Simplifying for the Common Case

I omitted Encumbrance from my post on Athletics abilities in November because my old system had some flaws in it, so I’ve been working on a revised system (and playtesting it).

To recap, the rule for Athletics was that you put points into either Speed OR Power, these were adjusted by appropriate attributes and SIZE and HEIGHT, resulting in a bonus which you look up on a table to get a lift / run / jump capabilities.

Each +1 gives a percentage improvement, and it was scaled to give Olympian capabilities at +8.

In playtesting of the new encumbrance rules I discovered that athletics could be greatly simplified by a simple change in how the character sheet is laid out, so I’ll talk about that today and leave the Encumbrance rules until next time.

It's an application of a good general principle: things should be simplest for the most common case.

With athletics you get SIZE as a bonus on Lift, Survival and Kill, and HEIGHT-SIZE on Run and Jump. This means you end up with lots of boxes on the character sheet which are all zeros for humans!

Dwarves are also more complex than necessary - Dwarves are SIZE -2, HEIGHT -4, which would give them -2 in all categories. Except that in addition Dwarves get modifiers of +1 lift, +2 survival and kill, and -1 on Jump. So Dwarves have modifiers of -2 AND a +2 which cancel each other out. That's a lot of numbers for no gain.

Hence halfway through copying out character sheets to the new template I revised the template and started again!

Now I have a table (below) for races showing what the overall bonus is. There is no box on the character sheet for these bonuses, you just annotate the appropriate part of the character sheet with a bonus (just as you would for any other miscellaneous bonus). The top line (in italics) is the default, which gives you a starting point before any racial specific alterations. I've included 12' tall Giants as an example for a typical large humanoid monster, not because I've got Giant PCs (though there's no reason why you couldn't have a Giant campaign). You can see I'm being quite generous to Dwarves and Halflings.

Race	SIZE	HEIGHT	Survival	Kill	Lift	Move	Jump
			SZ	SZ	SZ	HT-SZ	HT-SZ
Halfling	-6	-10	-3	-3	-6	-4	-5
Dwarf	-2	-4			-1	-2	-3
Elf		+1				+1	+1
Giant	+10	+10	+10	+10	+10

So Humans don’t put anything at all onto their character sheet, and Dwarves simply put -1, -2, and -3 in the appropriate places. As with all simple things like this I wondered why I hadn't seen that in the first place!