Physical stats

Burning wheel seperates physical skills into:
Power : physical strength, affects damage dealt in Figh!
Agility : manual dexterity
Speed : all speed not covered by agility
Forte : phyiscal fortitude/endurance.

As there are few stats they all have some importance. Mind is not only intelligence, but also awareness and I think charisma, too. It's used to calculate the combat value and the energy points (mana in some games).

You seem to be retarded, OP.

Olympics athletes aren't body builder lifters.

Runners are runners, high dexterity.
Lifters are lifters, high strength

>Your character is as smart as you play them as, no smarter and no stupider.

Seems hard to make interact with skills/in universe stuff. After all, I doubt the player knows the details of the metaphysics of the setting or the exact laws of a country, while the character might.

Not him but in a campaign that I'm a part of, everything that we need to know about the setting is available on a wiki that the GM updates every week, so if your character has max ranks in a lore skill, you can use anything that the wiki mentions about a particular subject.

So if you're too lazy to learn about a thing, so is your character.

>Because my GM does it a certain way, you're lazy.

Not that user, but-- sadly not every GM can do that. Remove yourself and personal situation from things, user. It'll make discussions more fun.

>Implying most decent systems worth their salt doesn't have an extensive entry on the setting.
Either stop being lazy or play better systems user.

Not really. You just fill them in on anything relevant if they have the appropriate training or skillset, the same way you would in any other RPG.

If anything, a mind stat over-emphasizes intelligence as it relates to knowledge. You don't need a lot of brainpower to know the ins and outs of your profession, have a working knowledge of who's who, or understand your religion's beliefs.

>implying

I repeat, play better systems user.

You seem to be retarded, user.

OP was making the point that there's far more overlap between physical strength and dexterity in real life than the abstractions of systems like D&D suggest.

Olympic athletes for a broad range of disciplines spend time lifting weights, as strength is a critical component of most sports.

To use your examples:
Strength is critical for short distance running, and long distance running requires improved endurance rather than improved dexterity.

Olympic weight lifters require considerable dexterity and flexibility to ensure they perform lifts with the optimal form, and even powerlifters need this to some extent.

Why assume everyone's going to play a pre-made setting? Didn't you just say you were playing in a GM's custom setting? Setting doesn't equate to system always either.

Which ones do you think it should include?

The point, my moronic friend, is that players have a means of learning about the details of the setting as a whole, whether it's coming from the GM or it's coming from the system itself.

So you don't actually need INT as a concept because such things should be stuff that the player should already know in some form or another, even if it's as simple as asking "hey, would I know about X considering my background?"

Skill, Stam(hp), luck.
Everything was off skill apart from saving throws.

What if the answer is "maybe"?

frigg off bobandy

Then you have bigger problems to worry about.

A GM who cannot give you a straight answer is one that's either running the campaign by the seat of their pants or one that believes that any information that they give will somehow put them at a disadvantage later on.

Or, y'know, they're human and haven't intricately crafted the details down to every minute detail, such that they know how much livestock you'd have to work with to know about some obscure bovine disease or some other detail. In these cases, a roll makes for an easy answer that depends on the skill of the character so as to not make the result completely arbitrary. In these rolls, it makes sense that someone who is better able to memorize things would be more likely to recall it.

Also, you sound like a tremendous boy-molesting fruit, you prancing la-la homo man.

Big Eyes Small Mouth divides attributes into Body, Mind and Soul. Each of these can be fine tuned by taking advantages and disadvantages to specific facets.

So you might have an above average Body, but take a penalty on "dexterity" to represent that you're big and tough, but clumsy. Or put some points toward Toughness and Super Strength to push those aspects beyond human limits.

Overall the way attributes work and the other values derived from them work pretty well, the system runs into issues either when someone finds a broken combination of powers... or when the entire balance of combat falls apart because offensive abilities scale all out of proportion to defensive abilities. Personally I like to make offensive powers deal 1d6 per level instead of a flat 5. You'll still do damage but it's no longer just crushing every defense in the way.

Err on the side of providing information. No competently-designed game has ever been ruined by the players having too much information, unless that information was something the DM damn well knows should be a secret.

