Does Anaxial's Roster have an entry for 'human'?
This would seem a really logical place to put a set of default keyword values, kind of like a 'species template' to match the existing cultural and profession templates.
Something like:
Speak, Listen, Understand, Manipulate, Run, Dodge, See, Resist magic, Endurance
All these would be at a lower value than other templates, somewhere between 8 and 14.
Add a house rule that no ability can be increased beyond double it's template value by training alone. Or, if you want to get really smartass, give all intelligent creatures a _learn_ keyword that they can use as a kind of augment to any other plausibly learnable ability, up to some limit based on the keyword value.
Learning would then have some special-case rules involving spending hero points, which would by some strange coincidence be very similar to the existing rules for increasing skills.
The human keyword Endurance can be used as an augment to physical skills, gaining a defensive edge that reduces AP loss due to fatigue. This allows particularly skilled humans to eventually run down much faster creatures, if they use smart tactics.
Specifically:
human turn:
jog towards horse without exerting yourself too much (small AP bid, can't lose due to edge). Horse runs away, maybe getting a little more tired in process.
horse turn:
To counter the human's edge, horse puts in a large AP bid with Run Fast. Human counters with tracking, which is a mental skill and so can be arbitrarily high.
If horse wins, he gallops out of range and the human loses him, or at
least loses a lot of ground.
If the human wins, he lets the horse tire itself and follows along at
leisure.
Seems like a fair contest, maybe something that some culture could use as an initiation test.
Richard
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