Re: Re: Starting ability scores

From: Andrew Dawson <asmpd_at_...>
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 23:08:48 -0500

I haven't had anyone generate HQ characters yet, but my idea about changing starting scores is to allow the player to swap points from their keyword abilities to their non-keyword abilities. This way, a Heortling character could drop the Farming ability to raise a special ability. While all other abilities in the keyword keep their rating, the keyword rating is dropped to the level of its lowest ability.

The result resembles: Heortling 15 (Dragon Pass Geography 17, Farming, ... ); Spiffy Ability 15

Some points:
1. I know this is open to powergaming and abuse, but I don't care because I game with reasonable people and I don't keep players in line with game balance. I prefer in-game repercussions (without the adversarial manner of the HQ play examples).
2. I don't like random character generation. 3. There are in-game repercussions to being a Heortling with a lower than normal ability to farm.
4. Real minimaxers will make everything at least 15 for augmenting purposes; but that's the nature of the rules and see point 1.

For further abuse of ability ratings: In my HW-now-HQ game, we raise the rating of the keyword to the level of the lowest contained ability in order to reduce the number of numbers on the character sheet. Also, I allow raising of keywords (5 points to raise by 1, which is probably too low). I do this because I have players who are not interested in scanning scads of abilities on the character sheets and who really don't care about spending points to raise abilities and all of that other accounting, math, etc. The example of devoting from scratch for 26 HP (p. 119) would (Orlanthi) never happen in my game unless I decided to calculate the numbers and suggest it. My players don't love doing sums the way other gamers seem to (many of them also play Amber, go figure).

Thanks,
Andy