Supernatural Attributes

It occurs to me that I mentioned Supernatural attributes in my post on Monday but you may not be familiar with them. I won't go into the details of the mechanics for them but I thought you might like to hear a little about them so you would have some idea what I was talking about in the event I mention them again in the future.

So, in Renaissance, there are ten attributes (I know it sounds like a lot, but it works out quite well) which operate on a scale from 1 to 100. Average is 10, so there's a lot of room for improvement. Most established adventurers have 20 to 30 in the attributes associated with their primary interest. So, if there's still a lot of room left for higher attributes, you might ask why I need Supernatural attributes as well.

For one thing, even with such a wide range of Natural attributes available, there's still a significant cap. If you wanted to run a modern game, a Strength of 100 still wouldn't let you throw a car. You could lift it and waggle it about some but you could only throw it about a foot. Without messing up the low end scaling (or forcing a non-linear chart reference for Strength) there was no way to allow for the outrageous feats of Strength associated with the supernatural without having an alternate attribute system for such occasions. The same remains true of the other attributes as well. Speed, Constitution, even Charisma, all grant additional benefits as Supernatural attributes, things which become a "natural" occurrence for such a character without having to resort to spell effects. A siren with Supernatural Charisma can command your actions, a vampire with Supernatural Speed can move and act too fast for the eye to follow, etc. etc.

Supernatural attributes don't add to Natural attributes though, I wanted to keep thec mechanic on a 1-100 scale and so I scrapped the old way from 1st ed. Renaissance. Taking inspiration from a superhero system an acquaintance of mine was working on some years ago I decided that when you achieve Supernatural status with an attribute, it replaces your old attribute with a lesser (but more useful) value. So now, if you convert from a 50 Natural Strength to a Supernatural Strength your Strength will decrease numerically (to 25 at the moment; it can be increased again later with xp) but the total benefit you see from the new Strength score will be significantly greater than your old score.

Finally, characters with Supernatural attributes will find that they are more often able to exceed those without them (in similar tasks) because when rolling a skill or an attribute characters with Supernatural attributes roll on a similar scale, shifted by one level, so that they are more easily able to achieve higher levels of success.