new version of BRP Universal Rules is nothing new.

It was initially presented as an optional rule in Demon Magic: The Second Stormbringer Companion, back in 1985.
Whether this is good, bad, indifferent, I don't know.

As a teen I vaguely remember reading it in my cousin's Stormbringer collection, and I now wonder why it didn't get further emphasised in later editions as the concept seems appropriate for a dark fantasy setting.

I remember that it looked like usual CoC Sanity Pts to me. However I suppose that it could of been a little more straightforward in some way (I can't remember clearly)

 

[sharps54]

That makes sense, remember under ORC you give up any control to all the mechanical bits you put in so why not include one that’s nearly 40 years old instead of the CoC7 one?

 

[Bilharzia]

I thought Mythras capped the highest characteristic x 5%, not the lowest, but I may be mistaken.I may quite possibly be running that wrong.

As far as no Characteristics goes, I am also running Cypher System at present and it works fine. However it’s a very broad system, it’s more aimed at the pulpy action end of things, rather than the realistic and gritty flavour that BRP and WFRP has.

There is an optional rule "Limits to Endurance and Willpower" which proposes that Endurance and Willpower may be limited by GMs to CONx5 and POWx5 respectively, but this is an option only for these skills. Whether you would extend it to other skills is questionable, it seems to suggest physical and mental limits, but then I don't know why you would not also apply it to Brawn as well. I have always been dubious about using this option, especially if you have an average POW your Willpower is stuck at 55%, which in a skills-based system I find a bit silly.

Personally I have not used these limits, and if I did have some kind of limit it would use starting skill x 5. This would allow average characters to get to 100%, but put a cap on exceeding 100% by too much. This feels like the right approach to me, that with training and practice you can get to a very high level, better than most, but you aren't crushing others. If your characteristics are higher, you can get to significantly above 100 if you really want to. In my experience, most PCs are going to get one or two skills to 100% in a couple of years of play. It is really painful to push skills above 90% because you are very often only rolling for a 1% increase. YMMV. Another factor in Mythras is your skill increases are budgeted (usually a max 3 increases), unlike in some BRP games where you might have an enormous shopping list of skill increase rolls. In Mythras you might be spending those XP rolls on other things as well, like fetishes, spells, and so on, rather than skill increases alone.

This is the table we use in Mythras to gauge expertise (taken from Monster Island):

 

[Triumvir]

...In a historical setting I interpret the skill value as percentiles. So 99% means you are in the top 1% of people in the setting.

Definitely divergence, and I can tell you why: because I view attributes as percentages...of the odds to roll them on 3d6 or 2d6+6, respectively.

Thus someone with Dexterity 16 is better than over 98% of humans....

While I have some qualms about derailing the heroic effort to get us back on topic, I thought this raised an interesting point. I must admit I am closer to AsenRG's view here in that I regard attributes as ordinal (a rank ordering within the population) and skills as cardinal (an absolute number, i.e. you succeed at a task 80% of the time - not that you are better than 80% of the population).

BUT it's messier than that, because attributes have some cardinal aspects, i.e. the rules say what weight a person of a given STR can carry. While it's ordinal, there is a cardinal underlayer of the spectrum of objective human capability.

And skills are not (or should not be) tested every time a task is attempted, only under stress conditions i.e. a surgeon with Surgery-80% doesn't botch 20% of his routine day-to-day operations; so there is wiggle room around what are sufficiently "stressed conditions". But ultimately it is still about how likely you are to succeed. Put another way, there is nothing that says a random draw from the population as a whole should succeed 50% of the time.

Long story short I come back to where I started - a need for some linkage of attributes to skill scorings.

Overthinking it much?? Man, I need to get some real gaming in soon...

 

[Mankcam]

There is an optional rule "Limits to Endurance and Willpower" which proposes that Endurance and Willpower may be limited by GMs to CONx5 and POWx5 respectively, but this is an option only for these skills. Whether you would extend it to other skills is questionable, it seems to suggest physical and mental limits, but then I don't know why you would not also apply it to Brawn as well. I have always been dubious about using this option, especially if you have an average POW your Willpower is stuck at 55%, which in a skills-based system I find a bit silly.

Personally I have not used these limits, and if I did have some kind of limit it would use starting skill x 5. This would allow average characters to get to 100%, but put a cap on exceeding 100% by too much. This feels like the right approach to me, that with training and practice you can get to a very high level, better than most, but you aren't crushing others. If your characteristics are higher, you can get to significantly above 100 if you really want to. In my experience, most PCs are going to get one or two skills to 100% in a couple of years of play. It is really painful to push skills above 90% because you are very often only rolling for a 1% increase. YMMV. Another factor in Mythras is your skill increases are budgeted (usually a max 3 increases), unlike in some BRP games where you might have an enormous shopping list of skill increase rolls. In Mythras you might be spending those XP rolls on other things as well, like fetishes, spells, and so on, rather than skill increases alone.

This is the table we use in Mythras to gauge expertise (taken from Monster Island):

View attachment 59120

I am misremembering stuff, too many games and its all getting jumbled up.

Now I remember I think I made a ruling only for begining characters Max Characteristic x5%, but then ended up ditching it as it was too fiddily and not worth regulating it. I don't think we worried about max capping in play too much as we only had sporadic sessions.

I also ended up ditching that limit, and just broadly stated no Skill over 70% for begining characters, which looks about right on the scale above.

So yeah, I totally got my wired crossed here

 

[sharps54]

The issue I have with capping skills strictly to attributes is that with a lot of work you can excel at something you may not be genetically disposed toward. You will be limited but perhaps not to the extent a simple cap would justify. I like the idea of either being able to spend extra to raise skills that your attribute wouldn’t predispose you to or to at least allow for the raising of attributes in a game.

