The Gaming Den

It's been spitballed a few times here that base stats should really only affect defenses so that people aren't trapped into making certain kinds of characters. If strength determines your bonuses to hit and damage, justifying putting any points into intelligence instead of strength for a warrior is punishing your effectiveness for flavor. That's not really ideal. However, the idea that your basic characteristics don't actually give you positive bonuses is pretty silly- the super strong guy really only punches as hard as the frail old guy?

So what if each stat was both an offense and a defense? Say a stat spread like this:

Might- Is physical damage and damage reduction
Agility- To hit and AC
Intelligence- Save DC and save bonus (magic)
Charisma- Save DC and save bonus (social)

Would anything of value be lost switching to a stat system like this? Would anything be gained?

spongeknight wrote:It's been spitballed a few times here that base stats should really only affect defenses so that people aren't trapped into making certain kinds of characters. If strength determines your bonuses to hit and damage, justifying putting any points into intelligence instead of strength for a warrior is punishing your effectiveness for flavor. That's not really ideal. However, the idea that your basic characteristics don't actually give you positive bonuses is pretty silly- the super strong guy really only punches as hard as the frail old guy?

So what if each stat was both an offense and a defense? Say a stat spread like this:

Might- Is physical damage and damage reduction
Agility- To hit and AC
Intelligence- Save DC and save bonus (magic)
Charisma- Save DC and save bonus (social)

Would anything of value be lost switching to a stat system like this? Would anything be gained?

Unless most magic is targeted (requiring agility to hit), a system like this still causes MAD problems to physical fighters while leaving casters caring about only one stat.

Did you miss all the SAME (Strength/Agility/Moxie/Elan) discussion? If you did, it's worth looking up.

nockermensch wrote:

spongeknight wrote:It's been spitballed a few times here that base stats should really only affect defenses so that people aren't trapped into making certain kinds of characters. If strength determines your bonuses to hit and damage, justifying putting any points into intelligence instead of strength for a warrior is punishing your effectiveness for flavor. That's not really ideal. However, the idea that your basic characteristics don't actually give you positive bonuses is pretty silly- the super strong guy really only punches as hard as the frail old guy?

So what if each stat was both an offense and a defense? Say a stat spread like this:

Might- Is physical damage and damage reduction
Agility- To hit and AC
Intelligence- Save DC and save bonus (magic)
Charisma- Save DC and save bonus (social)

Would anything of value be lost switching to a stat system like this? Would anything be gained?

Unless most magic is targeted (requiring agility to hit), a system like this still causes MAD problems to physical fighters while leaving casters caring about only one stat.

Nah, that's only true if spells allow spellcasters to not have to worry about getting hit. If damage is just as viable as SoL spells, the wizard has to actually care about not being stabbed.

spongeknight wrote:Nah, that's only true if spells allow spellcasters to not have to worry about getting hit. If damage is just as viable as SoL spells, the wizard has to actually care about not being stabbed.

In this case, everybody has to care somewhat about AGI, because it provides the "physical save bonus".

Wasn't this an 2nd Edition option in the last splat books?

Google will point you to an uploaded PDF of 2E's Skills & Powers:
Strength: Stamina, Muscle
Dexterity: Aim, Balance
Constitution: Health, Fitness
Intelligence: Reason, Knowledge
Wisdom: Intuition, Willpower
Charisma: Leadership, Appearance

spongeknight wrote:Nah, that's only true if spells allow spellcasters to not have to worry about getting hit. If damage is just as viable as SoL spells, the wizard has to actually care about not being stabbed.

Here is the problem. By tying to defenses AND attack you create a really poor choice.

Generalists or "balanced defense builds" can only guarantee mediocre attack and defense.

Specialists can guarantee a strong primary attack, have a chance of a strong defense, and merely risk low defenses.

Now you can claim that nuh uh every attack type occurs equally often and is equally unavoidable and you can't use spells, or positioning, or any ability or choice at all to have any influence on who gets attacked by what attack types.