>Hey GM, my character has a background in being a farmer, would he know anything about that disease?

He can either say
>Yes, you've encountered this disease before and you know that the disease only has one known cure.
or he can say
>No, the disease is too obscure for you to have encountered it during your years as a farmer. Even experienced Ranch Hands have only vaguely heard of it, let alone know how to cure it.

The only time a GM asks you to roll for shit that you would otherwise know is when he fucked up and doesn't have any other way to justify not telling you a key piece of information that you'd otherwise know about. Either that or he's one of those D&Dfags who thinks that you need to roll a die just to walk five meters down a flat plane of land.

My GM usually makes us roll because, if we've studied animals for example, we may have skipped the part about cave bears and their preference for living in caves, or dire bears attacking with claws. Unless we note it down that we've studied specific topics, which would not require a roll, the rest is generic nature book knowledge that we may or may not recall at that moment.

There is a middle-ground between winging it and autistically writing down literally every little detail in case someone might have that knowledge, and I prefer it to the other options.

I just use a passive knowledge skill. If you want to roll for it, then try to do some research.

I like the way Dogs in the Vineyard splits it up

>My GM usually makes us roll because, if we've studied animals for example, we may have skipped the part about cave bears and their preference for living in caves, or dire bears attacking with claws.
Does he make you roll a DEX save to avoid smacking yourself in the face whenever you take off your helmet too?

Because anyone with a functional brain can tell you that a cave bear most likely lives in caves and that wild animals will tend to attack you using natural weapons.

>Because anyone with a functional brain can tell you that a cave bear most likely lives in caves and that wild animals will tend to attack you using natural weapons.

How do you know what a fucking cave bear is though?

Like, how can you tell looking at a bear that it's a cave bear? If I show you pictures of 5 different type of bears can you point the cave bear out for me?

In the same wein, how could a peasant tell that a a bear mauls you? A wolf doesn't maul you; in fact it's rare as fuck that an animal stands on its hind legs like a bear does to do the mauling.

It's not like illustrated books are a big thing for the peasantry in D&D-land. The best a peasant who never saw a bear before would know about it would be oral traditions stuff about it being big, brownish, hairy, and dangerous as fuck.

Seriously. And it's not even like things with huge claws even use them on others all the time. I can name five mammals with massive claws off the top of my head that only ever use them for digging, and when confronted, will run, curl, or bite first.

>How do you know what a fucking cave bear is though?
Because the GM told us that it was a cave bear? If we weren't supposed to know what it actually was, the GM wouldn't have called it out by name, this is GMing 101.
>In the same wein, how could a peasant tell that a a bear mauls you?
Because it's pretty obvious to even the dumbest motherfucker alive when someone gets killed by a bear as opposed to something like a wolf or a coyote. Like have you seen the size of some bear claws? Also, what fantasy setting are you running where bears aren't common?

I'd say too many. It could easily drop HT relegating it to advantages and maybe secondary attributes. Speed as a combination of Strength and Dexterity would be even better than how it is currently done.

The answer is to drop attributes.

But the individual things you want to buy, have nothing be derived.

It's not so much inherent overlap between strength and dexterity/agility as it is overlap in exercises that build both. If you train for sport besides lifting (end even then) most exercises will train both strength and dexterity though in different proportions and for different parts of the body. Some sports, say martial arts, need to you to build whole body so there is no way to cut out the dexterity training altogether.

You absolutely can train strength to the detriment of your flexibility, though the doing it the other way is much harder. But there is a thing - such training is worthless in most situations and absolutely worthless for activities like combat and many sports.

For D&D and its derivatives I like to use a homebrew where instead of getting +1 for attribute in a couple of levels characters get point buy points for each level and can spend them at the same as at character creation. So if a fighter has a spread of STR 18, DEX10 and CON 16, he can buy up STR for 4 points, DEX for 1 (up to 14) and CON for 3.

Somebody who can't make snap decisions like that and then shape the session/campaign to fit those should not be GMing.

That gives me a new house rule.

Intelligence to lockpick doors.

Fuck rogue cucks.

Yeah, manual dexterity falling under dex is weird when it's (contrary to the name) mostly used for hand-eye coordination, balance, "body control", etc...

