Opinions about Stats (Skills, Relationships and Personality)

Game Development Writing and Content
21

I’m… not a big fan of stats in general, honestly. They stress me out when playing a game so I do my best to not pay attention to them and just stick to what I think the character I’m playing at would do. But I hardly ever think that someone can be defined by one or two particular skills and, as a result, I end up failing a lot of stat checks because the one that goes with my character’s highest attribute… isn’t the one I would think that character to pick.

Take charisma- I often go for charisma as a sorta “main” stat when I’m paying attention to stats because I often find that the “strength” paths consist of solving most of your problems with a good fist to the jaw… Which, okay, that can work in some situations but most of the characters I play as would rather talk it out than duke it out. But, that being said, I also find charisma a tough path to follow because a lot of the time it ends up in “seduce everyone” which, no, that’s really not what I want to do right now. Some might but… I was thinking more along the lines of just talking to them and not trying to flirt with them. So, okay, I go with intelligence then… and now I’m a cold, clinical robot because all I ever do is analyze the situation and nothing else.

This can severely limit the possibility for well-rounded, developed MCs with multiple skillsets and disadvantages. And, sometimes, it just makes me scratch my head. You’re giving me a sci-fi soldier character but my gun skill is low so I fail when trying to shoot at a target- if I can’t shoot at a simple target in training then why am I a soldier? It makes no sense for the context!

So, as a result, I much prefer finding ways around as many stats as I can. I prefer consequences for previous actions to affect whether or not a character will believe your lies, not a charisma stat. I prefer whether or not the MC has stated that they’ve had experience in the military to an ‘aim’ or ‘fitness’ stat. This cause-and-consequence is just one way to work out a game with little-to-no-stats, and I find there are plenty others as well. I’ve tried doing miniature games just to experiment with ways to eliminate relationship stats (using favors and debts instead), personality stats (using one variable for the way a character thinks, one for the way they talk, and one for how they see the world), stat checks in combat (using visual clues and area in a more of a logic-puzzle-style), and other such stats. Mostly just as experiments but some of which end up bleeding into future projects.

That being said, stats do have their uses. I think they can serve very well when it comes to changing the way the MC reacts to certain things or views certain actions. I think that they can be used very effectively… but more often than not, I tend to avoid them as much as possible.

But maybe I’m just weird.

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22

With Paradigm City, I did some things with relationship stats. Typically, they were checked when you wanted to persuade a character or when a character was going to offer you something (say, a promotion).

However, the stats could also be bypassed by making certain choices in the story. If you wanted someone to help you out, he could do it because he likes you and you see eye to eye (high relationship stat) or because you’ve helped him with specific things in the past.

I like including relationship bars because I simply like seeing things go up and down, but I don’t think stats should necessarily be the sole arbiter when it comes to character things.

Choice of Robots is maybe my idol of having stats working in the gameplay and choice-based narrative. Part of this may be because there were so many ways to affect them and have them be utilised and even failing based on a stat-check could be entertaining.

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23

I was just thinking after reading some of the replies… There seems to almost be like two main classifications among CoG type stories/games.

  1. Interactive Novel (with stats have little effect on the story)
  2. Interactive Story Game (with stats playing an important role)

Obviously writers need some stats to be able to adjust the story to the way the reader is playing.
But I do have a couple of small questions for the CoG writers out there… How do you determine which stats are important? And does it become cumbersome trying to include stat options?

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24

Well… to anwer this, I’ll quote my previous comment

So everyone will read it, and give it a like, and it will be the most liked comment :smiling_imp:

And about this

Believe me. Adding stats is a LABORIOUS task (at least for the good one) :laughing:

When you’re planning to add a stat, you have to consider 3 things:

  • How it will be used? What are its purpose?
  • How you balance it to prevent the “best choice” scenario? (Unless that’s what you want to achieve)
  • How often will you use the stat?

And that is just when you’re adding it.
You still have to find the creative ways to code it in and to blend it seamlessly to your story :thinking:

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25

Ideally, all stats should be important. There should never be a stat that is useless or markedly less important. This is, however, a problem for almost any RPG under the sun where something like Strength is always useful but something like Charisma can be ignored (and might actually be a disadvantage to put points into).

The amount of stats you have should be minimal. As many stats as you think the story will need and no more. I’ve seen some games use stats like HP and Money but they never actually come to anything (HP won’t hit zero or, if it does, nothing bad happens; money isn’t used enough to matter as a stat), so, why do those games have them?