But frankly that's bullshit, attack types will not be equally common even to start with (though which will be more common may not be predictable) and yeah, sorry you can do SOMETHING to influence who gets attacked on which defense stats, and even if it's imperfect (it probably will be pretty imperfect) it's a reduction in the mere risk of bad defense in return for the large guaranteed boost to primary attack (and some defense).

Not to mention that if you are throwing this in with any sort of traditional class system unless you give every class at every level equally good attack options of every type (you won't, and if you did, well, lets not get into the vast bland mess that would create) then the generalist falls even further behind. Even a points based system won't help you unless each point spent buys you all the attack types at once every time or similar.

And all that will almost certainly still put specialists ahead of generalists by a large margin.

All in all it's nice to have some diversity in defense and attack types. But arbitrarily tying your attacks and defenses together on indirectly used "primary" attributes for no real reason only hurts your goal for diversity in investments.

If muscle bull and frail old guy are made with the the same amount of points then they do the same damage cuz old guy has higher agility intelligence perception wisdom or whatever.

As you've split Mental into magic attack/defense; and Charisma into social attack/defense; I'd further split Might into strictly melee/heavy weapons; while Agility is ranged/light weapons.

Make Might affect melee & heavy weapons To-Hit/Damage. While Agility affects Range To-Hit/Damage for light weapons & ranged attacks.

I'd also suggest making larger bows heavy weapons. As in, anything with higher draw weight than 20 lbs. A 50-100+ lb draw weight could only ever be aimed due to physical strength; not agility.

PhoneLobster wrote:Specialists can guarantee a strong primary attack, have a chance of a strong defense, and merely risk low defenses.

Uh. Yeah? In Dungeons and Dragons you can dump your will save and probably go a whole level without something actually targeting your will save if you're lucky. But when you encounter a bodak or whatever the fuck that drops your ass instantly if you have a low save, well, your ass is dropped that fight. Intentionally minmaxing with this setup will pretty much guarantee that you'll get minned at some point. Probably many points, since this kind of stat array means that more things will use magic and social attacks starting from level one and more frequently overall, since magic and social attacks will be just as easy as sword swings even for goblins and shit.

Maybe this seems like a dumb question, but why not just have to-hit/bonus dmg/etc. as the base stats, assign points straight to those, and have players fluff them out however they like?

spongeknight wrote:Uh. Yeah? In Dungeons and Dragons

Whoops. You just handed yourself your dumb ass.

Because in dungeons and dragons to the extent that Will saves are effected by attributes they ARE routinely dumped , and even dumped by characters with a poor contribution to will save from their classes, JUST to better max out their attribute contribution to their primary attack.

Attaching a characters attack spell Save DCs to Wisdom and other mental stats won't make a fucking fighter or rogue invest in fucking wisdom. And hell d20 actually DID do that for that matter and the result was... strength and dex users (and even wizards) not investing in fucking wisdom.

I mean you are describing basically hell almost blow by mechanical blow, the d20 attempt to make every attribute relevant to everyone then claiming it will do the diversity thing it rather clearly didn't do in d20. Then inexplicably referring to D&D as a counterexample when people tell you it won't do diversity.

PhoneLobster wrote:Because in dungeons and dragons to the extent that Will saves are effected by attributes they ARE routinely dumped , and even dumped by characters with a poor contribution to will save from their classes, JUST to better max out their attribute contribution to their primary attack.

Just to be clear: Your stated complaint was that some people would maximize their attack at the expense of other defenses. I agreed that people would in fact do that, and stated that I didn't think it was a problem because that lack of defense would then bite them in the ass occasionally. And your GOTCHA! response is to say... that some people will dump their defenses to maximize attack.

Okay, I believe you have nothing relevant to say here. Kindly move along, would you?

spongeknight wrote:Okay, I believe you have nothing relevant to say here. Kindly move along, would you?

Title it like a whiny coward or fuck off.

YOUR stated goal was diverse choices in character attribute profiles.

Almost exactly your plan has been tried before. It didn't work.

Lets try wording it another way you might understand. If you make every attribute do SOMETHING that ALL characters MIGHT care about but have characters that CARE MORE about SOME attributes relevant to their builds they will STILL dump the attributes they care about A BIT and take the attributes they care about MORE instead.

