PDA

View Full Version : How do you decide what attributes to include in your rpg?



xBlackWolfx
2013-01-28, 09:14 AM
The attribute lists of rpgs obviously vary quite a bit. There appears to be no stead-fast rule as to what attributes should be included, minus the fact that most rpgs will at least have seperate attributes for physical and mental capabilities. Some fuse together strength and hit points/constitution/toughness/etc... Some have only a few attributes (like tristat's, which is essentially physical, mental, and supernatural if i'm not mistaken) while others have larger lists of more precise attributes (like 3rd editon mutants and masterminds, where the 'dexterity' attribute of D&D has been split into three seperate attributes, and its not uncommon for systems to have seperate attributes for manual dexterity and physical agility/speed). And some even have odd choices, I believe all of the marvel rpgs actually have combat as a main attribute, which is ironic considering that 99% of the rpgs out there are heavily combat focused yet few of them have combat skills as an attribute, most just seem to go with deriving it from the main attributes, and some just use skills instead. And dungeons and dragons actually has an attribute for social skills, and if that isnt wierd enough, WoD has three social attributes, along with three seperate mental attributes.

How do you decide what attributes to include? Like how do you decide if its necessary or not to have seperate attributes for stength and toughness? How do you decide wheather or not to have a seperate social attribute or just use an intellect attribute? I do sorta wonder why there's so many variations, particularly with mental attributes (seriously, WoD essentially has 6 while most games only have one to three).

Yora
2013-01-28, 09:45 AM
I started with AD&D, the six ability scores made sense, and I was never convinved by other systems about being a better solution.

Though Mouse Guard with only Will and Health is also an interesting idea for an entirely different approach to character stats.

nonsi
2013-01-28, 10:21 AM
Basically, ability scores represent one's inborn potential of accomplishing certain categories of endeavours.
Anyone who's done some RP have their own view of how those are supposed to be divided.

Splitting dexterity and agility/speed does seem intuitive.
Combat, otoh, is something one hons with practice, definitely not ones inborn potential of accomplishing certain categories of endeavours.

Social attributes are a bit tough.
One's appearance does have impact over one's ability to influence others to a certain degree, but I haven't yet seen it integrated into the rules in an elegant manner.


Usually, people are unhappy with things that revolve around Wis and Cha, because it seems like both are a kind of mishmash.
At current, I'd create 3 alternative attributes:
1. Willpower
2. Intuition
3. Persuasiveness (this one should also have an element of timing, but that's just handwaving on my part ATM)
That's as far as my gut feeling goes.
Balancing them out vs. one another and vs. the other attributes is a tough one.

xBlackWolfx
2013-01-28, 11:43 AM
I do agree, I've always thought dexterity and agility should be seperate, since obviously being able to do fiddley stuff with your hands is completely unrelated to your reaction time and your running speed.

And in the case of M&M3, they split dexterity into three attributes bc it was overpowered, so they divided all its characteristics among three attributes. An interesting note btw, even there one of them is specifically called 'fighting', in reality all three are involved in combat in some way, fighting only determines melee combat abilities (both for defense and offense, though defense and offense for ranged attacks is split between dexterity and agility). I don't think it makes any realistic sense either, though it does make practical sense since dexterity attributes do tend to be overpowered.

One thing I have been fiddling around with is a game where attributes and skills arent linked, or in some cases aren't even differentiated between. One game I was working on years ago only differentiated between mandatory abilities, and optional abilities. For example, not everyone knows how to survive in the wilderness, but all people can lift up objects, throw things, hit people, thus all characters must have a strength attribute. Though to be honest the mandatory/optional thing was sorta silly since all scores defaulted to +0, meaning if you wanted to use an ability you didnt have (like sneaking around), you would just roll the dice and read them as is. Strength worked the same way, minus the fact that having a strength of +0 just meant you were average, unlike most abilties where having +0 meant you were untrained and inept. It was interesting, but the problem was determining what all the abilities should be. For instance, should there be one ability for combat, or different abilities for different weapon categories? Also, there was no way to be smart in the game, you could be highly knowledgable about specific subjects, but when it came to abilities you had no score in, wheather you were dumb as a rock or the smartest person on earth meant nothing. An idiot was just as likely to succeed at the task as a genius. Similarly, being good at one skill that implied speed and agility didnt mean you were any better at any of the other skills relying on speed and agility.

I noticed however that mouseguard seems to take a similar approach, since characters seem to only have two attributes, and a list of skills which dont appear to be tied to either of the two attributes. Perhaps my idea could infact work afterall...

A similar idea i've been considering is to have attributes and skills, but to have none of them tie in to eachother (there is no dexterity+attack bonus rolls), with the only exception being intellect which determines how many skill points you get, and sometimes how high you can set your skills.

