Attribute Bonus House Rule

[zedturtle]

The point is that by shifting the odds, you are making the higher levels of skill produce less of a reward (relative to investment in APs) and the lower levels of skill a higher reward. You make everyone into almost a competent generalist before they even play the game or have earned any APs. Looking at my eight pregens for Theft, the lowest number of level 2 skills a character has is six, most all of them have eight or nine common skills at Level 2 or higher.

You also run the risk of making Weary less impactful (since it's a smaller proportion of the total value).

You get bonus dice for Encounters, Combat and Journeys. And your system (by virtue of its design) would increase the chances of everyone having at least one bonus die each time out.

Traits are auto-successes for common skills, not Hope. You are meant to spend Hope in order to make actions succeed, and you are supposed to make hard choices about the game.

I'm not sure what level of experience you have with the game system. But I've found that with the rules-as-written you have a nice arc of character development and I fear that tweaking the system in this way reduces this arc by making success easier at lower levels and reducing the trade-off for advancing skills to higher levels (in your system, I can't see any reason to advance skills past level 3, since bonus dice, Hope and my attribute bonus will almost certainly get me to where I want to be for most tests. I guess Great/Extraordinary successes are the only reason why you'd want to keep going, but they're most important in Travel, Insight, Battle, Courtesy and weapon skills.)

[Bocephas]

Okay, I think I see what you're saying now. Basically, any bonus you give to the standard Feat Die + Success dice (per skill level) task system is going to encourage players to never go beyond skill level 3. Thus, we end up with a flattening of skill levels where everyone's skills are level 2 and 3, and no higher (unless you're really wanting wthose extra "6s"). I get it now. Thanks.

I can also see how Weary would be less of a big deal if you had an automatic +1-3 on every roll (a bonus that would not be affected by weariness).

What if you're running one shot adventures using entry level heroes? Bedsides the Weary issue, it seems the real problem comes with character development.

[Glorelendil]

What if you're running one shot adventures using entry level heroes? Bedsides the Weary issue, it seems the real problem comes with character development.

If it's one-shot adventures, why use entry-level heroes? Wouldn't you want them to have some fun virtues/rewards to play with?

[Deadmanwalking]

What if you're running one shot adventures using entry level heroes? Bedsides the Weary issue, it seems the real problem comes with character development.

I think he was just using starting characters as an example of how pervasive having plenty of skills at 2 is.

If it's one-shot adventures, why use entry-level heroes? Wouldn't you want them to have some fun virtues/rewards to play with?

If it's intended as an introductory adventure for new players (which I believe zedturtle's is), having minimal moving parts of that sort is actually all to the good.

[Glorelendil]

Zed's adventure (I assume you're talking about "Theft of the Moon") is designed as an adventure for Conventions, so in that sense it's both introductory and one-shot, although those two things are not synonymous. We (here on the forums) actually had a whole discussion around which virtues and rewards would be most likely to be useful...and therefore presumably "fun"...in that context.

But if you add a mechanic whose justification is "this a one-shot adventure and I want players to have fun" then you're not really introducing the game, you're introducing a variant of it. Instead of altering the game rules, why not just give the players more advanced characters with more goodies (Virtues/Rewards) to use?

I've yet to hear a good reason for wanting to give attribute bonuses to common skill rolls.

EDIT: By the way, Zed mentioned above trait invocation. I totally left that off the list of ways to achieve success when you really need it. So we've got Hope invocation, bonus dice, and trait invocations. Then there's always the chance that you have a Wondrous Artefact or two.

So, to attempt to answer my own question above, I really don't see the rationale for adding attribute bonuses being that the odds are too low according to RAW, because there are multiple ways to succeed if you really have to, and it wouldn't be an interesting game if you passed tests too easily.

The only other reason I can think of for adopting such a rule is that it just seems logical that somebody with a high Body score would have a better chance of passing any given Athletics test (for example) than somebody with the same skill but lower Body. But realism is a slippery slope, and the same argument could be applied in countless ways. E.g., Mirkwood Elves should be better at Traveling in Mirkwood. A successfully Stealthing character should get some kind of attack bonus. Dwarves should have a harder time climbing than taller folk. Swords should be better at parrying than axes. Etc. etc. etc.

So then the question becomes: what do you want out of a game? Certainly highly detailed realism is a source of enjoyment for many. But games that try to be all things to all people end up...bland. TOR has been brilliantly designed to support storytelling, and one way it does that is by removing or suppressing a lot of the mechanical detail that we've gotten used to from many/most other RPGs.

A great thing about pencil and paper games, compared to video games for example, is that we can tweak and adjust them as we like. I would posit, though, that trying to force TOR in some directions is a bit like trying to turn a Bugatti into an off-road vehicle. You might get there, but what you end up with won't much resemble the Bugatti. It might be easier to start with an off-road vehicle.