Hello again after a long break.
In role-playing games, a 'God Stat' is a stat which is more useful or desirable than any other. Typically this is a stat that has the greatest usefulness in combat, or which determines how many hit points you have or how many skill points you get to spend. The player character with the highest value in that stat will have a big advantage over the other players. In games where players can either juggle their stat rolls to suit the character they want to play, or just have points to buy stats with, most players (especially powergamers) will try to maximise that stat for their character.
An example is the Reflexes stat in Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0., on which all the combat skills (and many other cool skills) were based, which helped decide who act first in the combat round, and which added to the number of skill points you got to spend.
The Norse god Thor has a Strength of 100. Make that 1,000!
A 'Dump Stat' is the opposite of a God Stat. It's the stat which nobody cares about, often because it's never used for anything 'cool'. In many RPGs the 'Charisma' or 'Appearance' stat is the dump stat, because no-one really cares if anyone likes or fancies their character when they can kill everyone in the room in ten seconds.
Stig of the Dump has a Charisma of 3.
One reason for the (perceived) existence of God and Dump Stats is that the most widely-played RPGs are either in the Fantasy genre, where the game generally revolves around dungeon crawling and monster slaying, or are otherwise combat-heavy games. Cyberpunk genre games, for example, seem to end up being all about getting as many high-tech weapons as your character can carry and using them on someone at the earliest opportunity.
In designing this RPG I decided to try to avoid creating God Stats and Dump Stats. I'll try and explain how I went about that.
In designing this RPG I decided to try to avoid creating God Stats and Dump Stats. I'll try and explain how I went about that.
In Lead & Chrome there are eight primary stats and four secondary stats derived from them. The main stats are:
Strength: how much physical force you can exert. Although there is only one skill that uses the Strength stat, it affects how much damage you can do in close combat and how much weight you can carry. Strength stat checks might be used to see if you can bend or break an object, or overpower an opponent.
Toughness: your physical endurance and how resistant you are to disease and poisons. It is also used to see if you can survive being mortally injured long enough for a doctor or first-aider to get to you. Other than that there is only one skill which relies on Toughness.
Agility: your gross motor skills, and how fast you can run. Close combat skills are based on Agility.
Coordination: your fine motor skills. Ranged combat skills are based on Coordination.
Intelligence: how clever you are. Academic skills depend on Intelligence.
Know-How: how good you are with manual tasks and machines. Technical skills are related to Know-How.
Charm: how well you understand and get on with people. Important skills to do with persuasion and telling if someone is lying use Charm.
Nerve: how much guts, grit or whatever you have. Several key skills are linked to Nerve, and you need plenty of this if you're going to face off with your enemies in a fight.
The derived stats are:
Size: how physically big you are. Size is calculated as the average of Strength and Toughness, with halves rounded up. It affects how badly you get wounded if you're hit in combat, and what size clothes (and body armour) you can wear.
Reflexes: how fast you can react. Reflexes is the average of Agility and Coordination, rounded up. Combat initiative depends on Reflexes.
Looks: how attractive you are. Looks is the average of Geniality and Agility rounded up (since a high Agility stat means that you're in good physical shape).
Sanity: this is the unusual one, calculated by adding your Geniality and Nerve. Every time you do something brutal or witness something horrendous or terrifying, you have to roll equal or less than your Sanity (subject to positive or negative modifiers) on a D20 or lose one point of the stat, and a point of either Geniality or Nerve to boot. In Black Chrome, the Cyberpunk setting for Lead & Chrome, having cybernetics implanted in your body also calls for a Sanity check.
Notice how the eight primary stats roughly make four pairs. A character with a high Strength but a low Toughness is like a boxer with a glass jaw. One with a high Coordination but a low Agility is like an obese watchmaker. One with a high Intelligence but a low Know-How might be a university professor who can't work out how to turn their computer on, and one with a high Nerve and low Geniality is probably a cold-blooded killer.
Stats in Lead & Chrome are generated by rolling 2D4+1 eight times, then assigning the results to the stats as you please. This gives a range of 3-9 with an average of 6. One stat of the player's choosing can then be raised by a further point, possibly raising it to 10, which is the absolute human maximum (and quite exceptional) in the game.
Alternatively, the Game Master can give the players a number of points to assign to their stats as they please, with the proviso that you can only have one stat with a value of 10 and no stat lower than 3. A total of 50 points gives an average character, but the GM might want to give players more (or even fewer) points.
