Adjusting Attributes

[Majestic]

So have any of you allowed your PCs to adjust attributes a bit?

All of my PCs did things exactly as per the RAW. But one of my players, after the first night of playing, took me up on my offer to allow them to make some minor adjustments.

His Barding character chose 'By Hammer and Anvil'. Therefore he started with:

Body 5
Heart 7
Wits 2

Once adjusted, he ended up with:

Body 5
Heart 5
Wits 4

which ended up leaving him much more balanced, and without such a drawback as the 'Poor' rating in his Wits.

Has anyone else adjusted any of your PC attributes?

[Rocmistro]

I have not allowed this type of thing, personally, in my campaigns.

Not because I think it may be inherently imbalanced, but because I really don't want to entertain a bunch of special requests from players.

the 5/5/4 stat array, I think, is fine, because it's present as an available option for bardings in another package (A Patient Hunter).

What I would not allow is an attribute starting array that's not already represented within that particular culture.

For example, if a Barding player asked me for 2/6/6 (Hobbit Witty Genteman or Woodsman Sword Day Counsellor) or 2/5/7 (Woodsman Seeker) , I would turn them down big time. It would result in an imbalanced character.

A Barding with 6 or 7 Wits and then Swordmaster virtue on top of that, plus a Great Shield is looking at a parry of 25. With Heart score of 5 or 6 and King's Men, he's looking at 33 endurance, which is more than enough to carry the burden of a great shield and longsword (in addition to all the other stuff like armor and helmet.) That's too good.

So anyway, yeah. I might allow swapping attribute point arrays within a culture, but not across cultures.

[Heilemann]

The 'oddly' balanced attributes are a little strange in our game as well. I know that you can select your mixture in a sense, but they're not all equal on other points, so it's not quite that simple.

It's still odd to me that Woodmen have such a bad Body.

There aren't ways for characters to improve their attributes over time, is there?

[Murcushio]

What Rocmistro said.

Letting someone switch to another in-culture spread because they like the spread from one of the backgrounds but the actual role-playing stuff from another is totally harmless. One might argue that the different backgrounds also have different lists of distinctive features to pick from... but people can swap those out at-will during the fellowship phase anyway.

Where things get tricky is letting people pick their own attributes. A lot of the cultures specifically have virtues that are balanced around them not having access to certain attribute values.

For example, both Bardings and Beornings have a "Parry gets better" Virtue. This is balanced around the fact that neither of those races can get their Wits above 4, and in the case of Beornings around the fact that if they want a Favored weaponskill AND to fight with a shield, they are gonna need to blow a Virtue slot on making that happen.

I've seen fan-made cultures where people just went "screw it, here's the total number of attribute points you have to work with. You can't go above seven or below two." Usually those didn't have synergies which would break that.

And no, you can never improve your attributes, which is a major, major break on character power. You can improve your favored scores (important for some race/virtue combos, such a Hobbit with Small Folk) but never your base attributes. Characters only grow in power by becoming more skilled and deadlier combatants with more rewards and virtues.

[Majestic]

Thanks for the feedback. It's worth noting that, at least in this case, the player wasn't attempting to min/max anything. He actually played the character at first, then saw how hamstrung he was with the Wits score of 2.

And he's the only one (of seven PCs) who had anything adjusted at all.

For example, both Bardings and Beornings have a "Parry gets better" Virtue. This is balanced around the fact that neither of those races can get their Wits above 4, and in the case of Beornings around the fact that if they want a Favored weaponskill AND to fight with a shield, they are gonna need to blow a Virtue slot on making that happen.

That's great feedback, Murcushio. I hadn't considered that Virtue, and it makes me glad we didn't put his Wits above 4.

[Sprigg]

I've given my players the option of simply distributing the attribute scores as they wanted, with the restriction of a 2-7 limit for any given score, totaling up to the number any character with a standard background can get. It hasn't seemed to break anything.