Sunday, November 15, 2009

A Non-Numerical Approach To D&D Attributes

Well, there may not be much new Lands of Ara content from me this weekend, for although I am very close to having "Deities of Ara" ready to go, I keep getting distracted by various (real-world) housekeeping tasks (I changed the cats' litter boxes today) as well as some inspirational reading of other old-schoolers' blogs and websites.  Along this line, I caught wind (via P_Armstrong at Ode to Black Dougal) of a really provocative and smart proposal at Robertson Games' site about approaching attribute "scores" in a more qualitative, comparative way rather than a roll-dice-for-numerically-quantitative-scores kind of way.  It is worth checking out and something I will be pondering for possible future use in my own campaigns. . .


 
Charlie the cat says: Happy Sunday!

4 comments:

  1. I like the idea of non-numerical stats. I recall playing around with this 15 years ago.

    The 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.

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  2. 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.

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  3. I 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.

    I 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

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  4. Wow, that looks good, thanks for the link!

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