But that all creates a problem, since it means all my attributes have to be designed so they dont affect the skills in anyway,with some of them, like strength and toughness, that's easy, but not so with things like dexterity/agility.

Back when I was on rpgnet, a lot of the people on there believed that the whole attribute-skill division was something that was completely unnecessary and infact if you went with this model they assumed you were unimaginative and infact was basing your game mostly off of D&D (to them, any game that had attributes and skills was a rip-off of D&D's system), though to be honest I'm thinking they were just trolls trying to harrass people (that site is swarming with trolls, and its not much of a secret either, they even have a specific forum for the trolls).

Glimbur
2013-01-28, 05:29 PM
You should have as many attributes as it takes to differentiate people in the areas you want to make distinct. This is also related to whether or not you have skills, and in what form. In my mind, attributes are innate and change slowly if at all over the character's life and skills can be added much more easily.

For example, Wuthering Heights (http://www.unseelie.org/rpg/wh/index.html) has Rage, Despair, and Oldness. This works well for that system because you are not in total control of your character; in novels the system is based on people often know the right thing to do but cannot bring themselves to do it. Similarly, you have to make two Rage checks to push the man who murdered your family off of a tower, while in, say, D&D the question is not 'are you mentally able to kill a man?' but instead 'how is your bull rush check?'

RISUS (http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/risus.htm) lets you define your own attributes/skills. Want to be an excellent lion tamer? Put 3 or 4 dice in Lion Tamer. Done.

GURPS has four attributes: Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Health. They purport to be a generic system which can be used for a wide variety of things, so these attributes should be targeted to this goal. They also have an extensive skill system. The combination means you can have a naturally agile person who has taken a college class on fencing compete with a person of normal 'natural' ability who has practiced extensively; and the match can be even.

The game design advice I usually give (after 'read a bunch of systems. play a bunch of systems') is to ask what you want your system to model, and target that. A game about hamsters trying to escape their cage will need very different attributes (furryness, cheek capacity, tooth sharpness, cunning) than a game about space pirates (ferocity, ship capacity, sword sharpness, cunning).

xBlackWolfx
2013-01-29, 02:29 PM
I tried to make a game once where characters actually did have stats for their personality traits (though they also had stats for their physical abilities just like in more traditional rpgs). It was surprisingly easy, but the only problem is it basically put the characters on auto-pilot, where pretty much everything they did was based on a dice roll. Its not much of a role-playing game when you have no control over what your characters do, infact in such a game the GM would have more control over your character's actions than you do.

I do however like the idea of a character's intelligence playing into the results of the game in some way. I find it a bit silly that although characters can have a high intelligence score, in reality everything he does will only be as intelligent as the player. Meaning that most wizards in D&D aren't actually as clever as their intelligence score would imply. Sadly its hard to implement this, beyond just giving them a flat bonus to everything they do. Though now that I think of it, you could use the intelligence attribute of a character to alter the chances of a critical success or failure, that could simulate a character's intelligence rather well I think.

And besides, that method wouldn't work too well in some games. The system I am currently working on is meant for a supers game, and it would obviously be a bit stupid if all the characters only had two attributes: good and evil.

Thorodin
2015-01-16, 07:32 AM
Old post but.....

I have had problems that some games try to boil characters down to as few attributes as they can. 3 and even 4 attributes seems to really not reflect things accurately. Even D&D being the most well known, Dexterity is rather crazy in that it covers manual dexterity along with Agility. So a master watch maker is somehow a ninja when it comes to dodging arrows? Then there's Wisdom which was somehow not only actual Wisdom, a mental thinking ability somewhat different from Intelligence, but was also their Willpower (strength of mental will) and their senses. Because anyone who can see well also has a strong will and ability to resist enchantments.

Someone once answered me that Feats and skills separate those differences. Well original D&D didn't have Feats and Skills, but even using them it seems odd to have to take feats to differentiate a watchmakers abilities from a ninjas. Why not just have one attribute, say Strength and then just use Feats and skills to show differences in other attributes? See that doesn't make sense so why should you need Feats to separate fine manual motor skills from dodging bullets and swinging from a chandelier? Or to separate the difference between having strong mental willpower with the ability to see and hear well?

Amechra
2015-01-16, 11:49 AM
Naw, it makes total sense to do that. "Strength" reflects how good you are at stuff in general (you might call that your Level), and Feats decide what you are good at in the specific.

D&D really isn't the only game you want to be looking at, though (good thing that doesn't seem to be what you are doing!)

You see, D&D is mostly based on old, old game design; 3.x is 14 years old, and the industry has moved on from there.

There are systems without what you would traditionally call "attributes" (Risus, Wushu, and Cthulhu Dark are some of my favorite examples), there are those that divide them up in thematic ways (L5R has Fire, Air, Water, Earth, and Void as Attributes, with two sub-attributes for all of them except Void.)