Now, say the GM is generous and gives you 55 points to play with, and you want to create the ultimate combat character. You want them to be a crack shot with a gun, an artiste with a knife and to have fists of fury. You're going to want a high Coordination and Agility to complement your Firearms, Melee and Martial Arts skills, and to give you a high Reflexes stat. But you also want a high Strength to do more damage in close combat, and a high Toughness to help keep you conscious in a tough fist-fight or alive after an armour-piercing bullet goes through your kevlar vest, while the resulting high Size reduces the effects of attacks that hit you.
At the same time, you want a high Intelligence so that you have a good chance of making Perception skill rolls to spot lowlifes reaching for their hidden guns, and a high Nerve stat so you don't reflexively duck for cover every time a bullet whizzes past your ear. A reasonably high Geniality score is also useful as it raises your Sanity, so you don't end up with your nerves shot to hell and jumping at shadows after a few close shaves.
Those 55 points could buy you seven stats at level 7 (just above average) and one at 6. But you don't want to be average, you want to be the best. So you put 10 points in Coordination and 9 points each in Strength, Toughness, Agility and Nerve. Hold on, now you've only got 9 points left for Intelligence, Know-How and Geniality, three each. Your whirling dervish of death is also a moron, a technophobe and a social outcast. You'd need another five or 10 points to build the character you really want, and unless the GM's a soft touch he's not going to give them to you.
So that's is how I tried to avoid God Stats or Dump Stats in Lead & Chrome. Do you think it works? Please leave a comment below this post.
Notice how the eight primary stats roughly make four pairs. A character with a high Strength but a low Toughness is like a boxer with a glass jaw. One with a high Coordination but a low Agility is like an obese watchmaker. One with a high Intelligence but a low Know-How might be a university professor who can't work out how to turn their computer on, and one with a high Nerve and low Geniality is probably a cold-blooded killer.
Stats in Lead & Chrome are generated by rolling 2D4+1 eight times, then assigning the results to the stats as you please. This gives a range of 3-9 with an average of 6. One stat of the player's choosing can then be raised by a further point, possibly raising it to 10, which is the absolute human maximum (and quite exceptional) in the game.
Alternatively, the Game Master can give the players a number of points to assign to their stats as they please, with the proviso that you can only have one stat with a value of 10 and no stat lower than 3. A total of 50 points gives an average character, but the GM might want to give players more (or even fewer) points.
Now, say the GM is generous and gives you 55 points to play with, and you want to create the ultimate combat character. You want them to be a crack shot with a gun, an artiste with a knife and to have fists of fury. You're going to want a high Coordination and Agility to complement your Firearms, Melee and Martial Arts skills, and to give you a high Reflexes stat. But you also want a high Strength to do more damage in close combat, and a high Toughness to help keep you conscious in a tough fist-fight or alive after an armour-piercing bullet goes through your kevlar vest, while the resulting high Size reduces the effects of attacks that hit you.
At the same time, you want a high Intelligence so that you have a good chance of making Perception skill rolls to spot lowlifes reaching for their hidden guns, and a high Nerve stat so you don't reflexively duck for cover every time a bullet whizzes past your ear. A reasonably high Geniality score is also useful as it raises your Sanity, so you don't end up with your nerves shot to hell and jumping at shadows after a few close shaves.
Those 55 points could buy you seven stats at level 7 (just above average) and one at 6. But you don't want to be average, you want to be the best. So you put 10 points in Coordination and 9 points each in Strength, Toughness, Agility and Nerve. Hold on, now you've only got 9 points left for Intelligence, Know-How and Geniality, three each. Your whirling dervish of death is also a moron, a technophobe and a social outcast. You'd need another five or 10 points to build the character you really want, and unless the GM's a soft touch he's not going to give them to you.
So that's is how I tried to avoid God Stats or Dump Stats in Lead & Chrome. Do you think it works? Please leave a comment below this post.
The prevalance of God and Dump stats has typically eveolved due to use of mechanics in a game. Many rpgs revolve around a series of 'combats' and as such combat stats tend to be favoured and consdiered 'hard' and other less used stats become 'soft'. Teh 'skill challenge' machanic is a good example of breaking away fomr that tradition wherein a gaming group can develop a great narrative around using different skills to overcome a challenge in the tale, however the bruden is still on the GM (DM or Ref) to ensure there is a balance of combat, rp and skill based encounters, and even then... the balance of encounters has to fit with the play style preference of the players. It is definitely an art and a skill to get it right
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment, the first ever on this blog! Of course you're right: the GM must set other challenges to the players than crawling around dungeons and bashing monsters. Another problem is the restrictions of class-and-level based games, where some stats are only really useful to certain character classes, and some abilities are exclusive to one class. It didn't help role-playing that, for example, in first edition AD&D only thieves could climb up anything. The fact that the only use of Charisma was to gain access to some of the prestige classes made it an obvious dump stat.
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