Quest For It

3d6, down the line, eight attributes. I still like that roll. It is mean in a way that feels honest, and I have grown tired of generation systems so generous that everyone walks away with an 18 and a little story about how fair the math was. Dungeon Crawl Classics uses the same kind of roll: six scores instead of eight, still 3d6 in order, still the body you get instead of the body you shopped for. That part of the two games is already cousins.

Palladium does not hand you more of those numbers just because the experience chart ticked. There is no ceremony at 4th and 8th where you pick two points and pour them into I.Q. or P.S., which I used to miss until I sat with what the books actually print. Physical skills can bump the body - Body Building, Boxing, Wrestling, Running, the usual gym list - and if you take one of those later, when the O.C.C. finally gives you another skill pick, the bonus comes with it. Race and class can add a point at the start. After that, the sheet is mostly done growing in that direction. Skill percentages still climb, Hand to Hand still climbs, hit points still climb. The attributes tend to sit.

I do not mind them sitting, not really. What bothers me is the hole it leaves for the scores the gym cannot touch.

I.Q. does not get a Literacy that makes you smarter. M.E. does not get a winter of meditation the core book will honor. You can wander into a later Rifts training package, or a ring, or a gene-splicer, or a juicing, and those are doors, just not a general rule. Tables fill the gap with character points, or they borrow the D&D calendar and give +1 every few levels, and both of those are fine if you like other games' tables. I have been looking at more interactive ways to improve characters through the world and story.

DCC does not put the raise on the class table either. The funnel scores are what you walked out of the first night with, and if Strength moves later, it is because something in the world did it - a patron paying you, a god taking the service, a well under an idol, a stone that was not supposed to move. The modules already hide those bumps, which is why many judges try not to stack automatic raises on top. Quest For It is just that idea said briefly: if you want the number, it usually comes from a place, a being, or a night the table will remember.

It is also older than the slogan. Tunnels & Trolls adventures used to do this openly. You came to a fountain, a pool, a door with writing on it, and you drank, or you didn't; you picked the left basin or the right one, and Strength or Luck or Intelligence moved because the room said so, or because you were lucky, or because you guessed the inscription. Nobody waited for a level, since the dungeon was allowed to rewrite the sheet.

I would like that freedom on the Palladium side of the shelf.

The picture I keep coming back to is simple enough. Hercules puts his shoulder into the Spires of Demios and walks them over. That is +2 P.S., not because he leveled, but because the city has a new skyline and his name is on it. Great deeds are written on the sheet, and the ability score is linked to them.

Three kinds of ability score changes show up often enough to be useful:

A bargain. Church, cult, a mark you should not have taken, a procedure that was not on the O.C.C. menu. There is a price, and it belongs on the sheet next to the number.

A service, which is not the same as attendance. Recover the relic, stand the vigil, refuse the easy out while something is watching. Priests live here, and so do people who are not priests and did the job anyway.

A deed the map will remember: the Spires again. The world moved, and you were changed as a result.

I recommend letting the gym and the monument stack, since they are different sources. Boxing is a whole season off, and the Spires are a ruin. I would not also sell the same +2 out of leftover skill picks while the dust is still in the air, and I would leave the extra d6 on a 16 where the book put it, at creation. Crossing 16 because a god liked you just gets the chart.

Do you want to raise those low ability scores? Get out there, serve something, promise something, or change the world. You won't get free ability score points for leveling up a chart in the book.

Quest For It.