D&D does not have a "social" attribute (Charisma doesn't just cover social stuff; it also covers strength of personality), while the World of Darkness system is heavily based around political and social gameplay, so having social attributes makes sense (and makes for a nice 3x3 grid.)

So to answer the OPs question: as many as you need, and the ones you need. The consensus seems to be that 3 to 9 is the "ideal" range, with the "best" spread being 4~6 (depending on the system.)

Jormengand
2015-01-16, 12:33 PM
My game has four physical and four mental: Might (Strength), Agility (Dexterity), Dexterity (Dexterity), and Vigour (Constitution); Intellect (Intelligence), Awareness (Wisdom), Will (Wisdom), and Personality (Charisma).

Other stats that people don't have personally include God (for worlds), Technology (For communities), Monster (For random encounter gen), Toxicity (Rolled by poison) and a few others, which are rolled very much like any other stat. Then again, God and Technology don't come into play very often.

Deepbluediver
2015-01-16, 03:20 PM
How do you decide what attributes to include? Like how do you decide if its necessary or not to have seperate attributes for stength and toughness? How do you decide wheather or not to have a seperate social attribute or just use an intellect attribute? I do sorta wonder why there's so many variations, particularly with mental attributes (seriously, WoD essentially has 6 while most games only have one to three).
The webcomic Leftover Soup actually has two of it's characters discuss this at one point, and the advice given was basically: decide what story you want to tell, and then work around that.

In the story, the characters where trying to create a fast-paced, action-based game, and so they dumped all the skill-checks and dumped it into one category.

If you want your players to roleplay more, then stats can probably be a little simpler. If you want them to be making lots of dice-rolls, then you probably want a more detailed definition of what everything works back to.
Try to figure out what the focus of your combat-system will be. If it's melee, focus more on physical stats. If magic, decide how you want the mental/spiritual stuff to work.
etc etc etc.



If you have some idea what you're going for, describe it and I can try to give you feedback about the kind of thing I'd like to see in response.

steelsmiter
2015-01-16, 09:53 PM
A game about hamsters trying to escape their cage will need very different attributes (furryness, cheek capacity, tooth sharpness, cunning) than a game about space pirates (ferocity, ship capacity, sword sharpness, cunning).
What about a game about Hamster Space Pirates?


decide what story you want to tell, and then work around that.

Yep. I'm doing a Fable game. I have Strength, Dex, and Will. They each have 3 subattributes. This design was in order to emulate the video games of the same name.

Octopusapult
2015-01-17, 12:37 AM
I'm using 9 attributes in the game I have in progress. Three categories (Physical, Mental, Spiritual) with three attributes each.

Physical attributes are Agility, Strength, and Endurance handling the common effects of those attributes. Agility depicting movement speed, turn order, Finesse class weapons. Strength handling carrying capacity and puissant weapons. Endurance handling health and resistances to disease and such. Nothing groundbreaking.

Mental attributes are Charisma, Perception, and Reason. Perception doing some obvious things like spotting / searching, but also handling precision weapons (firearms mainly.) Reason governs psionic abilities mostly but also handles item creation and repair (mage-tech is a big thing.) Most RPGs do Charisma wrong in my opinion, it seems like a "Roll to talk to NPC" kind of stat sometimes and I don't like that. So for me it keeps track of Minor Followers and the max level of a Cohort. Followers being minions of a sense, and Cohorts being named and leveled characters (of which you are limited to one.) So with a CHA of 7, you can have seven followers and a cohort at lv-7.

Spiritual attributes are Essence, Faith, and Wisdom. Essence covers the Arcane / Eldritch side of magic. Faith represents the Divine / Pact side of magic. Wisdom only covers the characters resistance to magic and how many spells they can cast.

Nine attributes seems like a lot to me, but I rather like them and I think I've balanced them well.

Truth is, the attributes don't make the game. You can run a game with no attributes, all narrative, and I have, and it was a lot of fun. So I think when considering what attributes to put in (or when considering how many, or what they do) it's all just a matter of preference. What the designer prefers, what seems to most fun and relevant to the setting for them.

Consider the difference between Oblivion and Skyrim. Oblivion (and previous games in TES series) feature a large number of both attributes and skills. But in Skyrim, all attributes were removed and skills are boiled down to simple perk trees. The developers felt attributes weren't necessary to make the game complete and enjoyable (if they succeeded or not is a different thread entirely.)

I'd like to use Dark Souls as another example of interesting attribute mechanics. The game features Vitality (health) Endurance (stamina), Attunement (spells per rest) Faith, Intelligence, Dexterity, and Strength which do their predictable things. Then there's Resistance which increases Physical, Fire, and Poison defense and is widely considered entirely useless in game. Humanity is an interesting "attribute" that changes as you play the game. You gain humanity in a number of ways and lose it by dying. Having more humanity can do a number of things like increasing item find luck, and dealing more damage with "Chaos" weapons.

aspekt
2015-01-19, 02:02 AM
I'm curious as to why you equated Agility to move speed and not Strength.


