Dear Uni-mind,

Recently I came up with an idea and I wanted to bounce it off of you; I'm calling it "sub-attributes".
I'm thinking of a stat to represent characters' capabilities in an area that makes up an Attribute. For example, an old west gunslinger or video gamer might have quick reflexes, but would only have Good Agility if we took the classic definition. A better "on the page" description would be a sub-category of the Attribute (sub-Attribute). The sub attribute would have its own rank, but not tally into Secondary Attributes (Health and Karma). Talents would still
Some examples might be:
Agility:
(Sub-Attribute) Reflexes
(Sub-Attribute) Marksmanship
Intuition:
(Sub-Attribute) Empathy: ability to read people's emotions and detect lies
Psyche:
(Sub-Attribute) Magic: Magical ability
(Sub-Attribute) Willpower

What are your thoughts?

AD&D tried this back in their 2nd Edition and it never really took off. For Marvel, I think the single biggest obstacle is that it would require evaluating all of the existing character stats and deciding how they should re-statted... a fairly large undertaking which I would be completely uninterested in.

Quote
Adrian
Dear Uni-mind,

Recently I came up with an idea and I wanted to bounce it off of you; I'm calling it "sub-attributes".
I'm thinking of a stat to represent characters' capabilities in an area that makes up an Attribute. For example, an old west gunslinger or video gamer might have quick reflexes, but would only have Good Agility if we took the classic definition. A better "on the page" description would be a sub-category of the Attribute (sub-Attribute). The sub attribute would have its own rank, but not tally into Secondary Attributes (Health and Karma). Talents would still
Some examples might be:
Agility:
(Sub-Attribute) Reflexes
(Sub-Attribute) Marksmanship
Intuition:
(Sub-Attribute) Empathy: ability to read people's emotions and detect lies
Psyche:
(Sub-Attribute) Magic: Magical ability
(Sub-Attribute) Willpower

What are your thoughts?

The sub-attributes are unnecessary because of the existence of Talents to enhance task-specific feat rolls. The old West gunslinger may have Good agility, but he would also presumably have Guns as a talent, which would increase his Agility whenever he fired one. Perhaps he has Weapon Specialist - 6 shooter, so now has a +2 CS to his Agility and an extra 1 point initiative modifier. What you're trying to accomplish with the sub-attributes is already in the system.