Quote from: Elliot Wilen;309704I accept Kyle's definition ("stuff that doesn't change much") although there you probably have to add that we're talking about stuff that takes a range of values as opposed to 0/1 toggles like Advantages.

Good point!

However, many games have no dis/advantages, but almost all games have attributes and skills.

Quote from: Elliot WilenI think stats ought to be broadly applicable and universally relevant to the PCs. E.g. I seem to recall a game (Harnmaster? Pendragon?) that has a stat for how nice a voice you have. Now this may matter quite a bit in a chivalric game so I don't begrudge the example system, but it's silly to include a stat like that in other games.

Harnmaster has it, yes. They also have separate attributes for Eyesight, Hearing, and Smell.

In Harnmaster, attributes are rarely rolled against directly. The attributes are used as the base for skills, an average of three attributes for each skill (sometimes one attribute doubles up in the base). For example when you first buy Climbing skill, it begins as 4x the average of Strength, Dexterity and Agility. When you buy Acrobatics, it begins as 1x the average of Strength, Agility and Agility.

Voice factors into communications skills like Acting, Lovecraft, and Rhetoric.

It's part of the 1980s trend of attempting to get realism by lots of little details. Bring in three attributes, they reason, and it must be realistic. The trouble is that when you bring in three attributes which were themselves generated by rolling 3d6, you usually get some skill base of 8-12. So even in the Skill Base x4 skills, the biggest starting difference is from 32% to 48%. Not really a big deal. In play you don't get a strong sense that because Agrigor has better Agility than Barinald, Agrigor is naturally better at Acrobatics.

Thus, even if some obscure attribute like Voice is part of the flavour of the campaign, much of the flavour is lost by being mixed with so many others. As I said above, when you have lots of numbers, you can't remember them all and they stop meaning much to you.

Quote from: Elliot WilenI also think that stats, especially primary stats, ought to represent qualities that are fairly independent of each other. I mean the idea that Strength and Constitution need to be generated separately and independently is a bit silly, isn't it?

This is true, but difficult to make rules about. If you tie the different attributes to each-other, for example by saying that Strength must be within 30% of Fitness, then what you get in effect is... two attributes, Brains and Brawn. Which may or may not be realistic, but most players enjoy a bit more flavour than this.

Quote from: Elliot Wilenthe classic "roll 6 abilities straight across" approach is prone to producing freaks--and so is a point-buy system that forces/allows you to buy strength and damage capacity completely independently.

That's not really an issue of how attributes are split, but rather how they're generated.

For example, if you roll 1d20 x5  for each attribute, you are fairly likely to have attributes which vary a lot. But if you roll 10d10, they'll be very clustered in the middle, and you're unlikely to get extremes.

I'd also say that what is a "freak" is pretty subjective. Obviously an emphysemic strongman makes no sense, but a strongman prone to catching colds does - lots of top athletes have frequent colds and flu because they put their bodies under strain.

Lastly, the very freakishness can be what players enjoy, because it inspires them to make something sane and interesting of those wacky stats.

Quote from: Elliot WilenBetween these two concerns I agree with the emerging consensus that 10 is probably an upper limit, though I'm not sure if that's purely because of the human capacity to track a number of different elements, or if it's related to some deeper truth about the "dimensionality" of human potential and its "eigenvectors", so to speak.

It's both. I already mentioned the rule of seven above. As for the rest, this ties in with the emphysemic strongman. The more different elements we have, the more likely we are to get that sort of freakish character.

For example, one system I playtested had Strength and Carrying Capacity as two different stats. Thus, we could have a circus strongman who could never carry more than a handbag, and an emaciated dwarf who could carry a huge treasure chest on his back, Nodwick-style. We simply couldn't imagine that, it corresponded to nothing in reality, except that some people are good or bad at packing; but not to those extremes. The characters were being split into more dimensions than anyone really has.

What we have to realise is that it's all an abstraction, and all abstractions fail when you look at them at their lowest level of detail. For example, years ago I played a wargame called Fortress Europa. The smallest unit was a division. When they fought, they might retreat or die, but they couldn't be "wounded". Thus, entire divisions of 10-20,000 men were regularly being utterly routed, destroyed, or surrendering en masse. In reality, this rarely happens in conventional warfare, much more common is that a unit takes some casualties and withdraws, or retreats in disorder but if given a few days or weeks will pull itself back together.

However, if we ignored that and pulled back to look at the whole game board, the movement of front lines and capturing of towns and so on, all this looked much like a map of the real WWII. So while the lowest level of abstraction was nonsense, the end result looked at as a whole made a lot of sense.

That applies whatever our lowest level of abstraction is.  It's worth remembering that in the first dungeon crawls, the combat system was that two character/figurines would face off, and whoever rolled best would win and be unharmed, while the foe was killed - all with a single roll. That level of abstraction made a lot of sense when players had small armies of dozens of figurines, but made no sense to the players who were playing just one character. Thus the use of Ironclad rules, giving us Armor Class, Hit Points and so on. But of course, many people thought that abstraction made no sense, thus the development of RuneQuest and the like.

The fact that Risus and GURPS can both sell and be happily played in the world of gamers shows that there are many different levels of abstraction players are happy with. So I think there is no hard and fast rule about this. All abstractions make no sense at their lowest level, we can only hope that when looking at the system as a whole, its emergent properties during play make sense.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;309708That's not really an issue of how attributes are split, but rather how they're generated.

