After seeing mods only listed in the monster stat blocks, I want it for PCs too. Every "but" I can think of for making stats go away has been answered in the new design blogs. Well, every "but" but rolling for stats that is.
What if rolling now used the D12? Stay with me here gang.
D12 stat results:
1-2 = -1
3-4 = 0
5-6 = 1
7-8 = 2
9-10 = 3
11-12= 4
For rolling fans, is this too much of a change? Im sensitive to tradition since I like a few sacred cows myself, so I am curious if rollers can dig this method?
Or an alternative 2D6.
I don't want mere modifiers. It works for monsters for me, not for PCs. I want the history of the current attribute system.
Even if your stat# doesnt actually account for anything mechanically?
I'm not really interested in losing stats myself, even on the monsters. I may just be clinging to the sacred cow, however.
After seeing mods only listed in the monster stat blocks, I want it for PCs too. Every "but" I can think of for making stats go away has been answered in the new design blogs. Well, every "but" but rolling for stats that is.
What if rolling now used the D12? Stay with me here gang.
D12 stat results:
1-2 = -1
3-4 = 0
5-6 = 1
7-8 = 2
9-10 = 3
11-12= 4For rolling fans, is this too much of a change? Im sensitive to tradition since I like a few sacred cows myself, so I am curious if rollers can dig this method?
Or an alternative 2D6.
Re stat mods, I like them over ability scores, but people have brought up some good points about having 0 in an ability score just "feeling" wrong and making you feel like an invalid for it supposedly being the average number.
So... my counterproposal would be that everything just get scaled up by 5. Instead of +0, the average score is +5, and instead of penalties, you just go down to 0. This works for everything, especially skills (have skills equal to your Intelligence, plus whatever is granted by your class), and encumbrance / bulk (light bulk is your Strength, heavy bulk is twice your strength; or in pounds, just multiply by some number).
It also solves the issue with not getting to use potions at 1st level unless you're sexy under the new Resonance system.
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Re d12, nah... but I don't like d20 either. It's way too swingy and minimizes actual character / monster skill. What we've been doing since I tried it in a one-shot that my table really enjoyed is actually 2d10. It creates a modest bell curve that emphasizes the actual skill rating / attack bonus over pure randomness, while still keeping enough chance to be interesting.
I bootlegged the 5E playtest's advantage / disadvantage system and adapted it to the 2d10. Anything that actually increases or decreases your intrinsic abilities, like a magical buff or a disease, still gives a numerical bonus or penalty... but anything which merely /assists/ or /interferes/ externally, the sorts of things which would be circumstance bonuses or penalties, is instead advantage and disadvantage. For every advantage, you just add one more die to the dice pool and take the two best dice; likewise with disadvantage but the two worst dice, with advantage and disadvantage cancelling out on a 1-for-1 basis.
Because of the bell curve, the crit range is actually 18-20, because that works out roughly the same as 20 on a d20. I also just keep an eye on skill DCs and monster ACs and make sure they aren't so high that only a 17 or higher would be required to succeed, unless the party is actually intended to find a more creative solution.
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I always roll. For me it’s about the generation though, not the aesthetics of having a stat as well as a bonus. So as far as I’m concerned, rolling 4d6, drop the lowest (or whatever it is) and then consulting a table to get the bonus would be fine. (I like the possibilities to go all the way from 3 to 18, personally).
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I suppose if you wanted to roll non-swingy stats using only modifiers, you could do something like roll a set of four Fudge dice (or d6 with 1-2 as a minus, 3-4 as neutral, and 5-6 as plus) and then count up the +s and -s to get stat modifiers. This averages to +0 so you would likely want to say you get to bump one of the four dice up by 1 for each stat (still to a max of +4) which centers around rolling 12 for every ability score. There's lots of little tricks you can use to leverage randomness.
I know I wouldn't go for it. It's pure sentimental value, though, I suspect. The math might very well work out almost exactly or even exactly the same. But if I look at a PF character sheet I just expect to see those numbers, even my newer players tend to due to experience with D&D being the common gateway drug for PF. There is inherent positive value in tradition. There's a lot of weight on something so small and people just like it. Sometimes it's better not to reinvent the wheel.
