Sources of Power

As part of my job - I'm a sociologist - I was thinking about 'power' the other day... and I filed a way a few thoughts as to how this relates to roleplaying games. 

What are those numbers on the character sheet? They are the numbers that determine you PCs capacity to interact with the game world. What is power? Thinking about it (very!) simply, it is the capacity to bring your will to bear on the world. So what a character sheet is, mechanically, is a inventory of the sources of power available to a PC. It really can be that simple. And once you start thinking like that, the sources of power to which you assign a numerical value (or whatever, depending on the resolution system/s of your game) can be, well, *anything*. Give a score to one PC in Strength to exert power in the game world. Give another PC a score in Persuasion, and give a third PC a score in Patriotism, and the way in which those PCs are able to shape the game world, solve problems, approach the situations that you, as a GM place in front of them changes in dramatic and interesting ways.

Which is to say I'm finally working out what many other people have long before me, and is attracting me to games such as PDQ, Heroquest, and Fate (and FUDGE, which has long imagined that different PCs will have different stat lines), and thinking also about the ways in which I can bring this to bear on more 'traditional' games. 'Light' games, naturally - these thoughts are very closely related to the fact that I can't see myself having the time and energy to run 'crunchy' games any time soon.