Stat/Skill Combinations
One thing that I really like about the Ironclaw system is the whole, "you can merge various skills & stats at will" bit. That's hard to do in most systems.
In most games, the best you can do is to say that you can arbitrarily mix and match one stat and one skill.
In many, like D20 and Savage Worlds, you can't even really do that- each skill depends upon a particular stat and that's that.
So even if I did drop the Ironclaw-ish resolution system, I would want to be able to mix and match easily without major balance issues.
That requires a few things:
- Adding an additional rating to the mix should increase the spread of results, but not alter the range significantly.
- It should be easy to figure out what you need to roll (this is a major weakness of Ironclaw to some folks... they can't remember what dice to use without looking them up).
- For maximum flexibility, stats and skills should be rated the same way so that they can be used interchangably.
Some possible approaches:
- The White Wolf system: every stat and skill is just rated as Xd10. You can merge any pair and just roll that many d10. Count how many of them rolled 7+.Can't merge 3+ things without seriously altering the range of results.
- The Ironclaw system: every stat and skill is rated as a pool of dice. Mix and match at will; roll all of the dice and take the highest number rolled. Can be a pain to assemble all of these pools of dice since they can be quite complicated. High stats can be overpowered since stats like Mind and Speed apply to a ton of different skills.
- The Silhouette system: stats are base zero and adjust skill results. Skills are rated as Xd6. You match up a stat to a skill and roll Xd6 and take the highest, then add the appropriate stat. Can't mix multiple stats easily; high stats can be overpowered.
- The Whispering Vault system: stats are rated as Xd6, skills are flat modifiers. When you roll, you take the highest value rolled (or sum up matching numbers, but I'd probably drop that). Can't merge multiple skills without unbalancing stuff.
- The Savage Worlds system: stats and skills are all represented by one die and are never combined. Instead, you get a bonus d6 on all rolls and you take the highest number rolled as your result. No actual mix-and-matching, but if we replace that d6 with another rating, it could work.
- The Children of the Sun system: stats are rated as pools of identical dice (d4, 4d6, 2d12, whatever) while skills are flat modifiers. Roll the dice and take the highest.We could reasonably add different stats together, but not skills.
Posted by Kiz at June 7, 2004 04:47 PM