The Gaming Den

So I've been mulling over some preliminary ideas for stuff to do with the SAME System. This is sort of an unorganized thread to post them in, and hopefully get some feedback.

Idea one: "traits"
A thing always puzzled me about S.A.M.E is that "balance" characters are supposed to be defensive specialists somehow despite the fact that in the base system the defender never is at an advantage. Character are most resilient against mirror-matches and any other kind of character enjoys an offensive advantage over them.

So most basic form of my idea is that in addition to your stats you have one of four Traits

Toughness - which gives you +1 all soak rolls
Evasion - which increases the DC to hit you by 1
Precision - which gives you +1 to all attack rolls
Impact - which adds +1 to all damage you do

Each of these is roughly equivalent to raising one of your stats by one but slightly weights a character toward offence or defense and if an even larger bias is desired Traits could give larger bonuses.

Lurker here who also has a SAME-ish system in the works. You're right that mirror matches are the best case for defense, but a character is still better off defensively the closer they are stat-wise to their opponent. Assuming the following three stat distributions are equally likely (and that the Guardian has equal access to physical and magical attacks):

Berserker: Physical 6, Magical 0
Guardian: Physical 3, Magical 3
Warlock: Physical 0, Magical 6

Then the Guardian both deals and takes the least damage overall:

	Berserker Defending	Guardian Defending	Warlock Defending	Average Damage Dealt
Berserker Attacking	0	3	6	3
Guardian Attacking	3	0	3	2
Warlock Attacking	6	3	0	3
Average Damage Taken	3	2	3

The traits technically undermine the point of SAME, but I think as long they're binary & limited it's fine. Unless you're curving your RNG the defensive ones are probably worth less in a vacuum, but I'd assume the characters who take them would have abilities where their defenses matter.