Profstat

From Sagataflwiki

Latest revision as of 11:26, 18 March 2011

The profstat is a statistic, a Secondary Attribute, that has only one function: It appears in Aptitude blocks (APT Blocks) for Profession skills and for the Omniskill.

In the APT Blocks for these special skills, the number 3 appears in some places, alongside the regular letters that each refer to an attribute. The number 3 in all cases refers to the Profstat, which for almost all characters has a value of 3.

Profstat is an abbreviation of Profession Stat, or Professional Stat.

About the Profstat

The Profstat indicates how easy it is for the character to learn the normal Profession skills, and also the special Omniskill. It is therefore all about having something to "fall back on" when a character does not actually have the necessary skill. It also serves to "shift" the APT value of Profession skills closer to 3, making it harder for players to create characters who can easily learn Profession skills to high levels.

Profstat is not intended to be rolled for, at all, and it cannot be trained.

Having a reduced Profstat gives the character a subtle air of a particular kind of idiocy, although it can be compensated for with high values in other attributres, especially Intelligence and Dexterity. The effect of an increased Profstat is equally subtle, but perhaps gives the character a certain intellectual smoothness and flexibility. Raised Profstat is also an excellent choice for characters with an air of the veteran, of having been many places and done a great variety of things.

Profstat does not correspond to any real-world phenomena, and so can be very challenging to translate into in-character terms. One must try to think in terms of a one-sided experience in the formative years and later. Often a character with a lowered Profstat was raised in an enviroment favouring a single trade (job-related skill set), and only that trade, for the character's sex, caste or social class. For instance medieval nobles raised to be warrior knights and nothing else.

The reverse, an increased Profstat, could perhaps be due to the character being raised in an enviroment of self-sufficiency, such as a Viking age farmstead, or a similar context with almost no commerce, every extended family having to provide all skills themselves including blacksmithing, veterinary and humano-medical services, and so forth. An emphasis on versatility and knowing a little about all trades and skills.

Note that a species package bonus to Profstat can be a good component in simulating a long-lived species, such as the Elves in many settings. Likewise, a reduced Profstat could be the result of the culture of a species that has a lifespan shorter than that of Humans, e.g. Orcs in some settings.

Changing the Profstat

These are the Advantages and DisAdvantages that modify the value of the Profstat.

Profstat 3 is common in all settings, but more extremely common in some than in others. Cities and self-sufficient non-manorial farming communities are examples of cultural enviroments where as many as 10%-20% of the adult male population can have Profstat 5. In cultures with lots of war, and thus massive attrition of the male population segment so as to force women to take up male trades out of necessity, increased Profstat can be common among females.

In a more typical medieval setting, with some commerce, and lots of trade specialziation, individuals with Profstat 5 should be perhaps 0.5% to 2% of the NPC population, of both sexes.

People from broadly curious subcultures, such as roleplaying gamers and (amateur) authors, tend to more frequently have a high Profstat, and more generally, mass media such as popular science magazines, and public service and speciality television channels, will over time increase the number of people with a Profstat above 3.

Advice

Profstat is only really important to you insofar as you care about the Omniskill or Profession skills. Don't worry much about justification. The above text defines the norm, but when it comes to Profstat specifically, individuals can differ wildly from the norm of the social context in which they grew up. A nobleman or noblewoman might have been a very curious and inquisitive child, asking questions of and observing the labour of a wide variety of tradesmen.

Likewise someone raised in an enviroment where a high Profstat is fairly common could have had an obsession, since childhood, with pursuing a particular trade, rather like Sherlock Holmes is portayed in his early appearances (later appearances makes him into much more of a polymath, one who regards all kinds of knowledge as potentially useful).

Profession skills are expensive to buy to a useful level; Omniskill even more so. If you want to rely on them, Profstat helps. But be careful of relying overly much on them. Individual skills are much cheaper to buy, much easier and cheaper to get a good Aptitude for, and also much better and safer to use, especially in non-routine situations where the inherent RD penalty of Professions and of the Omniskill is a serious problem.

Please note

Profstat is basically a metagame stat, or very close to one, not having any real-world phenomena that it is truly analogous to. Therefore, some GMs or worldbuilders may decide that in their worlds, everyone is Profstat 3, effectively removing the above Advantages and DisAdvantages from the game.

Worldbuilders who have stronger opinions about Professons and the Omniskill can also decide that insted, everyone in the world has a Profstat that is some value other than 3. This must only be done after careful consideration, though.

Also, a potenial pitfall is to assume that 3 in an APT Block means the value 3, rather than the value of the Profstat which for a few characters is something other than 3. This has two causes, one is that all the other stats in the APT Block are reerred to by alphabetical characters, and secondly that the vast majority of characters will have a Profstat of 3 (the exact vastness of this majority differs from player group to player group, and perhaps from world to world within the same group, but it will always be vast).

Mini-FAQ

Q: There is a limit to how many Skill Points I can put into the Omniskill. Is there a similar limit for the other Profession Skills?
A: No. You may put as many SPs into those as you wish. The high price, and the built-in "gimp" of the automatic +1 RD penalty, makes this self-correcting; there's no need to have a limit.

The world

Profstat does not make a huge diffence for individuals, although it can reflect the outlook of an individual (or culture), and in a way grandness (not Jack-of-all-Trades but rather Master-of-all-Trades!).

Even more so than for other Secondary and Primary Attributes, assuming Profstat to be 3 is a reasonable thing to do.

World impact

No content here.