Mechanical motivation for diverse attributes needs to be significantly more robust than that plan. If every character doesn't care about every attribute equally diverse profiles are flushed and the specialization dinosaurs rule the earth. And if you do manage to make utterly equal attributes, well you may have created more problems than you fixed in the process, but it's unlikely to happen so whatever.

Your plan to put defense on all the attributes only makes players care about them all just a little bit regardless of character build and your plan to put attack stuff on all the attributes makes them care about some attributes more than others. You should know what happens next because we've been there since at least 3.0.

Sponge, while I'm not going to foam at the mouth like PL over your idea here I am a bit confused about what you're trying to do. My guess is that you want Intelligent warrior to be comparable to strength warrior so Int isn't just a waste of time for them but I also don't see this as really changing much that way. Fighters still just suck and you may change it so some can hit stuff with a big stick with big muscles and others can hit stuff with a smaller stick with a big brain but I don't see that as solving the issue of stats v flavor. You are still going to invest in the sstat you care about and not the stat you don't so what hhas really changed other than you making new fighter builds?

MGuy wrote:Sponge, while I'm not going to foam at the mouth like PL over your idea here I am a bit confused about what you're trying to do.?

This isn't tied to a current system, but rather just some brainstorming for how stats might work in, say, 6th edition or Advanced 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons. Because while it is true that currently the grognards have gained the high ground and fighters can do even less in the current edition than they could before, that is not necessarily what will happen in the future. If even a level 1 fighter could walk out the door with some actual varied attacks- like a magic shout, or an intimidating glare or some shit- and expect opponents to be able to deliver the same- it would actually allow fighters to put points into things other than strength and not feel like a complete tool. To that end, having a fighter with a high Int would both let them use their secondary attacks more efficiently and also provide defense against those kinds of attacks (the same with high dex, or cha, or whatever else). So the point is to let players play around with stats in their roles more, so that not every wizard is frail and not every rogue can't manage a push-up.

PhoneLobster wrote:Your plan to put defense on all the attributes only makes players care about them all just a little bit regardless of character build and your plan to put attack stuff on all the attributes makes them care about some attributes more than others. You should know what happens next because we've been there since at least 3.0.

That's just a straight up lie. In 3.0, THREE of the SIX stats did nothing for your defense. That is basically not like all stats being defense at all.

Yes, some people dumped all of their defenses entirely to put more into attack, but we call those people "glass canons" and they tend to die a lot. That's a choice with drawbacks, and it's really fucking hard for me to imagine a system where sacrificing some amount of defense for more attack was not possible. Your insane ramblings about how every player will always maximize attack at the expense of all possible defense is disproved in one second of Google searching actual builds people want to play. Also, having a stat cap that is lower than the amount of actual points you can put into a single stat means that people will, indeed, have points to put into secondary stats. Try to breathe (not necessarily from your mouth) for one second and put some thought into a response before demanding that something will always occur one way with no other possible options.

Ok I'm going to just say this and nothing more on the subject because there are enough fighter threads. you're focusing on the wrong issue. Arbitrarily snapping on new types of attacks to various attributes so your fighter can use a smaller stick to beat people and being able to get the sort of damage that way by cranking up your Int score is all well and good but that doesn't solve the primary issue with the fighter in that they don't scale upward. Honestly that's what I'm not seeing with your plan here. You make an Int fighter viable. Ok. So what? You could just give the fighter skill points but it wouldn't change the fundamental problem with them. What is the value of making more viable attribute distributions for the fighter? How does that alone significantly broaden their horizons?

spongeknight wrote:That's just a straight up lie. In 3.0, THREE of the SIX stats did nothing for your defense. That is basically not like all stats being defense at all.

