Is Stuff an Absolute, or a Bell Curve?

[SunBoy]

Well, I'm not high on the lower cap ( ).

I think that both aspects should be balanced (both aspects being Stuff being absolute or relative). In my campaign, I had a few guys around -50, and a girl in the positives, so it was very hard to balance luck (oh, and BTW all character were pretty much balanced). Methinks that's a question of where the numbers are. Stuff being relative for the players doesn't mean it is relative for the world. I mean, if some guy is in -90 and another in -91, and something can go wrong to any one of them, it will go wrong to the second one, therefore the first one being "lucky" there, but both their lucks will suck anyway. And remember that NPCs have stuff too.

[Otha]

What do you think of this stuff policy:

Good stuff won't make you win, but it will make your failures hurt less; bad stuff won't make you lose, but it will tend to make your victories hollow.

[RPGPundit]

Seems a little abstract.

RPGPundit

[Otha]

Perhaps I should be more specific:

Stuff isn't considered in the question of who wins a conflict, but rather is considered when describing the results of winning or losing.

[finarvyn]

Stuff isn't considered in the question of who wins a conflict, but rather is considered when describing the results of winning or losing.

This is a lot like what I do with stuff.

If the villian is going to single out someone for some really bad reason, it's probably the guy with the worst stuff. Once conflict is underway, I tend to rely on the attributes and (if similar enough) eventually Endurance. Stuff rarely comes into play unless a character wants to try something really wacky during combat.

[Bradford C. Walker]

Last time I played, I ended up competing with a guy who had the same concept for a character as I did.  He ended up one rank higher on each attribute save for Psyche, for which he bought an item that made him immune (at the cost of not being able to use that stat, effectively), and not having either Pattern or Logruss (again, sidestepped-so he though--through an item).

How did he do this?  Bad Stuff.  70 points of Bad Stuff.  (I, by comparison, had five points in Good Stuff and Psyche 4th with Basic Pattern Imprint.)  He bragged about how he'd always win against me, even with his Bad Stuff, when I pointed out the following: The multiverse utterly despises him, while it likes me, and though he had a rank of Warfare, Endurance and Strength on me (1/1/1 to my 2/2/2) I had control of the battlefield--inherent Pattern vs. his Item--and my Good Stuff vs. his Bad Stuff meant that all I needed to do was to Hellride to a sympathetic Elder NPC and wait for the anti-Psyche item to get yanked off for a moment- then I'd crush his pitiful Human Psyche, and likely be rewarded for doing so.

"You'd never get that far." he said.
"With your Bad Stuff vs. my Good Stuff, it's inevitable that I'd hold my own long enough to get away- and then you're right fucked.  God forbid you take a Trump call that you're not absolutely sure about; it might be me, and then Your Ass Is Mine."

And that, by the by, is why I always rate Stuff in absolute terms.  (capped both ways at 100)

[Malleus Arianorum]

I cap it at 10 points either way. More than 10 points good stuff is just a reserve for when they attune themselves to something new. More than 10 points bad stuff is not allowed. That way their "bad stuff" gets shunted to more interesting things like Human ranks and Shadow lameness.

That said, ill fortune always targets the PC with the least goodstuff.