Let me say it upfront: I don't like to have large sets of alternative values for stats. In RuneQuest human primary attributes vary within a standard range between 3 and 20 (notice the word "standard"). That means that there are 18 possible values for primary attributes. For skills the standard is to vary between 1 and 100, so we have 100 different values for skills. I don't see a purpose to this since in most cases the differences between different values in a set are meaningless in actual roleplaying terms. Actually their only purpose is to smooth character advancement, at least the way I see it. But how many is too many, how many is not enough, and how many is spot on?

Take one of those pediatric booklets for the medical records of children. They have the percentiles for different measures, right? Furthermore they also have, superimposed on the percentiles, a qualitative scale, usually with 6 levels with breaks at 5%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 95%. Most doctors act on this scale, not on the exact percentile of the child. That’s the spirit for Rough Quests. Stats have seven alternative values that correspond to the following interpretative scale:

Abnormaly below average Noticeably below average Below average Average Above average Noticeably above average Abnormaly above average

Think about size, for instance. How do you refer to it? If you are like me you will consider that there's the normal sized man, the big man, the really big man, and the giant. You will also consider the small man, the very small man, and the dwarf.

Dwarves and giants (I'm not referring to fantasy races, of course) are abnormal in the sense that they are considered extreme cases that should not happen in the normal flow of things. Which leads us to an advantage of this short range of stats: it facilitates character creation. As a player you may have a visual idea of your character. You see him in your mind as being a big, clumsy man, for instance. If that's so you can translate it directly into character stats.

There are situations where we can use scales that are even shorter. Seven levels are adequates fo human-like creatures, but I think that it does not apply to non-intelligent or non-social beasties that cannot escape as easily as an intelligent and social creature from the constraints of natural selection that tends to enforce uniformity. For these Rough Quests only requires five levels:

• Abnormaly below average
• Below average
• Average specimen
• Above average
• Abnormaly above average

The abnormal cases will usually be due to unnatural causes like magic or because the animal is a pet, so the normal range will be between Below average and Above average.

Two more notes:

First, the scale applies both to traits, experience and skills.

Second, this is the scale of stats within a species. It does not cover inter-species differences. Minotaurs are a lot larger than Humans or Gnomes. This is not reflected in the attribute scale defined above. It has been designed to differentiate Minotaur from Minotaur, Human from Human, or Gnome from Gnome. Inter-species differences are to be dealt with an added scale that is applied to the characters as a species modifier.

And next for something new. This column puts an end to the discussion on character description and creation. From next column we will be focusing more on issues related to action resolution.