wrote:OK, then depending on how many hairs you want to split, they either use some third attribute that's considered acceptable
OK you haven't even replied to me yet and its already clear I need to go into a bunch of additional stuff.
OK now complexity is bad. Even little bits of it. But when you have stuff like a skill list that is tied to attributes but which can have skills that are tied to say, between 0 and 3 different attributes (either any one of the tied attributes or a combination of all of them) then the complexity is REALLY REALLY BAD.
Role master kind of badness.
As it is walking into a game like D20 and trying to pick where to place your attributes to create a desired character concept is bad enough and the skills are tied to only a single attribute each.
Imagine the added overhead when you throw triple attribute skills into the mix.
But wait, there is another implication of such complexity.
If your skill system is so complex as to have all sorts of exceptions with multi attribute skills... it ends up looking more an more like a very inefficient, unbalanced and complex way of just having the same skills with no attribute contribution at all.
After all if every damn skill is a list of arbitrary exceptions to the basic break down of character attributes then why not just have skills be entirely rank based in the first place?
wrote:Next are you going to complain that you can't play a stupid, inattentive, uneducated nuclear physicist?
And you know if you put every optional character resource you ever received exclusively into nuclear physics then why SHOULDN'T you be inattentive and poorly educated (in all other fields).
And how many absent minded professor character archetypes who can't tie their own shoes and don't know which way round the gun goes have you seen in fiction?
And the consideration of the specialist problem brings to light two other problems with attribute+skill systems.
1) I didn't want to know things about Ancient Egypt.
To make Professor Fansworth, master of doomsday deviceology (and nothing else) I maxed the crap out of my intelligence.
Now when we go exploring ancient Egypt fricking Hercules and Casanova my travelling companions always turn to me when we need to decipher hieroglyphs because they maxed out their strength and charisma and my untrained Egyptology check is better than both theirs combined. And they Casanova even had a few skill ranks to spare that he blew on Egyptology!
Attributes contributing to skills in this manner means you are paying for aspects of character ability that you don't actually want and may not have envisaged as part of your character concept. You may even be forced to accidentally outshine someone else's actual character concept.
2) But I didn't JUST want to be a babe magnet.
But its not just a problem on the specialists side of things.
The Casanova character wanted to be History's greatest gift to women. But he REALLY modelled his character after Tomb Raider, so he wanted to be sexy AND an archaeologist.
Now if he wanted to be an archaeologist AND a doomsday devicologist he would have been fine, if he wanted to be sexy AND a liar he would have been fine. Because THOSE pairs of skills only require a single attribute to be invested in.
But no, he now suffers from MAD. And MAD makes Casanova Jones sad, very very sad.