Correlated stats and The Fantasy Trip

Plenty of strength, plenty of hit points

One thing that a lot of RPGs get wrong, I think, is allowing characters to have uncorrelated physical stats. A character with STR of 18 and CON of 3 makes little sense - and nor does a character with STR 18 and just one or two hit points.

RuneQuest does a little better than most old-school games, in that it also has the SIZ stat. Your damage bonus comes from an average of STR and SIZ, which seems logical, and your CON and STR can be trained up to the level of whichever is the highest out of the other stat and SIZ. But the fact the starting stats are uncorrelated still leaves problems. A very strong person, even if small, is likely to be muscular and therefore relatively heavy, which suggests greater hit points (based on CON modified by SIZ and POW but not STR in RQ2). And it's hard to imagine a small, strong person who is yet physically frail.

Equally, though, it's easy to find examples of fit, tough people who aren't particularly strong. But not, I think, to the CON 18, STR 3 level. It's also easy to imagine people (or creatures) that are very strong but not particularly healthy: an obese hill giant or ogre, for example. But it's hard to imagine that unhealthiness impinging on their hit points. The chances of a heart attack are not, one suspects, correlated to the chances of being killed with a single sword-blow.

How, then, to resolve this? One approach might be to adjust below-average CON up when STR is higher than average. Something similar could be done with hit points.

But there's another approach: shed some of the stats. I was looking at some retroclones of The Fantasy Trip and Melee (the combat game on which TFT is based) yesterday, and was impressed by the way that the STR stat is both physical power and hit points: you simply lose STR as you take damage. So, as you are wounded or fatigued, you become a less effective grappler and less able to accomplish physical tasks.

For combat, TFT and its clones use the DEX stat. That also makes sense; skill in combat is very different from brawn. Brawn certainly helps, of course - not least because it provides more mass to absorb damage, as reflected in TFT's system of declining STR. Of course, as in most RPGs, DEX encompasses much more than dexterity; deftness, agility and skill (and thus, presumably, training). For a game using a similar two-stat system, I'd be inclined to go with "strength" and "skill" to describe the attributes.

Now, there are myriad holes to pick in this. Someone can be a skilled swordsman but clumsy in other respects. And a skilled swordsman can certainly be a poor climber and otherwise unathletic. But I think that reducing the physical stats to STR and DEX (or "strength and skill") is actually preferable to having uncorrelated attributes of STR, DEX and CON (with SIZ too, in RQ).

Steve Jackson has reacquired the rights to TFT, which is to come back into print. I'll certainly pick up a copy when it does.