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An old-school RPG'ing Blog presenting the Lands of Ara fantasy RPG campaign setting and lots of other stuff.
The Lands of Ara campaign setting copyright 2009, 2010, 2011, Lands of Ara Enterprises. The Lands of Ara™ is a trademark of Lands of Ara Enterprises. Authors (unless otherwise specified): Carter Soles and Spawn of Endra.
The Lands of Ara is released under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a, copyright 2000, Wizards of the Coast, Inc. All gaming content on The Lands of Ara blog is hereby declared Open Game Content (see license here).Unless otherwise noted, all artwork is reproduced without license or permission. All art posted here is a copyright of the owner.
Everything here (except the artwork) is free for you to use in your game. Please attribute any works used to Carter Soles and/or Spawn of Endra and refer your players and friends to the Lands of Ara blog. And if you think of it, drop Carter a line at csoles666 at gmail dot com and let me know how it turns out.
I like the idea of non-numerical stats. I recall playing around with this 15 years ago.
ReplyDeleteThe only challenge was to come up with descriptors that were suitably evocative, but also seemed progressive. For example, strong (13-15), very strong (16-17), mighty (18), hurculean (19+). Easy for strength perhaps. But try to create textual descriptions for the other 5 stats, both high and low ranges, and have the text as an accurate descriptor of the ranges. I finally abandoned the attempt.
You could have only 3 descriptions for each stat (for strength, weak, average, strong) but it just doesn't evoke the same image.
Yes, it seems like this approach would make things more difficult to adjudicate until you got used to it. I am fascinated by the qualitative attribute concept and consider it great food for thought but will likely stick to old fashioned rolled attributes for my upcoming Labyrinth Lord campaign.
ReplyDeleteI roll attributes but then convert them to names for bonuses or penalties: mighty/feeble, bright/dim, insightful/foolish, skillful/clumsy, tough/frail, and inspirational/laughable. There's no special descriptor for the normal range, and we just say "exceptionally mighty" or "super-dim" for two standard deviations from the norm.
ReplyDeleteI like it because it's a great way to introduce the character when I populate the roster at the start of the session - "Lotur the Scurrilous Cur is mighty, foolish, and dim" - and I'm much happier during combat having people remind me that they're mighty than that they get a +1 to hit.
Here's the guidelines I use:
https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AX7IQrnAKr7rZGhkcWdjNHZfNTlkNHh0NGJkMg&hl=en
- Tavis
Wow, that looks good, thanks for the link!
ReplyDelete