Different way of doing races?

[Scurvy_Platypus]

Basically what I'm looking for are ideas/information about what kind of problems might come up if I do the following, as well as some suggestions. "Leave things the way the are" is a possible solution, but it'd be nice to have others.

So I'm chewing over my conversion of the Palladium Fantasy setting to be powered with C&C. I do realize that in doing so, some things are going to change, because both games have been constructed in a different fashion. Many people like to say that the 1st ed (which is what I'm using) is a houseruled version of AD&D. But I'm trying to keep as much of the flavor of PFRPG as much as possible. Which leads to two important things:

1. PCs tend to be more "heroic". The system isn't as "gritty" as C&C, and they have stats that could range up to 30, but have attribute bonuses somewhat like what you'd see in AD&D. Meaning that if you are lucky on your rolls, you could wind up with a character that had Giant strength and then some.

2. Non-humans are encouraged to be played, or at least not penalized like they were under older D&D/AD&D systems.

To address these two issues, I'm thinking of doing the following:

1. Shifting the TNs from 12/18 to 10/15. I'm thinking that doing this will allow for PCs to feel more heroic without having to worry about "stat inflation" and the problems it seems that can lead to.

2. This is where I have the iffy ideas. One important thing to note is that the changes I'm suggesting would also be applied to the "standard" races (elf, dwarf, etc) in addition to any of the other races I do. So it's not like you'd have the PHB races which use one system, and then another system setup for everything else.

2a. Non-Humans will have an additional half-prime or in some instances a full prime, but that prime is not a player choice. Humans have 3 full primes they can assign at will. 3 primes or 2 primes and a half prime are the maximum amount of primes allowed. Half-prime TN is 13

PFRPG does their character generation a bit differently. They actually tell you the number of dice to roll for each attribute. And then based on that roll (if you roll high enough) the attribute might be an Exceptional attribute and recieve an additional die roll added to it. So for example, an Elf might roll 4d6 for its Dex, and 5d6 for its Cha. The baseline is human with 3d6 rolled for everything.

To help preserve the feel of the different races and their advantages, I'm thinking to use a half prime/full prime idea. So for the Elf in the above example, it would have a half-prime for Dex and a full prime for Cha. This would then leave 1 prime for the Elf player to assign at will.

I'm a bit stuck here though. I get the impression that it's going to severely bend (if not break) the system if attributes above 18 are allowed, so...

I could always do something like humans roll 4d6 discard the lowest, and then elves would instead have 2d6+6 for Dex, and 2d6+8 (or even 12) for their Cha; anything over 18 is lost and the score is left at 18.

But doing the half-prime/full prime idea (with it being assigned by virtue of the racial tendency instead of player choice) would mean that members of the race would naturally tend towards certains types of classes, but they don't _have_ to go that way.

Another possibility is to say that if a race would normally get a bonus of a d6 then they would roll the stat as normal (4d6drop the lowest) and then add+3 to the final number; anything over 18 is lost and the stat becomes 18. If they would have 2 bonus dice rolled for a stat (total of 5d6) then instead they roll 4d6 discard the lowest as normal, and that stat is a half-prime.

What if there's a race that has 4d6 for one stat and 5d6 for another stat? Then I'd still use the same system outlined above.

What if a race has more than one 4d6/5d6 stat? Well, when I make the race in its C&C incarnation, I'll simply let the player decide which attribute they want to apply the bonus/half-prime to, and the other stats don't get anything. So for example, if the Elf (under PFRPG) got 4d6 for both Dex and Cha it would be the player's choice as to which stat they add the +3 to. If the player picked Dex, then Cha would be whatever the roll was. If a half-ogre gets 5d6 for Str and Con, then the player could pick either Str or Con to treat as a half-prime and the other is just a normal non-prime stat.

There were a couple of ideas posted in the previous thread I started related to stat generation. Things like 4d6 drop the lowest, 2d6+[some number], 3d6 drop the highest. Any suggestions on combining the stat generation methods with the assigned half-prime prime idea above? I've got a couple, but I'd like to hear from folks that are already running games or have run games.

I know it seems like I'm rather focused on the whole stat and prime thing, but really... there's not much else to the system. *grin* Unless the PCs get some sort of attribute mod in game for some reason, they're pretty much stuck with whatever they've got. I'm hoping to present a range of options for people to play races that feel differently from each other, without actually introducing a huge overhead on my part or umpteen bonuses and so forth for a player to keep track of.

[Omote]

Hmm, well there are a couple of different routes you could go here. I'll stick with attribute generation for the moment.

How about other ways to generate attributes?

What about a point buy method where during character creation you start out with X amount of points to buy attributes with. Each race Elf, human, troll, etc would have a baseline starting number for each race:

--------ELF---HUMAN---TROLL

STR-----6--------6--------12

INT-----7--------6--------2

WIS-----6--------6--------2

DEX-----10-------6--------3

CON-----5--------6--------10

CHA-----12--------6--------2

Or how about mixing and matching dice. For example, normally it's 3d6 for stats. What about for weak characters rolling 3d4? How about only mildly weaker characters roll 2d6+1d4. For very strong characters roll 5d4.

The attribute bonus system would get out of hand if PC had attributes in the 20+ range. You could always cap out stats for certain races, at 16, 18, or 20.

I wouldn't recommend stats going above 20 for PC unless magical enhanced, at least for the unque races your are tying to incorporate into the C&C game.

..........................................Omote

FPQ
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[serleran]

The easiest way to keep the Palladium method would be to change the attribute charts. For example, don't provide a single bonus until a score of 16, and go up from there. This way, you can roll your 5 dice, and have a good chance of getting something like a +2. I would suggest the range for the bonus is much higher in PC&C than in C&C, say... instead of 2-3, make it 4-6. Example:

Stat / Bonus

1 - 2 / -4

3 - 5 / -3

6 - 9 / -2

10 - 12 / -1

13 - 15 / 0

16 - 20 / +1

21 - 25 / +2

26 - 30 / +3

The rest of the game will not be affected.