I remember trying Arcanum out sometime last decade, can't quite recall why I didn't finish it. Anyway, planning a new playthrough but I'm not sure I quite get stat caps. Looked around a bit and here's what I understand so far: 1)Racial bonuses let you go over 20 2)Racial penalties keep you under 20 3)Background bonuses can make up for a racial penalty up to 20. Eg. sickly half-ogre can get IN 20. But they won't let you go further over 20 than a racial bonus allows. 4)Background penalties won't prevent you from reaching the racial cap. It will just cost more CP. Now for my question: how do bonuses from items/blessings/spells work into this? Are they similar to background bonuses that they can boost racially inhibited stats, but only up to 20? Or will my tech-ogre's machined plate boost his ST to 27? As you can probably tell I'm thinking of a Master playthrough with a couple of superm... err half-ogre buddies clad in powera... machined plate and electrified tophats wielding flaming axes. Should be fun.
Hmm, yeah, this is quite weird. Looks like those half-ogres can always pump their ST to 24, but other stats can indeed have lower caps because of backgrounds. Guess I should've tested more than one stat before drawing conclusions. Thanks for the replies. I heard magic is OP in this game so I was almost certain I was missing out on ST&DX 40 by not going the melee-with-magic-buffs route, but I figure I can do that in plenty of other games. Although I guess a tempusfugited posse would still be more powerful than what I'm going for, oh well.