Hey all, games like Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland, Mausritter, Cairn, etc. All use Chris McDowall’s elegant ‘stats as health’ concept.
It’s a great concept: It keeps the character sheet compact, and links a character’s prowess to their condition which is very immersive.
However, there’s a flaw in this system I cannot ignore: Strength is by far the most important Stat as almost all attacks target a character’s Strength. As a result Dexterity and Will/Charisma damage rarely comes into play.
Whenever possible, I try to apply Dex damage from attacks, traps or poisons that hinder movement, or Wil/Cha damage from spells or poisons that don’t affect the target physically, but that’s just a houserule and it’s not always easy to come up with immersive reasons a foe would have these abilities.
How do you get around that at your table? What are your most common ways of targeting these stats?
It hasn’t been much of an issue the times I’ve run Mark of the Odd games (ItO, QZ, and EB specifically), but one possible solution is to steal from Traveller and let players pick which stat is damaged. Traveller also applies damage to stats, but players can pick which of the three physical stats (Strength, Dexterity, or Endurance) sustains damage from an attack.
Letting players pick the stat that sustains damage could de-emphasize STR while adding a simple yet interesting decision, but one obvious issue is that it theoretically triples the HP of the player characters (since players won’t willingly choose to have a stat hit 0).
I do agree with AwkwardTurtle’s post about balancing the stats, and it’s probably the best way without rewriting how damage works.