Yeah you aren't actually paying attention are you. 3rd edition didn't put defenses on every stat, but they clearly (tried) to put something everyone was (supposed to) care about on every stat. Intelligence didn't get a defense value, but it got bonus skill ranks to try and make everyone care about it, and then wizards got to use it as an offensive boost so they cared about it more. It didn't have to be a defense attribute, just something everyone was supposed to care about, and sometimes that failed spectacularly because actually, no not everyone cares about melee attacks and bluff skill, but you could see where they were going and to a large extent they succeeded, but people STILL, sometimes rather rationally, dumped the hell out of int, dex, con, wis even though there WERE reasons for EVERYONE to care about those AND three out of four of them contributed to defenses in no less than 5 ways.

Your insane ramblings about how every player will always maximize attack at the expense of all possible defense

Nice giant flaming strawman you are screaming at there.

In the mean time. Ever seen an int 12 wizard? How about a Strength 8 Barbarian? How about a fighter or rogue that only maxed out all their mental attributes?

While d20 managed to get us some diversity in attribute builds it brought us very little because the "something for everyone but more for some" plan did not work. And the result was that actual attribute profiles across multiple characters of the same class are predictable and ROUTINELY either exactly the same or very damn close because of fucking course you prioritize the attributes that are more good for you and dump the ones that you only care about a bit that isn't building a glass cannon its basic optimization. Giving every attribute a defense specifically as the small thing everyone is supposed to care about doesn't make specialists into glass cannons, it actually makes them into narrowly specialized defense experts for free as part of becoming a specialized attack cannon.

And no the stat cap wasn't enough there was still no diversity in profiles, if you could afford to prioritize 2 or three things because of it you still prioritized the same predictable 2 or three things every other bastard with your class did.

And fuck of with "builds people on the internet want to play!" D&D nerds on the internet will wank around with anything, in the end the Wisdom Fighter is a fucking joke build and we all know it.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Did you miss all the SAME (Strength/Agility/Moxie/Elan) discussion? If you did, it's worth looking up.

Pretty much this. If you use half the stats on both attack and defense of any particular attack, then stat assingments are a balanced choice. If you use one third or less of the stats on any particular attack, then specialization is mathematically obviously superior to diversification. If stats modify only attack, specialization trumps diversification. If stats modify only defense, then diversification trumps specialization.

It's basically unavoidable that the attacker chooses what attack they use (up to the limit of resource management systems and obviously the abilities of the character) and the defender does not get to choose what attacks their opponent is going to use. So the fact that Kingler has a high Defense and a low Special Defense means that you are highly incentivized to hit his ass with a thundershock, and the fact that Mr. Mime has a high Special Defense and a low Defense means that you are highly incentived to use a cross chop instead. And these defense disparities are simply weaknesses against any opponent who can choose to use a physical or magical attack and of no particular benefit against opponents who cannot.

-Username17

Here you go the SAME system.

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=39 ... highlight=

here a little something as well.

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=38 ... highlight=

FrankTrollman wrote: If stats modify only defense, then diversification trumps specialization.

-Username17

In that case, is there a way to make stats not modify attacks that doesn't leave reactionaries foaming at the mouth? I'm finding it really hard to justify not having any stats reflect an increased ability to punch some fool in the mouth.

Reactionaries will foam and sometimes froth.

Don't worry about the trigger words. Express them as +damage/soak, +to hit/ac and so on. Crunch then the fluff.

Warhammer has weaponskill as a separate stat so orks and eldar's swording abilities are not tied to who is more agile or more strong and nobody minds that.

Just have "combat" be another stat and talk about how horses and elephants in your system are much stronger than humans but not better fencers than them

What about devising a way to utilize 2 "super-stats" that were summed from the individual stats?

Assume number assignments between 0 and 5.

PHYS = STR + DEX + CON
MENT = INT + WIS + CHA

The individual stats are then used on specific rolls for skills or opposed tests. But BAB (or something akin) is derived from the super-stats.

Then maybe class feats or w/e could allow for different combos/calculations of your super-stats for outlier class types. Maybe that wouldn't be necessary because you would be using your individual stats for opposed rolls and such.

This whole idea is really dumb. It makes characters that have less diversity between them for no gain. Its okay to have 6 stats. I could understand rolling wisdom and charisma into one. Nobody i've ever met can define either of them anyway. But making so that you attack and defend with strength makes very little sense for most situations.