You know, this makes me think of Karl May's Winnetou books, where the most sneaky guys were also physically strong. He describes it pretty well how streneous an activity it is to sneak forward inch by inch without making any sound.

I have played a game once that had Strength (Physical raw power), Agility (Coordination and movement, Acrobatic stat basically) and Dexterity (Delicate tasks, used for lockpicking, sleight of hand, etc.)

It worked quite well, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was called.

Vim, vigor, and spunk

So DnD uses Dexterity for agility, and Burning Wheel uses Agility for dexterity. The circle of stupid is complete.

All these people actually advocating for turning the game into mother may I. Go back to Gaia or wherever the fuck you came from.

I'd tell you to go back to trolling the 4e threads, but I actually like 4e, so how about you just kill yourself?

My system has Strength, but it divides "dexterity" into two individual stats: Precision and Agility, precision for fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination, and agility for gross motor skills, acrobatics, and flexibility. The idea that the same stat that a character would use to fire from a bow should also be used for lockpicking is ludicrous to me. Although bows mostly use strength in my system, anyway.

>I don't care do games with more then 7+ Attributes.

Why not? Even if the game has three or base stats there's going to be a load of derived stats and skill proficiency you're going to have to refer to.

Why not have two dozen ability stats that cover literally everything in the game? Rolling initiatives is it's own stat, persuasion is it's own stat, picking locks is it's own stat. Ect. There is no God is that because each stat literally does one thing and one thing only.

Numbers are too hard dude.

Well WEG d6 uses similar system and has a free Fantasy supplement.

I've been working on a system that has Fitness, Intellect, Alertness and Personality. They're good for physical combat, arcane magic, jedi training and divine magic, in that order. If you want your fitness to reflect stealth and agility, you spend points on the stealth and agility talent tree, and if you want it to reflect strength, you spend it on that.

>having a few more numbers on the character sheet to choose from makes a game overly complex
rule-light gamers are truly cancer

but why would anyone sane would do any of that if you can capture the basic strengths and weaknesses of a character with a simple sequence of numbers?

I was fond of the way Fable handled only having three attributes: Strength(affected damage, defense, hp, and melee weapons maneuvers such as chains and counters, as well as physical size and bulk), Skill(Ranged weapon damage and accuracy, speed of all attacks, reload speed, ranged weapon maneuvers such as sub-targeting and manual aiming, as well as stealth/lockpicking and trading skill) and Will(MP pool, unlocking new spells and upgrading existing ones)

In general, these attributes weren't specific values for your character's body or mind or whatever, but instead broadly described how your character tended to act, look, and fight; putting points into any of them affected not just your fighting, but your physical appearance and how the people in the world perceived you.

Fable, as a series, sort of fell apart as time went on, but I thought the initial concept was pretty good.

Was just about to say this.

6 stats:
>Agility: Includes skills and feats like dodging, jumping, sneaking, and generally being an acrobatic person
>Coordination: Throwing, shooting, lockpicking, steering vehicles, sleight of hand. The combination of hand to eye coordination.
>Physique: How strong you are, and how long you can keep going - This includes the traditional "Strength" and "Constitution" in one stat, because fuck people thinking you can lift a million ton, but die to a stiff breeze.
>Intellect: Bookknowledge. From foreign cultures, complicated devices and machines, navigating using maps, making good trades, and of course the basic reading and writing.
>Charisma: How good you are at social stuff. Commanding people, charming them, deceiving them, handling animals without scaring them off, all the usual stuff.
>Acumen: The more specialized stuff, this includes hands on knowledge of various topics, like crafting, hiding objects where people wont find them, investigating a scene, searching for specific items, getting a hold of the right person in the slums, surviving in rough environment, and tracking people or animals. Really the "Learning by doing" abilities, that most books wouldn't be able to really teach you.

I am a huge fan of this system because of how flexible it is. Even without official settings, like Fantasy, Future, etc, then any idiot could very quickly redo the skills and equipment to fit any kind of setting.

