Reading T&T 7.5 - Character Generation II p.p20-28

Now we have come to the part of the rulebook which talks about attributes. I find it odd that these are described after the Types, since they are more basic. Also, you early on is told to roll up your attributes, but the descriptions of them come much later, even though that might be useful information for deciding what type to play! Ken has said that this is not bad editing, since it's just that he thought about things in that way. Personally I think a game editor should be doing that kind of reshuffling of the text to make it flow more easily and make more sense. You can find a long debate about the state of editing in the business elsewhere.

After this comes something interesting. T&T have since the early days been a game where you can play a "monster". Any kind of race, or kindred, is defined by attribute multipliers. You basically have a table with a multiplier for STR, DEX etc. for all races. This is fun, and an easier way than calculating effective level, level limits or any such scheme. A dwarf with x2 STR just is stronger than a human. Learn to live with it. In my games we had a crazy assortment of kindreds and it was fun. Basically I see no reason to hestiate to bring in a new funky race, since many players will bring in new interesting problems or adventure seeds that way.

There is one thing I find annoying with this table though. Some creatures obviously have special abilities, and some are even hinted at in other parts of the book. But, none of them are described anyway. Of course, some of this data comes from the older Ken St Andre game, Monsters! Monsters!, but since it's not in print it is hard to refer to it. It do make some beings kind of oddly "amputated" though. What is just terrible unprofessionalism, though, is the fact that FDP managed to print 7th ed with a note saying that all Leprechauns have the spell Wink-Wing as an inherent ability, but they forgot to put it in the book! Even if the oversight was Ken's fault, it's just terrible to let such a thing slip by. Did they even read the book they published? In 7.5 ed. they did include it, but in a additional spell book, and not in the list of standard spells in the main rule book. Palm, meet forehead.

In this part of the book we have some real goodies, but the most interesting part of characters like AP, Level and Talents, I'll cover in my next post.