For people who have done some hacking or house-ruling, what are your thoughts on keeping the 3-18 stats? It’s a legacy mechanic to be sure, but do you like it? If not, how did you replace it?
For people who have done some hacking or house-ruling, what are your thoughts on keeping the 3-18 stats?
For people who have done some hacking or house-ruling, what are your thoughts on keeping the 3-18 stats?
Are you familiar with apocalypse world?
I like the subtlety and decisions the full stats add to stat increases, and I think it gives you some more design space to play with than just having the core stats.
They’re not needed by any stretch. And it’s arguable whether the benefits are worth the added complexity. But I do like them being there for DW.
I like having the core stats there instead of only the modifiers. It does so much to bridge the gap for D&D players and has a comfortable feel.
I recently had to explain DW stats to two different sets of first-time RPers. Without the D&D background, and given how little the actual stats actually come up in play, I found it surprisingly tricky trying explain them without including a history lesson about a time when stats actually meant something…sometimes…in some other game…before they kind of nodded and started filling stuff in. Even then, they only cared about the part that showed up in their moves.
I have another group on Sunday, and I’m really tempted to have them just assign the “bonuses” and forget the “stats” until they level.
My verdict: vestigial.
If your players are primarily D&D players, they’re nice, but they represent a sort of pointless fixture when dealing with new players or people who never really did the whole D&D thing, in my hacks I ditch them but I keep them when running DW.
The replacement depends on the game, but one I do in my cyberpunk hack, Worlds Edge, is to let people up their mod once every other level (2,4,6,8,10), to a max of +3. That basically does the job, tho I need to work on it a tad, and its worth mentioning my game focuses on 3 ‘prime’ stats per player rather than the DW’s 2
Hate them. There are better ways to control pace of increasing bonuses, and most of the raw stats have no other function.
I really don’t like the stat/bonus setup. It just complicates things without adding anything really beneficial to it.
Indie Hack ditched the stats in favor of the bonuses (AW style), and lost nothing thereby.
For my group’s hack we ditched the scores and only kept the bonuses, we switched to a d20 to resolve rolls, upped the bonuses to go up to +5 and recalculated the few things that are score dependant.