And it only has 6 primary stats, while allowing a really varied customization of your stats. Super simple, really good, has a great level of granularity in successes and failures (And not just, say, D&Ds hit-or-miss mentality), and doesn't make any one stat "the best", by virtue of simply affecting too many crucial elements.

Fable is a sad tale. Really sad that he didn't sell his idea to someone more competent than himself. The games were all "okay", by having a solid 6 or 7/10 gameplay most of the time, but at the worst, the game deserved a 1/10, if not straight up 0.

The game was just a mess of broken promises and high hopes, which it could never live up to.

How's this?

Each Character has a level.

If they want to do something, they added their level number to the dice roll.

That's it.

Boring as shit.

>everyone is equally good at everything as everyone else

Good job encouraging people to play nameless faceless robots. Unless that's you're goal and you're playing THX1138.

Yeah, it's really nice and my go to system for low-medium level fantasy. Much better than 5e.

There is just two moments:

1st - It's pretty lethal for wizards. Because they rarely have resources to pump their defenses, and so getting into close combat can lead to a pretty fast departure from the land of living.

2nd - I don't like how they handle magic with rolling vs skill to see if spell goes off or not. I remade it so that spells always succeed unless mage specifically added a requirement of another skill roll to cast a spell. The more requirements there is in a spell, the more powerful it is. So a magic skill level determines basic power of the spell.

This also allowed to build combat manoeuvrers for martial guys in the same vein as magic.

OP is bound to drool all over it

EPICS, action/superhero game, uses a similar system. With players adding strong and weak sides to the character during play. And you are encourage to have weak sides because it gives you more plot armor. But without strong sides you can't achieve your goals. So it balances out.

>1st - It's pretty lethal for wizards. Because they rarely have resources to pump their defenses, and so getting into close combat can lead to a pretty fast departure from the land of living.
As it should be.

D&Ds "I am harder to hit wound than fighters with heavy armour and shield" is stupid, and should never have been introduced.

I just noted this because people I played with were not entirely ready for the fact that fighter could straight up murder 5 people within two rounds one of whom was a wizard.

Good thing it was the enemies and not the PCs. Two party mages were much more careful after that.

Honestly, as someone who uses d6 for everything, Wizards are quite powerful if played right, and you, the GM, are giving them the free room a Wizard SHOULD have.

Yeah, they are squishy. They don't have AC that makes a fighter look like his armour is made of paper. They have a low physique and can't take a lot of hits.

But give them room to do their thing, and they will do wonders. In a fantasy setting, they are the artillery, to the archers supressive fire, and the fighters up close and personal blender abilities. It feels quite nice, and is a good balance between them.

Note that the common "Wizard" type generally likes to push Intellect as a primary stat, which D6 does not. You have a 7th stat for that, and a wizard could just as well be a fighter gish type of guy. Not as good as the actual fighter focusing on it, but close enough.

Especially since I have rarely had a player focusing entirely on combat. There is way too many abilities beside combat, and they are all far too useful. You really wont function as a character if all of your points go into combat.

And most important for D6, magic is never the best solution to everything. Magic wont replace lockpicking abilities, nor will it replace scouting abilities, or survival abilities. It can supplement them in certain cases, but never replace it. That is really one of the key things about magic, that makes it so much better than anything D&D has ever done with it.

I don't know what's worse, that you totally missed the reference that op and I made, or that you made me look up yours and find out you're Canadian.

I'm quite fond of the first one, and the second had some neat mechanics, but it's honestly astounding how badly gameplay was warped as the series progressed.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning was the only other game I've found that I thought was similar, and was pretty much what Fable 2/3 should have been like if the latter games stayed true to mechanical depth.

>Yeah, manual dexterity falling under dex is weird when it's (contrary to the name) mostly used for hand-eye coordination, balance, "body control", etc...

As much as AD&D gets shit on (and rightly so) for being a mess of largely-unrelated systems running in parallel, I do prefer how it handles thieving skills compared to 3+. In AD&D you have percentile chances for thieving skills which are slightly modified based on your Dex, but the fact that they're not directly tied together means that you can have a character with a high Dex but no lockpicking ability (because his class doesn't offer it) but a character with a lower Dex might be amazing at picking locks.

Americans watch it too.

Attack, Defense, and Other.