I'm using 9 attributes in the game I have in progress. Three categories (Physical, Mental, Spiritual) with three attributes each.

Physical attributes are Agility, Strength, and Endurance handling the common effects of those attributes. Agility depicting movement speed, turn order, Finesse class weapons. Strength handling carrying capacity and puissant weapons. Endurance handling health and resistances to disease and such. Nothing groundbreaking.

Mental attributes are Charisma, Perception, and Reason. Perception doing some obvious things like spotting / searching, but also handling precision weapons (firearms mainly.) Reason governs psionic abilities mostly but also handles item creation and repair (mage-tech is a big thing.) Most RPGs do Charisma wrong in my opinion, it seems like a "Roll to talk to NPC" kind of stat sometimes and I don't like that. So for me it keeps track of Minor Followers and the max level of a Cohort. Followers being minions of a sense, and Cohorts being named and leveled characters (of which you are limited to one.) So with a CHA of 7, you can have seven followers and a cohort at lv-7.

Spiritual attributes are Essence, Faith, and Wisdom. Essence covers the Arcane / Eldritch side of magic. Faith represents the Divine / Pact side of magic. Wisdom only covers the characters resistance to magic and how many spells they can cast.

Nine attributes seems like a lot to me, but I rather like them and I think I've balanced them well.

Truth is, the attributes don't make the game. You can run a game with no attributes, all narrative, and I have, and it was a lot of fun. So I think when considering what attributes to put in (or when considering how many, or what they do) it's all just a matter of preference. What the designer prefers, what seems to most fun and relevant to the setting for them.

Consider the difference between Oblivion and Skyrim. Oblivion (and previous games in TES series) feature a large number of both attributes and skills. But in Skyrim, all attributes were removed and skills are boiled down to simple perk trees. The developers felt attributes weren't necessary to make the game complete and enjoyable (if they succeeded or not is a different thread entirely.)

I'd like to use Dark Souls as another example of interesting attribute mechanics. The game features Vitality (health) Endurance (stamina), Attunement (spells per rest) Faith, Intelligence, Dexterity, and Strength which do their predictable things. Then there's Resistance which increases Physical, Fire, and Poison defense and is widely considered entirely useless in game. Humanity is an interesting "attribute" that changes as you play the game. You gain humanity in a number of ways and lose it by dying. Having more humanity can do a number of things like increasing item find luck, and dealing more damage with "Chaos" weapons.

Logosloki
2015-01-19, 03:25 AM
It would really depend on what I was making. However most of the times I have thought and sketched attributes I tend to go with a skill/feats system. One of the reasons I like 5th so much is that it is very similar to the sort of things I would build: Broad category skills, Game defining feats, Backgrounds to give a base for defining your character in role and roll play.

Octopusapult
2015-01-19, 04:50 AM
I'm curious as to why you equated Agility to move speed and not Strength.

Why not? I don't see how strength might govern movement speed over agility.


It would really depend on what I was making. However most of the times I have thought and sketched attributes I tend to go with a skill/feats system. One of the reasons I like 5th so much is that it is very similar to the sort of things I would build: Broad category skills, Game defining feats, Backgrounds to give a base for defining your character in role and roll play.

Agreed about most things. Backgrounds I can live without, but broad category skills are good.

aspekt
2015-01-19, 06:08 PM
Why not? I don't see how strength might govern movement speed over agility.



Agreed about most things. Backgrounds I can live without, but broad category skills are good.

It wasn't a criticism, to be clear, I was just curious.

Octopusapult
2015-01-19, 06:46 PM
It wasn't a criticism, to be clear, I was just curious.

I was curious as well why you thought Strength would be more indicative of movement speed than Agility. It's hard to imply tone through text, but I honestly want to know why you think Strength might be better, I like getting alternative opinions on things and considering all options. To me though, Agility represents a full-body swiftness (where Perception might cover hand-eye coordination.) so the only time I can imagine where Agility might not be the best factor in determining movement speed is when the character is weighed down by armor or something.

Occidental
2015-01-20, 02:06 AM
To me though, Agility represents a full-body swiftness (where Perception might cover hand-eye coordination.) so the only time I can imagine where Agility might not be the best factor in determining movement speed is when the character is weighed down by armor or something.


Your example of wearing heavy armor requiring more strength to run faster is correct, but even without wearing armor, you still have to push your body-weight. Direct footspeed over land is dependent on how much force your leg muscles can exert to move you across terrain. Thus, Strength. At least, that's what I was thinking.