That said, WoD got away with it using a 1-5 dots system (with some glaring exception in oWoD for the most part.) And it didn't bother me? Eh. Maybe I am just arbitrary.
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In the new system, 3d6 straight down averages 10.5 for all six stats.
So say you roll 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.
Or a 9, 10, 10, 11, 11, 12.
Or a 10, 10, 10, 11, 11, 11.
Or a 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14.
Or some freaky array.
You can then assign your ABC's as normal, with a cap of 18, and with near impunity turn out a playable character.
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I think they may have hit the sweet spot. Ability scores are like male nipples. Completely vestigial, but some people think we would look weird without them. I get keeping them for PCs.
Monsters, on the other hand, don't need as much detail on their stat blocks. If nothing else, this ascetic change should really only bother the one in five players who DMs.
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If the mods are meaningless (so far we have Bulk that makes Str only non-meaningless, and that can be changed to be based of the Mod not the score quite easily) and they refuse to remove the vestigial limb of Ability Scores for aesthetic reasons the only difference it will make to me is that I have to spend an afternoon making a character sheet without the meaningless scores and better utilize the space.
How do you know that Bulk is based on the score and not the modifier?
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If the mods are meaningless (so far we have Bulk that makes Str only non-meaningless, and that can be changed to be based of the Mod not the score quite easily) and they refuse to remove the vestigial limb of Ability Scores for aesthetic reasons the only difference it will make to me is that I have to spend an afternoon making a character sheet without the meaningless scores and better utilize the space.How do you know that Bulk is based on the score and not the modifier?
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For me, there is this ancient thing in my brain that places too much emphasis on "playing the character that you rolled up" instead of "playing the character you want to play"
You can do that with the existing Ability Up system and some very simple die roll mechanics:
Roll 1d8 for Ancestry, then 1d4 for where you put your floating stat mod (start at Strength and count down ignoring stats that already have a bonus).
Roll 1d20 for Background, then roll 1d2 for which stat gets the first bonus followed by 1d5 for what remaining stat gets the floating bonus.
At that point you pick a Class and assign the other four +2s of the final stage (or, for more variability, you can even determine the four +2s randomly before picking a Class if you really want, just roll 1d6, then 1d5, then 1d4, then 1d3).
This gets you a pretty random character (heck, even your Ancestry is random), actually, and one with the exact same number of points in stats as the 'official' method (though probably a little more distributed and less focused).
Halving the stat is effectively the same as adding 5 to the modifier, so it would be nice to do it all like that. In practice this adds 5 to a lot of numbers (every DC, every AC, every attack roll, ever skill roll, etc) which is minor complication. The difficulty arrives with things like Smite which (in PF1) adds +ChaMod to the attack roll, and that would become a clumsy +ChaMod-5. Similarly with channeling ChaMod-2 times/day and so on.
So unless there's an awful lot of rework, modifiers have to be 0=average human. Shame. I've been playing D&D/PF for over 35 years and the 3-18 range is entirely embedded in my skull, but I still find it a pain converting stats of 20+ to modifiers. So I'm happy to have gorillas with +4 StrMod and -2 IntMod or whatever rather that 18 and 7. But I can see that a player doesn't want a character with "0 intelligence".
Essentially, if 3-18 stats are going to stay, they ought to mean something in themselves. It's unclear as yet how PC stats are created, but having +1 stat increments every few levels rather than +2 might help with this.
(still frustrated with the fragmented PF2 information leaked out in the Blogs which generates more heat than light)
Paizo might not want to diverge Pathfinder that far from its glorious ancestor of 3d6 and percentile if STR 18
They do want to attract people who are familiar with that kind of ability scores. Better to keep some well-known references in an ocean of changes
I disagree, and that's because a lot of people who are voicing against keeping ability scores are people who have played with ability scores, and realized that they were only relevant for a few things, of which are probably now not worthwhile anymore due to other changes (such as bulk most likely basing off of modifier and not score, and by doing away with feats requiring odd ability scores).
Also note that several items (sans the Wish Tomes and Spell) always increased based off of granting modifiers at all times as a balance point, since it wasn't fair for some items to be worthless to some people (and yet useful to others). Sure, the Wish Tomes/Spell didn't follow this rule, but that's because they too were a legacy thing.
To put it simply, Legacies that still make sense are legacies that can stay and actually help make the game better because of them being legacies.
