... now with 35% more arrogance!

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Optional Abilities

Carrying on with some ideas from the comments on the deferred ability rolls post: another idea I've had (and I believe posted about, somewhere) was to assume that all ability scores are 10 and give players the option to not roll at all. This kind of works out the way Jim describes his first experiences, although whenever a character faces a challenge where a given ability would be relevant, the player has the option that one time only to try for a higher score by rolling; the downside is that the score might be lower, and the player has to keep it.

The advantage to this, aside from deferring rolls until later so that you can start playing quicker, is that if you decide later that you need another ability beyond the basic six, you can add it at any time and just assume the existing characters have scores of 10. Conversion between campaigns becomes trivial. Want to add psionics and a psionic strength rating from 3 to 18, limiting actual psi ability to those with scores of 13+? Assume it's 10 for existing characters; if a player decides they want their character to be psionic, give 'em three dice to roll and let them add abilities if they roll 13+. They risk becoming more psionically susceptible (Psi 3 to 8.)

This actually gives me another idea, but I'll save that for a later post.

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