I'm not saying tying it to Agility is wrong, it depends on what Strength and Agility mean in your system. In the context of homebrew systems, the one I am building in my spare time bases Strength on the total force a muscle can exert, while Agility is based partially on mental and physical reaction time (How fast you can think, and how fast your spinal reflexes are). So in my system, Strength would increase running speed, and Agility wouldn't really play a part. Your system might not be anywhere near as physical, and "Agility" could be a more general "Speed" category, in which case it would make sense to have running speed rolled into it.

aspekt
2015-01-20, 06:09 PM
Your example of wearing heavy armor requiring more strength to run faster is correct, but even without wearing armor, you still have to push your body-weight. Direct footspeed over land is dependent on how much force your leg muscles can exert to move you across terrain. Thus, Strength. At least, that's what I was thinking.

I'm not saying tying it to Agility is wrong, it depends on what Strength and Agility mean in your system. In the context of homebrew systems, the one I am building in my spare time bases Strength on the total force a muscle can exert, while Agility is based partially on mental and physical reaction time (How fast you can think, and how fast your spinal reflexes are). So in my system, Strength would increase running speed, and Agility wouldn't really play a part. Your system might not be anywhere near as physical, and "Agility" could be a more general "Speed" category, in which case it would make sense to have running speed rolled into it.

Thank you for being clearer than I could be =)

I have seen Speed related to Agil/Dex type scores a few times and always wondered if a Str based score would work or if it would weight Str too heavily.

xBlackWolfx
2015-01-20, 09:24 PM
I find it odd everyone decided to revive a thread I posted 2 years ago, but w/e.


The webcomic Leftover Soup actually has two of it's characters discuss this at one point, and the advice given was basically: decide what story you want to tell, and then work around that.

In the story, the characters where trying to create a fast-paced, action-based game, and so they dumped all the skill-checks and dumped it into one category.

If you want your players to roleplay more, then stats can probably be a little simpler. If you want them to be making lots of dice-rolls, then you probably want a more detailed definition of what everything works back to.
Try to figure out what the focus of your combat-system will be. If it's melee, focus more on physical stats. If magic, decide how you want the mental/spiritual stuff to work.
etc etc etc.



If you have some idea what you're going for, describe it and I can try to give you feedback about the kind of thing I'd like to see in response.

I recently decided to toss together a quicky rpg just so I could say I have actually accomplished something after all these years. Its not much, and its not really complete since I haven't decided how everything should be priced, nor have I made much for a monster list, and I haven't even started on spells (still kinda debating how arcane magic should work).

I'll copy-paste the section I came up with on attributes. There are no skills, so these traits (along with the secondary attributes derived from them) are all that really define a character besides abilities granted from their class.

----------------

Stength (STR): Determines how much weight you can carry and what kind of equipment you can use. Heavier equipment requires higher strength values.
Toughness (TGH): Determines durability. From this, stamina and health are derived.
Speed (SPD): How fast your character moves. Determines initiative, attack, and defense values. Note that attack and defense are also affected by equipment and class.
Intelligence (INT): Your character's intellect, obviously. It is used primarily for skill checks, though what kind of 'skills' a character can make is dependent on their class. No skills have any affect on combat.
Focus (FOC): Willpower and precision. Determines accuracy of ranged attacks in place of speed. Also determines alertness, for such things as spotting ambushes and traps.
Charisma (CHA): Your character's ability to influence others, also helps to get better prices when buying or selling goods.
Magic (MAG): Determines what kinds of spells are available to the character and how effective they are.
SECONDARY ATTRIBUTES
Stamina: Hit points, equal to toughness+level.
Health: Resistence to disease and poisons, equal to toughness.
Attack: How effective you are at attacking, equal to speed plus half your level plus any modifiers from weapons or shields. If your character uses ranged weapons, the value is instead based off of focus.
Defense: How effective you are at defending yourself from enemy attacks, equal to speed plus half your level plus any modifiers from armor and shields. Weapons also give a defense bonus, but only against other melee weapons.
Willpower: Determines your character's mental fortitude to things like charms, horror, and torture. Equal to focus plus half your level.
Alertness: How aware you are of your surroundings. Equal to focus plus half your level.
Many races get free bonuses to these, though few get bonuses to attack and defense.
Attributes are determined primarily by race and class.
---------------

I've ignored this game for a month or two now though, partially because of school, so I haven't actually gotten around to play-testing it.

Another game I've been wanting to make is a super-hero themed game. I haven't even started on that yet, but what I would like is for characters to be be defined primarily what makes them different from everyone else. For example, all 'attributes' in the game default to +0, meaning that if you haven't invested points in it, you can just roll the die without bothering with modifiers. Haven't decided how skills and attributes work though. I"m tempted to make them essentially the same thing, with various knowledge skills simply be minor attributes you can invest in. I've though about making intelligence do little more than determine how many skill points you get, but that seems kinda silly since if it just gives you points for skills, then why do players have to invest in it? Why not just have them put those points directly into the skills?

