It makes sense that Trolls have a higher base running speed, given that they have a longer stride. But I still feel like faster characters should be, well, faster. And it makes sense that a Troll can outpace an elf if neither are trying, but once they start 'pushing', the Troll has a lot more mass to move around, and the Elf has a lot more streamlining.

You need muscles to run fast. Ask a Rhino, the fastet living creature on land. A cheetah may have more acceleration but in top speed the rhino is in front. Same goes with elves and trolls. In my opinion.

Runners use steroids to increase strength and muscle mass in order to run faster. They don't take them to increase their agility and flexibility.

you need to carry your body-weight . . so if you're stronger you can carry it faster i sez!

I've never associated and overabudance agility with the speed and stamina for running.

Take a look at Olympic sprinters they're basically solid bricks of muscle in a roughly human shaped assemblage. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Game balance, pure and simple. Strength needed some linked skills, in order to prevent it form being totally useless.

That does make sense, in an unfortunate sort of way. A question: What would the game look like if Unarmed Combat were a Strength skill, and Running was an Agility skill?

Both broken and completely retarded?

I am a world class lifter, master of the jerk and clear!

And, also master of the impentrable jade lotus style of martial arts for some reason. My strikes always strike true because my muscles are massive and rippling!

Heh. Point taken. Although I've seen RPG's that do both.

I'm pretty sure Dragon Ball Z follows that doctrine (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) and D&D to the bafflement of myself and fellow players for years.

The non snarky question is wether or not you'd base damage of agility? If you didn't do some bizarre game balancing trick, making melee troll of doom would be that much easier.

Granted if you min/maxed his agility to make him stronger I guess he couldn't run particularly quickly at his opponents. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Well, to me (i.e., if I were designing the system - shudder at that thought for a moment), [Agility + Unarmed] is used to punch/kick, but [Strength + Unarmed] is used to wrestle/grapple. Either way, Strength determines damage.

So you just need Strength to catch a fish? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rotfl.gif)

I don't follow?

Omae, if you need to GRAPPLE a fish you probably shouldn't be in the water (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

But nah Hentai you do have a point there, wrestling is an event where strength probably plays a bigger role than agility. That said you still need a great deal of agility as a wrestler to apply your strength quickly and appropriately. Another example I would give are line backers, for the longest time I thought they had an easy life of just running in very short straight lines. It turns out what they do in all that mess is pretty damn agility intensive and that while being huge and strong go a long way, you need to be quick enough your feet to be good at your job.

So it's a balance but I still have to come down with agility being the key to good technique and strength being the deciding factor in damage.

To me, though, the same thing applies to running. Sure, strength is useful up to a certain point, but you also need agility to coordinate the movement.

Perhaps Agility+Running for short sprinting (within a single Simple Action), and Strength+Running or even Body+Running for long distances/durations?

If I was going to change it, the only change I would make would be to adopt Body+Running for long distance running. IMHO, Strength is by far the biggest contributor to short sprinting, which appears to be backed up by the size of the modern Olympic sprinter.

*nod* So, like in RL, you can hard-max Gymnastics or Running, but not both. I can work with that. It still feels weird having a 450kg guy outrunning a 90kg guy, though.

I can totally be with Strength and Running.

Now, if i recall...isn't Jumping linked to Agility? I'd be willing to put that at Strength as well-I always thought you needed to be, well, strong to power yourself through the air(and those jumpers seem to be built pretty damned strong). But Hmm...thinking about it again i do have trouble seeing a short-legged proportioned alot of upper body troll jumping easily between two buildings. I see more of a muscular elf being able to fly it.

Unless Im misremembering things because our Vappu(Labor Day) party was yesterday. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

But i'd at the very least leave it for yeah, balance purposes. How much more useless can the poor Strength stat be?(Hell, with Martial Arts and stacking DVs now, you don't even need strength to hit like an assault cannon.) I guess i was one of those ''Strength Favoring'' folks, even though there's a bit of disadvantage behind it. I'd at least like it to do, well, something. When sams dump the score you gotta wonder. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

And Doc, i know what you're talking about-I used to also think linebackers were just like big walls, until i saw more of the training and the like. It is pretty intensive stuff and I can understand why Agility, Body, AND Strength have their uses in about any kinds of athletics.

Heh. I really need to get Arsenal; I want to build a Capoeira / Parkour martial arts adept with an insane amount of Gymnastics.

...what?

Where are you getting your data about the top speed of a rhino? I'm pretty sure rhinos top out at about 35 mph. I know cheetahs are something like double that.

I'm not arguing the "you need muscles" part, or the "elves versus trolls" part in Shadowrun, yadda yadda. I just think your logic there in the middle is a little fuzzy/misinformed/misremembered/something.

Also remember - both Agility and Strength are a form of 'muscle' (which is why Muscle Toner works the way it does, and which is why Muscle Replacement adds to both). Strength reflects how forcefully the muscles can contract, while Agility reflects how quickly they can contract while still under proper control.

It's to do with the origins of D&D. It wasn't always an RPG, it began as a heroic wargame with the turn representing a minute of combat. Hence, your strength made it easier to hit because it helped you penetrate their armour and defeat their parries. This is also why HP improved rapidly; it represented a degree of danger sense developing and therefore additional narrow evasions - and in the wargame form it represented additional troops coming under your command.

By the by, the one minute turn was maintained through to second edition. Third edition officially changed the turn length to 6s, in line with a number of common house rules and as depicted in the Baldur's gate series. I honestly think that this choice causes the system to make quite a bit less sense, though it does bring the actual game mechanics in line with how people would naturally describe the play of combat based on the way things work - which is also quite important.


Strength score is a rough measure of strength per unit of body mass. Quite a bit of that 90kg guy is his internal organs and skeletal structure. A lot less of that 450kg guy is going to be those things and hence he has a lot more strength output per unit mass, corresponding to a higher strength score.

I've seen a wildlife report where those guys where hunt by a rhino and fleeing in their jeep with at least 70mp/h and the rhino was still close and that for some minutes.
While a cheetah maybe faster. It can run about 45 - 70 mp/h in his first 650 yards but then needs to rest before its heart explodes.
So the rhino will win about time and distance.

So i took the obviously comparison between elve and troll.

And to Grappling:
You need to be agile to get a grab on somebody. If you get the grab you'll need to maintain that grab or want to improve it you need agility again to get a better grip and the damage is implied by strength, so the rules catch that up very exact. But if we're talking about joint locks that is another thing. There you must be very abstract like Grapple then finishing move. Else it will be hard to find a rule against that.

I can give an example that might not be realistic at all, but in videogames, namely racing games, you notice how some of the 'Heavyweight' cars have the slowest acceleration, but the best top speed-likewise the lightweight classes tend to have faster acceleration but worse top speed. They both have their benefits in the game; the lightweights can recover a bit faster if you make mistakes from them-but if you're really good with the controls, the heavyweights have the speed advantage at the end; but try not to mess up with em, it takes awhile to get back in the race.

That being said, can anyone vouch for that being realistic at all, with real-life racing? Im not too familiar with the real-life mechanics as I am with the computerized ones. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

(and i know cars and people are quite different, but for some reason this sprang to mind.)

I still think you're just plain wrong on this one. I really just don't see a rhinos landspeed (and you did say "top speed" very clearly) as being anywhere near that of a cheetah. The fact a rhino can run for a longer time period has never been in doubt (or we'd all be wondering why Running wasn't linked to Stamina), I just remain convinced a cheetah has a higher top speed by a significant margin.

ElFenrir, I think that mostly has to do with engine sizes. The bigger the car, the bigger the engine block, the more horsepower.