There’s many cases where it would be useful to take a set of Stats, and always use the highest or lowest Stat for rolls or calculations.

Let’s take a situation where we have a character with the following Stats: Dexterity Dex, Wits Wits, and Perception Perc, and that we want to compare these Stats and choose the highest or lowest in any given scenario.

Here’s a couple situations, and their best solution.

Compare Dexterity, Wits, and Perception, then use highest/lowest Stat

In our hypothetical system, turn order is decided by an initiative score, which is calculated by taking the highest score out of the three Stats. Instead of writing initiative actions for all three stats, we can use an initiative score with the following value:

max(Dex, Wits, Perc)

This will always take the highest of the three and use that score as it’s value.

Let’s take this same system, and say that our character is suffering a debuff. This debuff causes all calculations using Dex, Wits, and Perc to use the lowest of the three. In this case, we would write min(Dex, Wits, Perc) which does the opposite.

Compare Dexterity and Wits, while using opposing modifiers

Lets say we’ve got a system that when the character is playing cards, they can either use Dexterity Dex or Wits Wits to play. If using Dexterity Dex to play cards from their sleeve, the player receives a -1 modifier as they are relying on the cards palmed being right for the situation. If they are using Wits Wits to memorize cards, they recieve a +1 modifier as they are more likely to play well and make proper bets.

How would we write this “Playing Cards” Stat? Like so:

Dex > Wits ? Dex - 1 : Wits + 1

The literal translation here is “Is Dex higher than Wits? If so, use Dex - 1, otherwise use Wits + 1.

If we wanted to use the lowest, we would simply switch the sign;

Dex < Wits ? Dex - 1 : Wits + 1

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