Been plagued by indecision for years. And I'm still not really any closer to having an rpg to my liking. I've kinda given up on it since its been so long and I still haven't been able to make up my mind. I did try to play BASH UE with my sister, and she was interested, but I don't think she ever managed to read the book yet, given that she has a job and is going to an expensive college in another city right now.

Octopusapult
2015-01-20, 10:53 PM
Your example of wearing heavy armor requiring more strength to run faster is correct, but even without wearing armor, you still have to push your body-weight. Direct footspeed over land is dependent on how much force your leg muscles can exert to move you across terrain. Thus, Strength. At least, that's what I was thinking.

I'm not saying tying it to Agility is wrong, it depends on what Strength and Agility mean in your system. In the context of homebrew systems, the one I am building in my spare time bases Strength on the total force a muscle can exert, while Agility is based partially on mental and physical reaction time (How fast you can think, and how fast your spinal reflexes are). So in my system, Strength would increase running speed, and Agility wouldn't really play a part. Your system might not be anywhere near as physical, and "Agility" could be a more general "Speed" category, in which case it would make sense to have running speed rolled into it.

Makes sense, I see how it could go either way. It could make for an interesting class ability to tie movement speed to Strength or to add half your STR score to movement speed to better optimize puissant build characters.


Thank you for being clearer than I could be =)

I have seen Speed related to Agil/Dex type scores a few times and always wondered if a Str based score would work or if it would weight Str too heavily.

Stacking too much use on STR is a part of why I don't want it to be default. As it stands STR could stand another buff of some kind for my game, it only determines Puissant weapons & Carrying Capacity at the moment where Agility determines Unarmored / Light armor DEF, Finesse weapons ATK and DMG, turn order, and movement speed.

My problem moving movement speed over to Strength is that I think it's more expected or commonplace of Agility to cover movement speed than Strength by default. I feel like people might wonder why Strength was over Agility in that regard.


I find it odd everyone decided to revive a thread I posted 2 years ago, but w/e.



I recently decided to toss together a quicky rpg just so I could say I have actually accomplished something after all these years. Its not much, and its not really complete since I haven't decided how everything should be priced, nor have I made much for a monster list, and I haven't even started on spells (still kinda debating how arcane magic should work).

I'll copy-paste the section I came up with on attributes. There are no skills, so these traits (along with the secondary attributes derived from them) are all that really define a character besides abilities granted from their class.

----------------

Stength (STR): Determines how much weight you can carry and what kind of equipment you can use. Heavier equipment requires higher strength values.
Toughness (TGH): Determines durability. From this, stamina and health are derived.
Speed (SPD): How fast your character moves. Determines initiative, attack, and defense values. Note that attack and defense are also affected by equipment and class.
Intelligence (INT): Your character's intellect, obviously. It is used primarily for skill checks, though what kind of 'skills' a character can make is dependent on their class. No skills have any affect on combat.
Focus (FOC): Willpower and precision. Determines accuracy of ranged attacks in place of speed. Also determines alertness, for such things as spotting ambushes and traps.
Charisma (CHA): Your character's ability to influence others, also helps to get better prices when buying or selling goods.
Magic (MAG): Determines what kinds of spells are available to the character and how effective they are.
SECONDARY ATTRIBUTES
Stamina: Hit points, equal to toughness+level.
Health: Resistence to disease and poisons, equal to toughness.
Attack: How effective you are at attacking, equal to speed plus half your level plus any modifiers from weapons or shields. If your character uses ranged weapons, the value is instead based off of focus.
Defense: How effective you are at defending yourself from enemy attacks, equal to speed plus half your level plus any modifiers from armor and shields. Weapons also give a defense bonus, but only against other melee weapons.
Willpower: Determines your character's mental fortitude to things like charms, horror, and torture. Equal to focus plus half your level.
Alertness: How aware you are of your surroundings. Equal to focus plus half your level.
Many races get free bonuses to these, though few get bonuses to attack and defense.
Attributes are determined primarily by race and class.
---------------

I've ignored this game for a month or two now though, partially because of school, so I haven't actually gotten around to play-testing it.

Another game I've been wanting to make is a super-hero themed game. I haven't even started on that yet, but what I would like is for characters to be be defined primarily what makes them different from everyone else. For example, all 'attributes' in the game default to +0, meaning that if you haven't invested points in it, you can just roll the die without bothering with modifiers. Haven't decided how skills and attributes work though. I"m tempted to make them essentially the same thing, with various knowledge skills simply be minor attributes you can invest in. I've though about making intelligence do little more than determine how many skill points you get, but that seems kinda silly since if it just gives you points for skills, then why do players have to invest in it? Why not just have them put those points directly into the skills?

