[Reimdall]

Originally Posted by Dan Davenport

(I emailed the author this question, but I thought I'd give it a shot here as well while I wait.)

I got my copies of the game line yesterday and began my customary fresh-from-the-package skimming.

Am I correct in my reading that for the most part, physical attributes have no effect on skills? It looks as though Agility plays no factor in combat prowess, for example, but Willpower and Intuition (for melee and ranged combat, respectively) <u>do</u>.

If I <u>am</u> correct, what is the rationale for this?

Hi Dan!

The rationale comes from a desire to give physical attributes weight in tactical play, but differentiate them from skill. It's part of our desire to have characters (in this case, warriors) have many different avenues to choose from and also develop widely different combat styles. D'artagnan from The Three Musketeers - what made him good? Was it his agility? His acumen? His brain? It certainly wasn't his Conan-like thews. Where do you put the bonuses? Everywhere? We thought that physical attributes should have a raw effect on combat, but that skill was a little different. A huge farmboy, say, with a Might of 10, which gives him a +4 modifier to delivering damage but not his ability to strike someone, shouldn't be in the same class as a warrior with a melee arms skill of 4 - approaching mastery level. In Epic RPG, the warrior has a very large advantage with regard to his ability to connect strikes on the farmboy - as long as he doesn't take too many heavy-duty hits from Jethro, he should be just fine.

Regarding Agility: it does indeed modify combat, but in much the same way that Build or Might do - they grant a large raw advantage, especially to early, unskilled characters, which balances out to a smaller advantage over time as characters become more skilled.

Agility directly modifies two things:

1. The combat movement of a character, which hugely impacts tactical play, as it allows a more agile combatant to control the tempo of the engagement, the range at which the two combatants engage, and even whether or not they go into hand-to-hand at all.

2. Athletics skill is also directly modified by Agility, offering some swash and buckle to characters that wish to use it in combat for acrobatics and the like.

One of my favorite characters was a stripped down speed-freak with low armor, a stabbing spear (read, long range) and a small shield. He had a very high agility, and a correspondingly high combat move and athletics. He was not sturdy, but it was very difficult to close with him as he moved in, tapped you from a ways away, and then moved back out of his opponents' range. Sort of like the Red Viper of Dorn in Martin's Storm of Swords, if you've read those books.

Anyway, the advantages of high Build and Might are also more about raw ability (to absorb or deliver extra damage, for example). The actual ability to strike someone - sussing an opponent out, combinations, discovering weaknesses in defense, etc. - we do indeed leave to the more refined skills of melee arms, ranged arms and military arts.

Which leads me to:

Intuition and Will: These two attributes (and all the mental attributes in Epic RPG) do not directly modify combat skills in tactical play. They modify the character's ability to learn the skill that they govern. (Indeed, in Epic RPG, will governs melee arms and intuition governs ranged arms.)

For example, a player with a high will will be much more able to apply the lessons of experience necessary to grow in the melee arms skill, due in great part to her ability to stay in there and focus when pieces of leveraged metal come flying toward her head. It's correspondingly much more difficult for a character with a low will to learn melee arms, as he won't have the intestinal fortitude to accept the realities, focus and body sacrifice that a successful warrior needs.

Mechanically, this is accomplished by the character with a high will needing to spend much fewer experience to advance in melee arms skill than the one with a low will attribute.

We refer to this paradigm as Talent; it models the phenomenon that some people are just better at grokking statistics or carpentry or spatial relations or cooking (I have a very low Talent there ) than others. You can learn math or kicking people or metaphysics if you don't have a natural aptitude for it, it just take a much longer time.