 

[Endless Flight]

So maybe to circumvent the cap, a player can choose a couple of “favored skills” related to the profession that they are in.

 

[sharps54]

So maybe to circumvent the cap, a player can choose a couple of “favored skills” related to the profession that they are in.

That would work, like I say I’m also in favor of having an addition cost to skills that you raise over the norm for an attribute but it should be possible, at least to some degree.

 

[Spellslinging Sellsword]

Definitely divergence, and I can tell you why: because I view attributes as percentages...of the odds to roll them on 3d6 or 2d6+6, respectively.

Thus someone with Dexterity 16 is better than over 98% of humans. Imposing on such a person any hard limits in what is an activity that depends heavily on the attribute in question? When there are strategies that make said attribute the most important one, and assuming he's willing to invest in the learning?

Yeah, that would be ridiculous!

And if the skill had a base of DEX x2, then the cap on the skill would be 96%. But the person is unable to reach that potential if it's a STR+DEX base skill because the STR is holding the person back. Why you think someone with an 8 STR would be able to compete at the same level is beyond me. However, if you want the fantasy of an STR 8 person getting that high then use the fantasy multiplier of 5x base skill as then the cap would be 120% skill.

 

[CRKrueger]

The issue I have with capping skills strictly to attributes is that with a lot of work you can excel at something you may not be genetically disposed toward. You will be limited but perhaps not to the extent a simple cap would justify. I like the idea of either being able to spend extra to raise skills that your attribute wouldn’t predispose you to or to at least allow for the raising of attributes in a game.

Hmm, but here's the thing (and the real question).

Does lack of natural aptitude make it impossible for you attain a certain skill level, or does it just make it harder for you to attain a certain skill level?

My gut tells me it's generally more difficult, with a hard cap somewhere below "best in world" performance.

 

[sharps54]

Hmm, but here's the thing (and the real question).

Does lack of natural aptitude make it impossible for you attain a certain skill level, or does it just make it harder for you to attain a certain skill level?

My gut tells me it's generally more difficult, with a hard cap somewhere below "best in world" performance.

That’s my point, it is harder, but not impossible for the less naturally talented person to reach a high level of skill. They won’t reach the same level as a naturally talented person who puts forth the same effort but the person with a lower natural aptitude will be able to get higher than most of the percentage caps posted here.

 

[AsenRG]

And if the skill had a base of DEX x2, then the cap on the skill would be 96%. But the person is unable to reach that potential if it's a STR+DEX base skill because the STR is holding the person back. Why you think someone with an 8 STR would be able to compete at the same level is beyond me. However, if you want the fantasy of an STR 8 person getting that high then use the fantasy multiplier of 5x base skill as then the cap would be 120% skill.

We already agreed there's a disconnect, man. Why do you insist on going on?

For that matter, stats can often be improved, while in many d100 games they can't...

 

[gruagach]

Is noone going to mention that we need to call BRP BRUGE now? And it's mandatory to play in irish accents?

View attachment 59003
"I retract what I said about your cunt-fucking kids" should be the new Chaosium tag-line for all their game lines.

I'm definitely in(to) BRUGE(s)!

My BRP experience prior to joining the Pub began and ended with Stormbringer! 1st edition. I've gotten deeper into it recently.

Just because I'm an unrepentant rules tinkerer, I like collecting options / widgets for game systems I use. And BRP seems quite amenable to that kind of tinkering. So once Chaosium closes out their error collection & correction efforts, I'm setting aside a bit of dosh to buy this.

(Oh, and count me in the camp of folks who think skills should NOT be capped, per se, by attributes. I'm much more comfortable with a soft cap - e.g. getting a skill value above a governing attribute should "cost" more / be harder. In my lived experience, I've known folks who have improved what in RPG terms would be their stats - both physical and mental.)

 

[Endless Flight]

How does somebody improve their Intelligence, Wisdom or Charisma in real life?

 

[Degeneration roller]

Getting off the internet?

 

[Nick J]

How does somebody improve their Intelligence, Wisdom or Charisma in real life?

In order: Soduku, trying to rehab a 100+ year old house with no prior experience, and a good orthodontist.

 

[CRKrueger]

How does somebody improve their Intelligence, Wisdom or Charisma in real life?

You obviously don’t know.

 

[JAMUMU]

How does somebody improve their Intelligence, Wisdom or Charisma in real life?

Depends on what definitions you're using, obviously. Intelligence is the weirdest, but with the right teachers, the right lessons, diet, patience and persistence it can improve. Wisdom can improve with meditation, therapy, the right reading and of course, age. Charisma can improve with lessons from professionals across a number of fields, therapy to improve self-esteem and mental health, and of course, age.

 

[CRKrueger]

trying to rehab a 100+ year old house with no prior experience

Sounds like that one has a story to it.

 

[Endless Flight]

You obviously don’t know.

That’s why I’m asking.

 

[CRKrueger]

Getting off the internet?

That would improve Str, Dex, and Con too.

 

[CRKrueger]

That’s why I’m asking.

Int is hard because if you increase it, it seems like you do it by building other skills. So before you raise Int to 13, you have to have 13 Lore or Language skills. So, the more Knowledge you have, the smarter you get. But I wouldn’t let someone raise a Stat more than once.

 

[Nick J]

Sounds like that one has a story to it.

Not exactly direct experience, just watching my younger brother suffer through it and trying to offer some pointers (I worked as a carpenter/landscaper for about 7 years). You haven't lived until you've tried to undo 100+ years of DIYers attempting to do their own electrical "upgrades".

 

[Endless Flight]

I don’t know anyone who’s personality changed from the time they were about five to the time they were fifty. For example, I knew my cousin was a troublemaker in diapers and ended up in jail. That could also be Wisdom at play.