Been plagued by indecision for years. And I'm still not really any closer to having an rpg to my liking. I've kinda given up on it since its been so long and I still haven't been able to make up my mind. I did try to play BASH UE with my sister, and she was interested, but I don't think she ever managed to read the book yet, given that she has a job and is going to an expensive college in another city right now.

I hadn't noticed the thread was so old until you said something, even though, looking back, the second comment mentions "old post." I must have missed it. XD

I've done similar "for the hell of it" RPGs. I challenged myself to build a comprehensive but simple game in under two hours. I think I didn't finish it in time, but somewhere around three and a half hours got it about right. I barely remember how to play that game, but I do remember it was fun.

Was your game meant to be a full campaign spanning set of rules or more like casual one-off kind of games? Because the attributes section implies there's a lot of deeper numbers involved. Generally the less specific the game is, the less rules you write, the more casual it is. Some people like that and are comfortable with GM Fiat while others like having clearly defined borders to work with.

I had toyed with an idea of giving out unique attributes to classes / races. There would be some default attributes and then secondary ones like physical characters using a Body attribute which determined damage resistance or health recovery while stealth characters had Focus to improve their sneak attack damage. The idea never left a conceptual stage, but it's something I always wanted to either do or see done correctly.

xBlackWolfx
2015-01-20, 11:51 PM
When I was writing that, my design goal was 'create something quickly that could work, and that I could expand upon later if I liked it enough'. So yeah, I wasn't really thinking of going that far with this, but I wanted it to still be an option. Like I said, I haven't ever actually played this thing.

Perhaps I should finish the thing and try it out, afterall, part of the reason I wrote it was to give me something to play around with, to see what worked and what didn't. I'm not too fond of the dice mechanic. Its a roll-under system, like GURPS, but using a d20, not totality sure how damage works yet but I was leaning towards just flat X damage, since the dice rolling might be a bit much as it is since both the attacker and defender roll. And another note: I haven't really though much about non-combat situations, guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

aspekt
2015-01-21, 02:16 AM
Hadn't noticed the age either. It's still a valuable topic for homebrew even years later.

NichG
2015-01-21, 04:07 AM
I don't think its that strange that the most combat-heavy RPGs don't have a 'Combat' stat - it makes sense that if you want the system to focus on something in particular, that's where you provide the most detail.

Anyhow, as far as what attributes to include, I think it comes down to 'why do you have attributes in the first place?'. Then you can figure out which you should include based on what you're trying to make them do. Here's a few reasons:

- You want to highlight some concept and promote its importance by tying it to specific mechanics.

Examples of this are things like the Humanity stat in Vampire. Here, by making an abstract concept into a stat, you're saying that 'in this game, this concept will be important'. You're also giving the players a way to deal concretely with something that, in the abstract would be difficult to agree on or handle (e.g. imagine asking a group of people 'between these two characters, who behaves more humanely?' without giving more details than that).

- There is some practical quantitative difference and you want to make it more abstract or general.

For example, you could have a mechanic such as 'A character can move a certain number of meters each round'. That naturally asks the question 'how many meters can each character move?'. You can make it constant (all characters can move 10 meters), but if you want to exploit this to create some kind of strategic or tactical considerations, you need a way for it to vary.

So then your choices are 'each character has a Movement Rate statistic' - e.g. a very fine-grained piece of information with no broader implications - or 'each character has some attribute, and Movement Rate is derived from it'. When you go to an attribute, you can associate the concrete thing (Movement Rate) with an abstract, general idea (Speed).

- You want to create patterns that structure the space of possible characters in interesting ways.

For example, lets say you have a rule 'a character's stats must add up to 10'. If the maximum value of a stat is 8, then this means that no one will have two 8's. If you're the best at one attribute, you won't be the best at another. Another kind of pattern relates to the previous point - if you tie multiple concrete derived things to the same attribute, you're generating correlations. For instance, if Movement Rate and Initiative are both tied to the Speed attribute, then you're saying that all people with high movement rates also have good initiatives (barring special quirks or abilities).

This is also related to the point about giving ways for characters to distinguish themselves from eachother.

- You want to create mechanical hooks for later

If I have an attribute, 'Constitution' for example, then that means I can also design mechanics which raise it, lower it, use it to determine their effect, etc. This means that I can e.g. design a wider array of items, spells, modifiers, etc later on, and in principle make the system mechanically richer and more interconnected (so long as the attributes themselves are meaningful, that is!).

- You're trying to establish mood

In 7th Sea, there's a stat called 'Panache'. Instead of 'Intelligence' you have 'Wits'. This helps to create the sort of swashbuckling feel that the system is going for.

