That''s an idea - have bad things happen occasionally for high ability scores.

For example - every D&D fighter wants high strength. How strong were swords back then? A fighter with strength 18(90) will be breaking swords twice a day!! Unless he gets a nice magic sword of course.

Regards,
WhiteWolf

I have to disagree

(This is in respect to the WhiteWolf post)
As much as weaknesses contribute to a good RPG experience I feel strongly that having negative aspect to high ability scores would kill the whole "experience and upgrade" thing.

Don´t get me wrong, strengths and weaknesses are what make it so much fun but when you have to watch out that you don´t become too strong everyone will be going for the "middle", ending up with an average allrounder.


And as for:

"A character creation system that creates a CHARACTER, not some numbers in a cookie cutter class. You couldn''t actually TELL the players the bonuses, or they might be looking for the "best" thing to be! Numberless system, voodoo! What do you make of that?" - Landfish


Isn´t looking for the best thing to be what RPGs are about (partially)? I have played a lot of games with good stories but character stats systems that were so crude that you couldn´t really influence anything.
I like the number crunching, figuring out what to do when to get the best results.


I would split the char screen.
"Fixed" attributes on one side:

stuff like strength, intelligence, charisma, vitality, endurance ... (the more the better)

those can´t be modified much (except strength and endurance maybe) in the course of the game. THis has the advantage of giving you a much more stable character to work with and it avoids chars that max out at the high end.

"traits"
like how stubborn one is, willpower, pain resistance, beliefs (ethics), ... the basic "character description" (does he think lying is ok, how about killing - good for combat but not exaclty the party talker..)..

these should also remain more or less fixed, but the player can do some work on them and they have both positive and negative effects.

and then Skills.

these you can increase up into the blue (investing more and more "points" as you go along). No negative effects there, it´s NEVER going to be bad if you can hit a goblin´s eye with a rock from 300 ft away blindfolded ...

There have been a few systems where ability scores are fixed, and only skills can rise. I think this system can work well.

I also like the idea of, instead of randomly generating ability scores, having a set number of points. Therefore, for any kind of ''strength'' that you give to your character, there will be an equal and opposite ''weakness''.

You could even have ''contradictory'' stats, where you get X points to distribute between the pair. Examples (which can easily be argued against, but they are just here to make the point. Besides, measuring abilities with numbers is arbitrary anyway so don''t get too upset ) :

Strength/Intelligence
Social Skill / Nature Skill
Psionics / Willpower (open mind / closed mind concept)
Attractiveness / Scariness

etc. Those are crap but you could do better

Personally, I like the idea of having characters which get stuck with what ever they are; you get rolled a character with generic output for values (moderatly strong) etc. You can then extend those attributes like any other skill:

Train and you get stronger, study you get more learned, well read.

In the underlying system, give basic stats like strength, etc. a value from 0 to 100%, whr 100 is the maximum strength. Then give each character a maximum score for this (randomly determined).

So all characters start as default, then select aptitudes like magic, might, etc. Which determines which values are pushed up and which are not (for maximums). It''d give characters a bit of personality I think. Also help to have more than just a standard set of seven attributes.

As a player you never become aware of what your actual scores are; only a generic sort of thing ("you are very strong, your strength is amazing, etc"). Somethings, no matter how hard you train, you can never get up as high as you''d like...

It would certainly mean players would not be game to just suddenly ditch a character because they found that when they rolled the character up, the character got a "bad" set of stats...because by the time they find out, the character would be considerably skilled already.

Just a final note on skills: I like the way the merc mud system works; when you create a character, you select a number of special skills you character will gain access to as they level up. The more skills, the more experience you need to level up.

But to level up always takes the same amount of xp; you just get less and less (and finally 0) for monsters which are weaker than you.

Nothing amazingly new there; but the way its implimented is cool, imho. Any class can select some skills, some only avaliable to certain classes / races. Good fun.

Honestly, the reason people show ability scores to the player is because they''ve all agreed that there''s no real way in english to provide accurate detail of the players'' scores.

If you do something like this.. think about personalities. How do you know if the player wishes to play a snotty character who always looks down on others and sees only himself? this kind of person would believe they had it all, no matter what they really had. So even if you did impliment a system of word-based representation, people would eventually figure it out. it goes from "fair" to "good" to "great" to "excellent". So instead of writing out things and wasting a lot of time, developers give people numbers. the only way to accurately do it is to have all people have some hidden stat of "how well do you know yourself?" and the modify what they should see by that. but you can''t do that because it detracts from the fun of the game. So, it''s a catch 22

J