In my previous post, I talked about taking dice out of character creation. Now I've only talked about d20 games and their derivatives so far. This is mainly because of two reasons: 1) most role-players are familiar with that venerable system; 2) it's the only one that is open-sourced.
Now, in subsequent posts I'm going to go into a few other systems here. These games and systems are the intellectual property of the various companies that have produced them, and my discussing them should in no way present a challenge to those copyrights.
<Whew> Glad I got that out of the way!
Let's start with the Palladium system as used by Palladium Books throughout their Megaverse of settings.
Now the Palladium system gives characters eight instead of six attributes. Mathematically, to give a Palladium character the same averages as a d20 character, you'd need to give them 107 points to spend. Just round it to 110, since that gives a nice, easily remembered number. Also note that the Palladium system has a sort of balancing factor for characters with some low scores; if a rolled character ends up with two attributes below 7, he gets some big time bonuses to other stats to make up for it. If you're using a point buy, I would not recommend using that little rule.
Now unfortunately, this only works for human characters or non-human characters whose species still roll 3d6 for each attribute. The Palladium system, however, allows for a vast range of species as PCs, and many of these roll many extra dice for certain attributes. This makes the math a little more fuzzy. I'll do my best to sort it out for you.
Take, for example, the Phoenixi, a race available from one of the many source books. As is fairly typical for Palladium, the number of dice rolled for each stat is different than for a human, and several of them have modifiers to the die rolls. Still, the attributes are still rolled with d6's so it's not too hard to figure it out. A regular human gets 24d6 total for stats, and using a point buy he gets 110 points. You could calculate that each die made available for rolling stats should give you roughly 4.583 points, and so this little birdie guy (who would get 28d6 total) should get 128 points. But there's a problem.
Not all stats for non-human characters are rolled using d6's. And then, there are often some very big bonuses to add (or even multiply!) to the attributes. Don't worry though. I've got it covered.... but first another example.
This example is the Killer Beetle, from yet another source book. This guy uses d4's for rolling several of his attributes. And so these lovelies have a total of 21d6 and 6d4 for their stats. "How do you figure that out?" I hear you cry. What we have to do is a bit of math.
If a normal human gets 24d6 towards attributes, that is a potential of 168 attribute points, out of which he gets 110; meaning he gets only 65% of the maximum points available. On average, he'd only get 84 points, or 50% (if you want the math I can get it to you, but it's not important right now), so using this system he's obviously at an advantage. And so, with math we have devised a multiplier of .65.
So, back to our Killer Beetle. Adding up the maximum points he would get for his dice, we see that he would get 150 points if he rolled the best he possibly could. If we apply the multiplier we calulated above we get (150 x .65) for a total of 97.5 points (rounded to 98). It's lower, yes, than a normal human, but he still gets a few modifiers to his stats... to the tune of an additional 20 points. And so the bug here gets a total of 118 points to spend on his attributes, when on average he would have rolled up around 109.
So, to put it in simpler terms: When figuring out the number of points to give a character in a Palladium system game, add up the maximum total of attribute points available to the character's species; this includes maximum die rolls and any modifiers (including multipliers!). To this total, apply a multiplier of .65. This will give you a reasonable amount of points to spend to tailor your character to your liking. I would round all fractions normally (.5 and up goes up, .4 and down goes down), but that's just me.
A further note: I would recommend following the listed maximums and minimums for attributes. The system can already get fairly silly, and I don't see the need for it to get any sillier.
A further further note: Some species have multiple means of locomotion and so have different rolls for each. Just add these to the max total and apply the multiplier. Then distribute the points like normal to the various movement types as you see fit.
More to come on this subject!
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