this is a public service announcement from your Staff Head of Standards
.Due to the recent events, many may have been wondering about the technical facts behind this discussion. They are not the basis of the dispute that was contentious, and focussing on these numbers does not serve to solve the case - regardless, I am using the opportunity to freshen up everyone's understanding of how stat edits are handled in ALFA.
Positive edits to a characters ability scores used to be illegal in ALFA, on the basis that Standards work inclusively - everything you can find a pricing condition for is allowed. If as a DM you are unsure about the availability of something, you can post a query on our handy Helpdesk forum - fellow DMs, staff or a member of the S&T will gladly offer their assistance.
As we were aware that stat edits had happened prior, we started a discussion in Octobre 07, and in the end resolved to create a pricing condition for them, 1:1 taken from PnP. The respective PnP features are Tomes and Manuals, each allowing boosts to a single ability from +1 to +5, priced at 27,500 gp per point. Our motivation in offering them was to give DMs the flexibility to toy with this tool should they see so fitting, as well as belatedly being able to handle player characters that were subject to them.
Of course, this kind of reward cannot be gained lightly. A player character should have to be at least level 12 to gain +1 to a single ability - or else he would be in violation of the maximum single-award cap. Furthemore, for a level 12 character, this reward would constitute, on average, the whole of all wealth rewards for 11555 experience - or simpler but, he would be questing almost all the way from level 12 to 13 without gaining any significant other wealth apart from this stat boost. I think this helps understand why many people are upset with the magnitude of what came up in the investigation.
Now, back on topic. While this pricing seems high, these boosts are arguably worth it - you cannot dispel, counter, disjunct them, and they also stack completely with buff and item boosts - therefore, they can be quite powerful, but as DMs in general have shown restraint and good judgment throughout ALFA, noone considered it to become a problem - and in fact, it wasn't, the only problem that arose was this legacy, back from a time when the application of standards was perhaps not as universally understood.
Another problem, apart from the single wealth rewards, of course is presented by the overal wealth guidelines. Most PCs would feel the pinch in having less equipment and expensive consumables available, as such an edit can bite severely into one's overall wealth. For example, having +9 abilities like in this case means 247500 gp of value - immediately putting a character as high as level 12 above his warning cut-off and into the condition for mandatory ooc wealth reduction.
Now, all things considered, I think it is clear what was aimed to do, and I think well achieved, with the pricing conditions for this kind of reward. It is something that can only be applied in moderation and special cases, and in these cases, it constitutes a noticable trade-off in other available means of character development through wealth rewards. However, it can be undoubtedly the special great something to tie up a long and meaningful storyline or plot arc
.For procedure, this kind of reward needs to be documented in the respective player-advancement thread, as quite rightfully, it's hard for DMs to check for this kind of stuff - and noone expects them to waste their time hunting for the possibility of this. I am quite proud of the fact that we imply trustworthiness of players, and that something different only gets assumed if there is a reason to believe so - which would explain why this slipped detection for so long, and why it may appear important to make sure players are held to the standard of trust DMs are led to expect.
We also toyed around with the possibility of a no-drop stat-boosting item, but let that slip as it seemed too clumsy in the end.
Now, I hope this was informative to you and helps you to understand a bit about the problem at hand, and takes away room for speculation of how grave, or not grave, the discrepancy here was.
Cheers,
not knowing the full local situation at the time IC) i chose to take STAT damage. i was planning on retirement at the time prior to leaving california and the means of her demise and raising gave me the means to have a IC reason to retire. from a base 10, her STR was dropped to 7, her DEX dropped from 16 to 14. hey, not everybody gets lucky on a rez and keeps all thier fingers or in my requested case, phyiscal disability.
