Hey yall, its yer boi. Did a big dumb and posted non-draft related media during draft week, so I fear my article got swept under a mountain of quality articles.

But I still want to talk about it. Rather than repost the whole thing, you can read it here: https://simulationhockey.com/showthread.php?tid=110028

But anyway, I'll give the gist here so we can talk about it.

Problem: users have no role agency

Proposed idea that could help: Users select a role at creation, and that role gives stat bonuses on top of their stats. So if you have 5 in screening and you get a +1, its 6. If you have 15, it becomes 16, etc. It's basically a free upgrade on top of your base stats, and that free point is worth more the more you put into it. The stat bonuses are determined by which stats are your important stats, and every role gets +8 in total, but never more than +2 in a stat.

The idea is that GMs are encouraged to deploy you at a certain role because you are naturally better at it. And players get a sense of building a certain style because it's built right into their role, so the fantasy is kept alive. Furthermore, it opens up the possibility of stats above 20, which to me is rather intriguing because the gap between 20 and 21 is greater than between 19 and 20. There's a linear progression from 1 to 20, but it increases with every step above 20. So 21 to 22 is greater than 20 to 21. And so on.

The other side of this is that it removes some overhead of some of the proposed solutions, such as limiting the roles you can be deployed to. Now, it's mostly in the hands of the updaters. The downside is that is makes updating slightly confusing, as now you have to keep track of two stat blocks: your natural stats and your enhanced stats. But this may well be worth it, and we've had Strengths and Weaknesses before to contend with and that didn't seem like a huge issue.