From: laird@think.com (Laird Popkin)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.advocacy
Subject: Re: Character Detail
Date: 5 Nov 1992 19:18:13 GMT
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA, USA
NNTP-Posting-Host: django.think.com

In article <17146@mindlink.bc.ca> Nick_Janow@mindlink.bc.ca (Nick Janow) writes:
>Several people have used "keeping track of numbers" as an argument against
>systems with more than (6?  8?) attributes.  Once person considers "attribute
>space" to be a scarce resource.  I'm having a little trouble understanding
>the argument.
>
>In Legacy, my character sheet has 15 attributes in an easy to read 5x3
>matrix. Several sessions may go by without me needing to look up one of the
>attributes, and that takes only a moment.  Those 15 attributes, 3 secondary
>attributes, physical characteristics, career and education titles, a few
>other bits of information, and 38 skills, all fit on one standard sized page,
>with plenty of white space.  Nothing takes more than a moment to look up.  I
>haven't measured the average number of times we players have to refer to our
>character sheets in an eight hour session, but I think it's somewhere around
>5, certainly less than 10.
>
>If that's "keeping track of numbers", I don't consider it anything worth
>compromising character detail.

It's not so much keeping track of numbers as a balance between simplicity
and detail.  If you have 15 stats, that's 15 things that need to be
determined in order to generate a character, and to take into consideration
during play.  If you have 4 stats, then that's fewer things that need to be
determined and taken into consideration.  Some people prefer more stats,
and some fewer.

Personally, I think that GURPS' solution is quite good.  There are small
number of stats, so there's not much *required* to create and play
characters, but you can use Advantages and Disadvantages to add as much
detail as you like to a character, giving you much more flexibility than,
say, 15 stats, since there are far more than 15 aspects of characters that
Advantages and Disadvantages can effect.

For example, in GURPS there is no "perception" stat, but perception is
assumed to be based on IQ (smarter people notice more).  For those
characters where perception is higher or lower than IQ, you can have the
Alertness advantage, for example, to add or subtract to IQ for perception
rolls.  If you want to have more detail, the character can have, for
example, bad eyesight but acute hearing.  Thus, for characters where the
"default" is true (perception = IQ) you have only a single stat to deal
with, but for characters which really want to differentiate, you can have
different numbers for vision, hearing, taste/smell, and touch, in addition
to IQ, giving you effectively *5* stats.  The advantage over having 4
perception stats plus IQ for all characters is simply that the vast
majority of characters don't have "unusual" senses, and so don't need to
bother with the extra numbers.  If you converted all GURPS advantages to
stats (i.e. you wanted to provide the same level of possible detail) you
would have *hundreds* of stats.  The use of advantages and disadvantages
gives you the detail of those hundreds of stats, without requiring everyone
to use multi-page character sheets covered with stats...

In terms of how many aspects of a character should be 'stats' (i.e.
everyone has them) and how many should be advantages and disadvantages
(i.e. only a few characters have them), well, that's open to debate.  But I
think that most players would agree that fewer than 4 stats would be too
simplistic, and more than a dozen or so is too much work.  There are a few
systems outside that range (e.g. TWERPS and your system) but there's a
reason that most systems range between 4-12 stats -- that's where most
players are comfortable...


>
>I suppose roll-playing games might require more reference to statistics
>during game play.
>
>--
>
>Nick_Janow@mindlink.bc.ca


-- 
- Laird Popkin, Thinking Machines

Connection Machine: Massively parallel supercomputer.  Also a cool black
cube with more blinking lights than you can shake a stick at.
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