The Ärth setting

The northern cultures of the Norsemen ("Vikings") and Kelts are often described as stupidly self-sufficient, and while that is an appropriate characterization of the primitivity of their level of commerce (they have virtually none), it does engender a higher occurence of high Profstat. The advice above about nobility also holds true for Ärh, for any culture, and also religious scholars, and secular scholars where such exist (in particular Moslems), and of course especially in terms of childhood (which means that among celibate Christians, the effect usually don't have anyone to "rub off on" except orphans raised in monasteries and the like).

The Keltic concept of Ildanach, one who is a master of all arts, is of course worth being mindful of, although it must be pointed out that that which the Learned Class (the Aos Dana) regards as "Arts" is heavily based on Intelligence, so perhaps look to that instead of to Profstat.

Design Notes

Note, this is Design Notes only for the Profstat. Omniskill and Profession skills will be talked more about in their respective articles, even though they are touched upon here.

Profstat came about while thinking about the new concedpt of the Omniskill, as a variant of an older idea, the Profession skill. It made a lot of sense to fill the APT Block for Omniskill with a wide variety of Primary Attributes, both for the sake of simulation (it is the Omni-Skill, the Skill Of (Nearly) Everything) so that high values in almost any Primary Attribute helps raise the APT, but also in order to serve to push the APT closer to 3.0, because a single very high or very low attribute won't make much difference.

Originally the idea for the APT for Omniskill was 2 parts Intelligence, 2 parts Dexterity, and the rest other Primary Attributes. What should those others be?

Constitution does not affect skill learning. That's an artefact from Quest FRP, that should/will be removed from the system. Faith and Psyche don't either, since they are almost exclusively concerned with the magic system.

That leaves Charisma, Agility, Perception and perhaps Will.

Yet an APT Block for a non-binary skill must have exactly 7 elements. IIDDCAPW will not do. The Dseigner's first idea was to reduce D to weight 1, thus IIDCAPW. That could work. Yet it overemphasizes Intelligence, a recurring tendency in Sagatafl given who and what The Designer is.

Replace it with 3? As it always-3? It was a radical idea, including something in the APT Block that was not a primary attribute. Yet the effect was obvious, and obviously desirable. Especially since it quickly occured to The Designer that the number 3 could also be used in the tenatively planned Profession skills.

So, The Designer saw that it was good, and decided to use it.

Very soon after that came the question that perhaps more than anything else defines and shapes Sagatafl, and sets it apart from other RPG rules systems:

Should it be 3 for everyone? With no exceptions?

The answer that is obvious to The Designer, and which is the correct answer to this qustion in almost all contexts, is a resounding "no".

It should not be 3 for everyone.

Attempts to link this newborn Secondary Attribute, the Profstat, to real-world phenomena, have pretty much failed. Versatile and varied childhood? Lots of tenous examples and causes are easy to come up with. Concrete material has so far proven completely elusive.

One justification is that an increased Profstat facilitates the creation of Veteran concept characters, secondarily via cheaper Professions (bought with the Skill Points that the Veteran - by definition - has in plentiful supply) but primarily via the Omniskill, that can (almost always) be fallen back upon if the character does not have a necessary skill of a type that realistically should be usable un-trained.

One might even postulate that a true conceptual Veteran character has Primary Attributes that are all lower than his Profstat. Codifying that into the rules would be blatantly against the spirit and ethics of Sagatafl, but having it as a guideline makes some sense.

Quick mini-glossary

Profession: A very broad Skill, encompassing many regular Skills, but expensive to learn (high Difficulty) and challenging to learn to a high level (high Complexity) and not good for use outside of routine situations (it has an inherent RD penalty; everyone is essentially Incompetent with all Profession skills). An example would be the Soldier skill, which lets the character perform a lot of small tasks that a soldier would have been trained to do, but only being useful under routine circumstances because of the inherent RD penalty (written onto the skill, e.g. Soldier (commo) 4-1). A modern soldier would know some Tactics, can use military communications equipment, draw maps, dig trenches, and so forth.

Profession Skills include skills that cannot be used untrained, because it can be assumed that the Profession training has included exposure to those skills.

Other examples are Housewife, Office Worker, Servant or Slave (two names for the same skill), Basic Science, Basic Humanities. It must be emphasized that Profession skills are not intended to be a good substitute for regular Skills (i.e. specific skills), especially for adventurers who very often find themselves in decidedly non-routine situations. Profession skills are merely better than nothing, and will perhaps also turn out to be a great aid in the creation of NPCs.

Profession Skills will almost certainly also follow a different cost progression scheme from regular Skills. Whereas for regular skills up until the Plateau Value each new skill level costs 150% of what the previous costs, and twice as much after the PV, for Profession skills (and the Omniskill), each skill level costs twice as much as the previous until the PV, and after the PV three times as much.

Omniskill: Omniskill is like a super Profession. In any case where a character wants or needs to use skill that he does not have, and which can be used untrained (many physical and social skills qualify; magical skills almost never do), the character can use his Omniskill instead. Omniskill has an inherent RD penalty like Profession, except it is higher, +2 RD (written as -2 after the skill level, since the - makes it clear that it is a penalty, something that is undesirable), whereas Profession Skills have a lower inherent RD modifier of +1 RD.

On top of this, Omniskill also has severe restrictions on how many SPs can be put into it, further compounding the effect of the very high Difficulty and the high Complexity. See the article on Omniskill for more information about this.

See also

Profession
Omniskill
Aptitude