Post originally by Sérgio Mascarenhas at 2003-08-05 19:33:50
Converted from Phorums BB System

"strength needs to be applied to the body in order to achieve motion, maintain it, and resist the effects of fatigue (...) To boil strength down to how much you can push/pull/lift is an incredibly short-sighted perception of what strength means"

The problem with this concept of strengh is that it turns it into an equivalent of concepts such as "stamina", "endurance", "energy". Now, I don't deny that it can be used that way,it can. But there are better words to express that idea like the ones just mentionned.

The point is that rpgs restrict langauage. They select words and assign values to them. They do this for a purpose.
Most any word about physical features overlaps with other words about physical features. Strengh may measure movement of oneself? Certainly. Just as much as Dexterity (meaning addroitness) can be used to express the ability to push/pull/lift as any athlete can tell you. If we follow your reasoning to the end, strengh and dexterity mean the same thing which begs the question: why two stats that mean the same?

My take is that, since words like these overlap, a game designer should use them in such terms that he restricts their meaning to avoid the overlap. In the context of an rpg (not in everyday like - something I'm not talking about) strengh should mean the ability to push/pull/lift things while dexterity should mean the ability to move around.

Let me give you an example. Tae Kwon Do practitioners are very agile, just as are ballet dancers. They use agility for similar purposes and require similar manifestations of agility. So, where's the difference between TKD and ballet? In ballet movement is made for movement's sake. The focus is on its grace. In TKD movement is done to generate strengh. The ballet dancer achieves grace by controling and de-emphasysing strengh. The TKD practitioner does just the opposite.
If we want to represent this in a rpg why do we separate strengh from agility, why do we need the former and do not restrict everything to the latter? Because we need a measure that the simple movement (present in both ballet and TKD) does not express: the ability to do damage, the ability to make something move, the ability to affect an external object through our movement.

In a rpg we need to distingish the maladdroit brute from the agile feather weight. We want to have someone that is harmless but able to swim accross the river faster than Mike Tyson. Your concept does not allow for this.

Sergio
Sérgio