Status Ridiculosus

I always loved role-playing games that had lots and lots of stats (or what some people called attributes). The more the merrier, and if there weren't enough stats in the game to please, then by gum I'd add them. Looking back on it, I think this is because I really loved the process of generating characters, and lots of stats makes for a fiddly, interesting generation process. I would hazard the guess that in the end, my "system" had fourteen or fifteen stats, not including the major and minor motivations that I pilfered from TWILIGHT: 2000.

And as I evolved toward this state of gross excessiveness, certain things never sank in. It never bothered me that most of my stats were never used in the game - just having a rating for situational awareness was reward unto itself; there was no need to actually use it. The sick look in the eyes of my players never meant anything to me either. As far as I knew, their uneasy trepidation wasn't caused by exposure to a system of almost baroque complexity, but rather just gas produced by substandard hot dogs. Or maybe they were trying to remember if they'd left the water running back home.

This wasn't role-playing. This was dice-throwing. But since I liked throwing dice, it was good, right?

For years I've enjoyed tinkering with BOOT HILL (2nd edition in my case) and I'd always intended to rewrite the rules at some point. I had three main goals in mind when thinking about the rewrite. First, I wanted to use the physical systems of the excellent AH game GUNSLINGER in BOOT HILL, especially the maps. Second, I wanted to do something to improve the role-playing nature of the game by giving characters at least some hope, however small, of actually surviving a gunfight (my experience in BOOT HILL is that the survivors are those who run away; everyone else either dies on the spot or dies of great enfesterment later on. The only way out of this immediately fatal mess seemed to be something like a luck or fate stat). And third, I wanted more goddamned stats. Lots more. In my notes, I identified no less than thirteen stats, not including a short list of optional stats.

But then I read a review of third edition BOOT HILL that defended its use of only five stats, and the more I thought about it, the more my mind whirled. Why have an intelligence stat at all? Why not let the player use his own intelligence? Why have a social standing stat? Let the player's actions determine that. In other words, let the player actually role-play and only use stats that actually affect quantifiable game systems - strength to determine how hard you can hit someone, speed to segregate the gunslingers from the plowboys, and so forth.

Pretty soon this epiphany caused me to look at the list of stats that were in the hallowed 2nd edition rules, a list that I previously had dismissed as entirely inadequate. And the more I looked at the list, the smarter Blume and Gygax seemed.

I'm still going to rewrite the BOOT HILL rules, even though nobody will ever play it. But I'm not going to have fourteen stats, I can tell you that.