Though personally I think that's often a design mistake, this can also be used to create a feeling of 'realism'. When things have a gazillion stats, people tend to have at least an initial impression that the system is more 'realistic' (because ostensibly you're modelling more details of reality, though of course in practice that's more places to get things wrong as well). I find it hard to give this particular usage a fair shake, but 'realism' is one of the reasons people make systems with lots of stats, and there are many people who do enjoy that.

xBlackWolfx
2015-01-21, 10:02 PM
I don't think its that strange that the most combat-heavy RPGs don't have a 'Combat' stat - it makes sense that if you want the system to focus on something in particular, that's where you provide the most detail.

Anyhow, as far as what attributes to include, I think it comes down to 'why do you have attributes in the first place?'. Then you can figure out which you should include based on what you're trying to make them do. Here's a few reasons:

- You want to highlight some concept and promote its importance by tying it to specific mechanics.

Examples of this are things like the Humanity stat in Vampire. Here, by making an abstract concept into a stat, you're saying that 'in this game, this concept will be important'. You're also giving the players a way to deal concretely with something that, in the abstract would be difficult to agree on or handle (e.g. imagine asking a group of people 'between these two characters, who behaves more humanely?' without giving more details than that).

- There is some practical quantitative difference and you want to make it more abstract or general.

For example, you could have a mechanic such as 'A character can move a certain number of meters each round'. That naturally asks the question 'how many meters can each character move?'. You can make it constant (all characters can move 10 meters), but if you want to exploit this to create some kind of strategic or tactical considerations, you need a way for it to vary.

So then your choices are 'each character has a Movement Rate statistic' - e.g. a very fine-grained piece of information with no broader implications - or 'each character has some attribute, and Movement Rate is derived from it'. When you go to an attribute, you can associate the concrete thing (Movement Rate) with an abstract, general idea (Speed).

- You want to create patterns that structure the space of possible characters in interesting ways.

For example, lets say you have a rule 'a character's stats must add up to 10'. If the maximum value of a stat is 8, then this means that no one will have two 8's. If you're the best at one attribute, you won't be the best at another. Another kind of pattern relates to the previous point - if you tie multiple concrete derived things to the same attribute, you're generating correlations. For instance, if Movement Rate and Initiative are both tied to the Speed attribute, then you're saying that all people with high movement rates also have good initiatives (barring special quirks or abilities).

This is also related to the point about giving ways for characters to distinguish themselves from eachother.

- You want to create mechanical hooks for later

If I have an attribute, 'Constitution' for example, then that means I can also design mechanics which raise it, lower it, use it to determine their effect, etc. This means that I can e.g. design a wider array of items, spells, modifiers, etc later on, and in principle make the system mechanically richer and more interconnected (so long as the attributes themselves are meaningful, that is!).

- You're trying to establish mood

In 7th Sea, there's a stat called 'Panache'. Instead of 'Intelligence' you have 'Wits'. This helps to create the sort of swashbuckling feel that the system is going for.

Though personally I think that's often a design mistake, this can also be used to create a feeling of 'realism'. When things have a gazillion stats, people tend to have at least an initial impression that the system is more 'realistic' (because ostensibly you're modelling more details of reality, though of course in practice that's more places to get things wrong as well). I find it hard to give this particular usage a fair shake, but 'realism' is one of the reasons people make systems with lots of stats, and there are many people who do enjoy that.

This should be in a sticky! Seriously!

Octopusapult
2015-01-21, 10:20 PM
snipped.

It's hard to get more comprehensive on the subject than this. Aside from some unique examples, everything is spot on here.

I'd add that, when writing, you never have to think about it this deep. You can go one step at a time thinking about what attributes will be most important based on what you expect the characters to do. If you expect a lot of melee fighting, decide how diverse that fighting should be. If it's just a matter of contested Combat rolls then you only need a Combat attribute. If you want it to be speedy types and strength types, add STR and DEX/AGI/SPD attributes. If you want it to be several different types of martial arts techniques that work well against some types of techniques but poorly against others you may want then to be tied to several attributes like Focus, Will, Grappling, Striking, Parrying, etc. Same with magic, but magic can be split just about any way you want. Arcane, Divine, Pact, Psionic, Blood Magic, Ritual Magic, Pyromancies, Spirit Magic, Enchanting, Alchemy, the list can almost literally go on forever, OR you can just have Wisdom / Intelligence. Or even just a Magic stat. Just keep in mind how you want play to go, what attributes will best define a character in your world, and how much rolling / paperwork do you want the players to do?

What I'm saying is, you can plan everything down to a T, or take it one step at a time. There's no wrong way to make something you want to make. Most games are creations specific to the creator and the process through which it comes about is always going to be different. Certain people value certain rules, mechanics, and other stuff of that nature and honestly that diversity is what makes creation so great.

/babbling rant. XD