More work on my dungeon crawler. One element is a sort of lite roleplay elements ... in this case the different playable characters having different attributes.
I feel happy how they are directly used. An event may call for your character to use their strength, they roll a number of D6s equal to their Strength Attribute and count any that score over the events difficulty number.
The issue is when I add secondary effects of these attributes. Namely strength provides extra power when attacking with a sword. Adding the attribute at its full score quickly inflates the number of dice beyond what I like (or makes the difference in characters to vast).
So is something like.
'Your attack bonus in melee is half your strength (rounded down)'
I think its fairly consistent so far..
'Your attack bonus at range is half your agility (rounded down)'
'Your defense bonus is half your fortitude (rounded down)'
'Your magic bonus is half your intelligence (rounded down)'
Oh yes sorry!
Combat resolution works as follows - A characters has an attack and a defense value ... the attack is usually determined by the characters weapon (Say a dagger has a attack of 1) and I intended to have a bonus from the characters strength (So a figure of 3 strength, halves it and rounds it down to a +1 bonus going by the above). The controlling player than rolls a number of D6s equal to the total attack value ... counting up any that score a 4, 5 or 6 as a hit. Defense is similar with the characters armour with an added bonus from fortitude, the total is rolled and on a score of 5 or 6 (or maybe 4, 5 and 6, still tweaking) they negate one hit.
Strength and Fortitude sometimes come into play on their own however in an 'attribute test' where the controlling player rolls a number of D6s equal to the attribute score to beat a target number, depending on the event in question (So if the target number is 5, they need to score at least one die with a 5 or 6 to beat the event).
The conundrum was I wanted an attribute like Strength to have a certain value for attribute tests, while also doubling in purpose giving a bonus to attack ... making the attribute to low makes attribute tests to difficult I felt, while making the bonus to high inflates the number of dice in an attack.
I was hoping this would be a simple enough solution, but wanted to make sure I wasn't getting into overly complex roleplay mechanics ... keeping it somewhat fast and simple.