Attributes, Skills, Backgrounds, how does it work at my table? Beloch Shrike recently started a discussion on dropping Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma on G+.
I said that I’m a big fan of renaming the attributes. This works really well while translating the character sheet because nobody gets confused. Based on Traveller, I renamed Intelligence and call it Education, now (”Bildung”). I also renamed Charisma to Demeanour (”Auftreten”). Renaming Wisdom to Yoga didn’t work as well, though.
So now that we are using Education instead of Intelligence, how do I use it? Roll under? I don’t like attribute tests. What I do instead is *negotiate*.
People are looking at some inscriptions, one player says: “OK, I read it!” I then say: “It’s written in the ancient tongue of snake men who ruled when the world was young. You think you’d know that?” They look at their education score and say “No… but perhaps Smartypants might,” pointing at the player of the Int/Edu 17 character. “OK, did your character spend years studying the ancient tomes of snake men? Is that the specialisation she has? And Ancient Snake is one of her languages, right?” If the player nods, then it works, and we’ll write it on the character sheet. Thus, next time, the character cannot also be a specialist in Elemental Air Summoning and Far Travel, or whatever.
This is exactly how I use skills, but using attributes as a bargaining chip. In the case of Intelligence/Education, the free bonus languages are basically the free extras that they’ll get.
Anyway, Charisma/Demeanour already has well defined effects: the number of retainers, their morale and the bonus to reaction rolls.
Wisdom is the thing that still eludes me... Specially now that I’ve removed clerics from my game!
#RPG #Old School