Y tho

Back to the Stats Portal.

Yes, but it's fair because he can't move in this armor...

It's fine, she may hit hard but it means she doesn't defend herself...

What's the point in playing an archer if anyone can pick up a rock and shoot better than me just by rolling higher?

In the Outrider Company, we use the in-game dice to reflect the randomness of battle. The rest of our roleplay is flavoured by how our characters' skills manifest themselves in emote form. In theory, roleplay events should be a product of randomness, clever choices, and how the strengths and weaknesses of our characters' came into use.

However, for the longest time, our roleplay depended solely upon the dice. Expressions of strength, weakness, character itself, were relegated to trivial, meaningless flavor. Battle was watered down into a race to be "the luckiest." Hence entirely out of our hands was any achievement or failure.

Stats bring your character's traits back to the fore. They are for making your character's, well, character feel tangible. They are to make the ninja faster than the brute, to make the wizened seer a better magic-user than the dull-headed battlemage. The concept of using stats to reflect your attributes is the oldest trick in the RPG-book. No new ground is trod here.

With stats come a suite of elaborations. Anything you read here comes as a more elaborate way of saying the exact same thing. That thing is as follows:

My character is good at this, but bad at that.

Why only 3 points total?
No reason. 3's a nice number, and the total amount of points is utterly meaningless. All that matters is how you distribute them. Everybody gets the same amount because roleplay is quickly ruined when it becomes unfair. This system allows you to excel in specific skills - you can gain up to 40% better odds than someone else if you specialise closely. You can also aim for total versatility, although the resulting bonus to any specific trait is of course slim.

My power fantasy though?
Intact. In cooperative roleplay the power-fantasy takes a different form - instead of power over players, you gain power over your chosen pursuit. By all means play the most competent marksman or berserker or mage you could dream of. By all means make an invulnerable tank. Every single time someone wishes to roleplay such a character, they justify it by accepting a significant weakness to counteract it.

Just like our strengths now take physical form as dice modifiers, our weaknesses must do as well.

Can I have an extra point?
No.

Please?
No. If one person gets an advantage over the others, then that's favoritism, and conceptually unfair.

If everyone gets an advantage over the others, the power creep begins and we go right back to the start, except instead of racing for luck, we compete to see who is greediest.

3 is fine. You were content with 0 up to now.



Back to the Stats Portal.