Game Mastery

As previously mentioned, I’d like to start writing about my homebrew system.  Since the system is diceless and I’m creative and motivated I’ve tenatatively named it “No Dice.”  I’ve created a category here for relevant posts, including a few from the backlogs.  You can view it here: http://gm.sagotsky.com/?cat=83

So first thing first, I’d like to talk about attributes.

I’m doing standard skills and attributes.  I’d love to be able to use something more original, but the fact of the matter is that skills and attributes work and everybody already understands them.  I doubt that if I could come up with something as good, and even if I did I don’t know that it’s worth training players to use a new paradigm.

So onward to stats.

I don’t want to write a rules heavy system.  Even putting aside all the extra balancing work, I don’t want to do a project with that big of a word count.  Let’s keep it small and tight.

First off a couple opinions as givens.

I don’t like GURPS stats.  They’re too simple.  You get strength, agility, intelligence, and health.  My first ever GURPS character was supposed to be a nerdy wizard.  But his intelligence was so high that he outsocialed the social character.  It felt wrong to me to fold charisma into intelligence.

I also wasn’t a fan of how the stats broke into skills.  Agility and intelligence had so many more skills that those stats actually cost more than the other two.  It just didn’t feel like a good breakdown of skills.

D&D has 6 skills.  Intuitively this seems like a good amount.  But charisma ends up being the miscellaneous stat.  And people never stop arguing over where the boundary between wisdom and intelligence lies.  To me this implies that there are too many stats.

So…

Let’s go with four main stats.  Strength, Agility, Intelligence, and Social.  (I may hit up a thesaurus to rename them later, but for now these terms are fine).  There shouldn’t be much overlap or redundancy there.  I’m hopeful that each skill I come up with will fall neatly into one of these stats.  We’ll see how that goes when we get to skills though.

Let’s also throw in Health, since I don’t think that can be derived from any of the others.  I wouldn’t treat health the same as the others.  I see it as more of a passive stat.  Health is what keeps you from dying, it’s not the basis for any particular abilities.

I’m also toying with the idea of a Magic stat.  I haven’t thought this through as well as the others yet though.  I think Magic will have to be a separate post.  I think the main attraction here is that keeping magic as a separate stat is a way to power down casters.  Mages simply have more things to put their points into.

Ok, that was easy.  That won’t continue to be the case.  I’m only getting started blogging about this, but I’ve got a fair amount of system written up.  What I’ve found is that it’s really easy to write rules, but the more rules you’ve committed to, the more constraints you add to the next set of rules.