Legacies that serve no purpose other than to just be there (and by relation waste pagecount space that could've been used on other worthwhile content that can better improve the game) should go, since those obsolete legacies are things that tables who are still familiar with those game rules can implement as they see fit.
As it stands, Paizo is still keeping the rolling and point buy rules as optionals, but the new standard of generating stats (both leveling up and character creation) have zero usage of odd-numbered bonuses to ability scores, which was a purposeful design choice that followed their opinions on odd-numbered ability score granting items being a possibility.
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I can see tradition as a pro to keeping something if there aren't cons to keeping it as well. But there are a bunch of cons.
1) Wasted space. There probably won't be much of it but at very least there will be a paragraph and table showing you how to derive mod from stats. Worse is the wasted space on the character sheet where space is a premium and readability is important.
2) Confusion and Unnecessary Functions. Old players might like the nostalgia of Ability Scores but all it does for new players is add another thing to get confused about. It adds a mathematical function for no reason whatsoever and you can bet plenty of players will mix up what -x to an Ability means.
3) Tradition and connotations work both ways. Something can be said for distancing Pathfinder further from the old and further from the market leader in the genre.
You are correct on your first point, but I'm going to disagree with the second. I think it is worth keeping and mind that Pathfinder is going to continue to be what it always has been: an alternative to D&D. How many people do you figure will jump into PF2 as their first table top role-playing exposure? I would imagine those that don't actually play 5e beforehand have a high overlap with The Adventure Zone and Critical Role.
As such, it will continue to pay to have some of the things translate across systems. That said, I agree that in a vacuum ability scores should die in a fire and modifiers are cleaner design. We just aren't in that vacuum.
Even if Paizo removes ability scores from the game completely (in favor of mods only),
I don't see anything stopping the OP or any like-minded folk from using 3.x/P1E score:modifier correlations and rolling techniques.
You can forget about them after you've created the character's scores,
but the wheel still exists and doesn't need to be re-invented so to speak.
Paizo could even include this in the game as rolling method, with scores meaningless except as intermediary to deriving mods.
Since Ability Damage no longer functions on Score (where odd/even distinctions matter), keeping Score is pointless,
so even/odd score distinctions don't matter i.e. 14 is the same as 15 as far as game mechanics are concerned.
But using your favorite d6 or whatever method for Score generation as intermediary to Ability Modifier just isn't that far-out there.
We already use Point Buy points as intermediary when those are never ever thought about after that stage of character creation.
This could be really subtle hat-tip to old-school ability scores, with Paizo not even needing to call them as such,
just the old-school people know the dice total before they use chart to convert to Ability Mod is actually 'Ability Score'.
Or they CAN retain the term explicitly, except just not ever tell the reader they have reason to write it down forever,
since there isn't a reason to do so if every mechanic solely cares about Ability Modifier.
i.e. treat it like Point Buy Points. Sure, it's something, the game just doesn't assume you write it down and track it forever.
But if you really WANT to write it down for whatever reason, Paizo wouldn't actually be impeding you.
I feel that is really best of both worlds.
TBH I am pretty sure Paizo considered the possibility and decided against it to the point of not even testing it in the playtestHa, yeah, that can be an instant non-starter, you have never seen such large toys thrown out of prams!
I have all my toys lined up and ready to throw! :)
Ars Magica used modifiers for "stats" and also had an optional random generation method. However, there are enough differences to make porting over that method problematic (-5 to +5 swing, additional modifiers from advantages and flaws, etc.).
But, as an alternative to using the "ABC (+Level)" method that seems to be the standard for PF2:
Roll 2d8 for each
2 = -1
3-5 = 0
6-8 = +1
9-11 = +2
12-14 = +3
15-16 = +4
It's a flatter distribution than 3d6, but still weighted toward the median result (8-10; +1 or +2 modifier), with a slight skew to the higher modifiers. If you want a slight skew toward the lower modifiers, then use:
2-3 = -1
4-6 = 0
7-9 = +1
10-12 = +2
13-15 = +3
16 = +4
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For me, there is this ancient thing in my brain that places too much emphasis on "playing the character that you rolled up" instead of "playing the character you want to play"
My problem with this is the negative version.
I rather play the character I did not roll, than the character I do not want to play