For example, if you roll 1d20 x5  for each attribute, you are fairly likely to have attributes which vary a lot. But if you roll 10d10, they'll be very clustered in the middle, and you're unlikely to get extremes.

General agreement on all the other points, Kyle, but here you're not being entirely fair to what I've said. If you generate the attributes the way you describe, then either way the statistical correlation between attributes will be 0--by definition, since they're the result of independent random variables. All that you achieve by using the 10d10 method is that everyone tends to be somewhat average...not that a weak person is likely to have a low carrying capacity. "Freaks" will indeed be less likely but only because you've unnecessarily (and unrealistically/unsatisfyingly) compressed the range of human potential.

The usual definition of 'stats' excludes such things as class, race, level, skills, and alignment. It's probably more relevant to count how many elements define a character in total.

All versions of D&D have the same 6 stats in a sense, but clearly there are more variables in some versions than others. Similarly, Tunnels & Trolls has 6-8 stats depending on edition, whereas GURPS has only 3, but characters aren't simpler in GURPS than in Tunnels & Trolls.

Sure, Elliot. But I used the extremes for clarity.

The thing is that whatever your system, you are going to get some "what the fuck?" results, whether in character generation, combat or whatever. All we can do is minimise those.

But... as the saying goes, fiction is more restricted than reality because fiction has to make sense. So if we want something which feels realish, we don't want to have no "WTF?!" moments at all. Because sometimes "WTF?!" turns into "hmmm, interesting." If "WTF?!" turns up half the time, that's bad. If it turns up in (say) one character in every party, and a few times in a campaign, that's okay, I reckon.

That's where the generation method matters, giving you varying numbers of "WTF?!" moments.

Freaks become much more problematic when attributes cover a very small range of stuff. For example, when I was about 18 I designed a game system where there were separate attributes for upper and lower body strength (I'd begun working out at the time and it seemed important to me). This of course led to many "WTF?!" moments and not much "that's interesting..."

So if you keep the attributes to a reasonable number - say, under 10 - then it minimises the "WTF?!" moments, and means they're more likely to lead to something interesting. The low-endurance strongman isn't emphysemic, he's just grossly obese. The low-strength super-dextrous person isn't a piano virtuoso and stage magician who's confined to bed, they're just a young kid doing gymnastics. And so on.

Thus, you actually want to have attributes have some overlap in their definitions. Where they overlap is what gives you some room to turn "WTF?!" into "interesting..."

Six shall be the holy number.

Seven be too many, confusion and sorrow shall follow when seven be the number.

Five be too few, anguish and rending of hair will be such a number's consequence.

Actually, I'm fine with less than five.  Three to six is my happy zone.

Regarding Fantasy Trip, AdjDx wasn't a stat, it was a temporary adjustment to the Dex stat, the name was perhaps a clue to that.  MA was constant for all members of a given race, I wouldn't call that a stat either.

Regarding fighting and not fighting, the ur-source is I think Ron Edward's Trollbabe, which has two stats, Combat and Magic (I may have the names wrong, that's the essence though).  3:16 was probably influenced by that.

Prince Valiant had just two as well actually, Brawn and was it Presence?

Quote from: aramis;309695Bull. It has 5. ST, DX, IQ, MA, AdjDX. The latter two are figured by race, encumbrance and armor, and are required for play.

"Last".  "Former" and "latter" apply only when there are two options.  Numerical Nazism begets grammar Nazism!  I would insert a smiley here (possibly the rolling one) but I detest emoticons.

Hairfoot Doesn't agree with the three style manuas I've been required to use. Pity for him.

Quote from: aramis;309747Hairfoot Doesn't agree with the three style manuas I've been required to use. Pity for him.

You can't be serious.  Those must be the same manuals used by all the forum posters who think "lose" is spelled "loose".  Did your employer buy them from Lithuania, with a box of herbal viagra advertised in a spam email?

EDIT: this is in humour, by the way.  I'll get into flame wars about some petty bullshit, but style manuals would set a new low.

Two were requisite for my masters program (of the 3 used in same said program); the third for my BA. I've only got 5 style manuals in the apt. But the fact that lots of people don't spell well, that's life. Typographical errors happen; again, that's life. Grow up, quit being an arsehole about niggling off topic bullshit.

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Anyway, TFT: AdjDX in TFT is used as a stat, and not all rolls for DX based stuff used AdjDx. In fact, it pretty much is used only for casting and weapons.

And MA, while it is static for a given race, as a generality, varies by load, and is the most commonly used numerical rating in the game. On the sheets by metagaming, it is in the stat area.

I don't think that "stats", that is, base attributes, are really in a position to vary much between games, given that they describe things common to people, whatever the setting. Personally, I think 8 is a good number, as six has never sat well with me in what it forces together ("Wisdom" comprises willpower and perception? Really?). I like even numbers, so that there's a good split between physical and mental attributes.

Quote from: Balbinus;309738Regarding Fantasy Trip, AdjDx wasn't a stat, it was a temporary adjustment to the Dex stat, the name was perhaps a clue to that.  MA was constant for all members of a given race, I wouldn't call that a stat either.

Beat me to it.