Sunday 30 June 1996

Characteristics

Having come from a Dragon Warriors Background, I found that Warhammers lack of Value for simple things like Reflexes or Psychic Talent or How good Looking you were, seemed to be Problematic. Game Systems with a base Characteristic such as Strength were the fall back for things like, a character using their strength, with no extra skills to perform a task..

Sure WHFRP has Strength, but how to compare to Reflexes? Dexterity? Charisma? they didn't.. You could multiply it by 10, but we'd already begun to introduce modifiers,

Also, since we had this XP per stat system, you had to divide any strength XP by 10, and lose out on a few points.. it didn't gel, it wasn't clean. something I can't stand is game systems which have too many clauses or cases (When I was teaching English this too became a pet peeve)

So I had to go back and look at these values. What was Strength, easy.. What was Reflexes vs Dexterity.. well most references to Dexterity was Hand Eye co-ordination, while Reflexes was more about speed and dodge.. D&D had both Intelligence AND Wisdom and Charisma was considered how good looking you were, everyone knew in real life that less attractive people are more likely to be nicer.. so it seemed wrong to lump them together. Psychic Talent from Dragon Warriors didn;t seem to appear in many systems, but Gurps had Willpower too, which made sense, and many times I saw rules for courage, but it was not considered something people had, it was a skill (like you had it or not.. more on skills later again...) or it was a check against wisdom and Rank or Level.. it was all very messy.. but the names made sense to us at the time as a basic fall back..

These are things that people have, regardless of race, religion, class, creed, training or development. A child even at the age of 1 has these things.. infact that seemed to be where we were heading.. looking at a basic being from the point of view.. what does a child have that is there from the beginning.. genetically so to speak. So we had our basic stats:

Strength, Courage, Constitution, Reflexes, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, Psychic, Willpower, Charisma and Looks.. years later I reverted a 'hit system' of luck, instead, to the final of 12 Characteristics.

By Mid Year of '96 we'd accomplished a new charactersheet, new basic characteristics, but we still had alot of leftover. Weapon skill, Ballistic Skill, Leadership, etc.. plus some of the new elements of Dragon Warriors.. Defence, Magical Attack and Magical Defence, Stealth and Perception..They were all there.. all messily bunched together.