It can become cumbersome adding options for stats. While every stat should be important, I don’t think every stat needs to show up and be useful at the same time in any given game. But there should never be a stat that, by the end of the game, the player thinks is useless or wasn’t relevant as much as some other ones.

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26

I think (personality) stats are quite useful for costumization if utilised right. Tracking them gives the author some information on what the player expects from their MC and can be used to add some flavor text to show that. It’s a way to recognize the choice or at least trends a player followed while playing… and it’s probably easier to do so as to track every single choice on it’s own.

So I guess generally I think positive about stats?

Well I also don’t like having to min-max stats to succeed in any way or to see the effects on my playthrough, especially with personality stats. Just…keep that mechanic away from the MC’s personality, I want to build the character like I want not like the game tells me to act because I choose the personality stat boost for this or that characteristic in the beginning. (One of my pet peeves by the way: games that have you choose the MC’s core personality but don’t use it to give the things MC says an own flavor fitting to it but instead hugely limit the choices the MC gets during dialoug…and not even hiding the choices that would came with the other “personalities”, so that I end up seriously pondering why this or that choice is even restricted/if I shouldn’t change the personality…and it also gives a wrong picture of how many choices actually exist effectively…I have only seen two games that do it, and they are otherwise really great, but this nags me still)

I can partly understand it with skill stats, but even with those I hate it if I have to max a stat to succeed and if not I always end up failing (especially if it’s already my highest stat?? What the hell do you expect from me?), but I sometimes wish that games would be more open to allow success by choosing an option, because it sounds like the most reasonable choice in the context of the game even if the stat of my MC are not 100 in favor for it. I mean…come on common sense is so rare depending on genre give the MC a few cookie points if they show it…

So bottom line is: I like them if they are utilised well enough, I guess.

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27

I think Sunless Sea did their “personality stats” well. Of course it’s not %-age of “insanity” or such, it’s more like using numbers.

Take example with a stat called Nightmare.
What they did with this stat is basically have your MC go to sleep on their cabin, and then there’s random chance you’ll gain Nightmare.

The higher your Nightmare, the more chance you’ll trigger bad random events (as well as more variaton). And I think having a high Nightmare itself is also a requirement to trigger one of important major plot :thinking:

28

I am a big fan of stats, to the points of stat-less CoG would be uninteresting for me, except if it was a 100% clue-finding game, like Evertree Inn. I “need” fun mechanics to enjoy a game, and for me, CoG are, well, games, before being, say, “litterature” (even though this distinction might be a useless one - there most be good narrative / story telling for a CoG to works…). What I am looking (and finding!) in CoG games is some sort of enactment of a 1-to-1 gaming experience with a good GM/ST from a table-top RPG/Story Game.

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29

The great thing about the stats/choices at the beginning of the game is that it allows players to customize their character, right? We need that because not everyone who plays the game is going to be the same as every other player. If you (any player) look at a bunch of games and always feel like it’s written for you, you’re the default character, then you probably wouldn’t see the value in adding more work to just make the character the same as it would have been anyway. But for someone who never sees themselves in a game… specification gives us a way to put on the character and have it fit. To feel comfortable in a game. To connect, and feel like we’re playing something that isn’t trying to keep us out. So, I love that CoG has this feature.

Maybe it would be easier to worry less about “upsetting an NPC” if you didn’t look at the game as only having one clear and definite end, and you’re either winning or losing. A good CoG game should have several possible endings, with many wins and losses. You’re not risking your only chance at happiness if you choose what feels right to you as a player. I say, give it a shot :slight_smile: Be you, and enjoy the game.

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30

I think stats can do a lot of good things for a Choice-of game.

For one thing, I think they can really help the player re-engage with the story after a hiatus, given the app context in which the player is experiencing it. The player is picking this thing up and putting it down, and a lot of the text is probably written to be ambivalent about what the player’s personality is like so far. Stats mean that somebody picking up the game after a couple of days can say “oh, yeah, this is the game where I was playing a mean capitalist, and I’m enemies with Dude Foo and romancing Lady Bar.” It’s instantaneous characterization of the most important character. I mean, plot summaries are great for this too, but they’re also a lot of work and still don’t necessarily capture the MC’s personality.

Second, people love personality tests. A player of your game probably also has at least once found out What Harry Potter House Are You or whatever, and that’s fun. We’re trying to be fun here, recall; or at least, recall that this is what the player thought they signed up for.

On the fun theme, a game is fundamentally a thing to play with, and stats are another thing to play with. Somebody out there had a good time figuring out how to drive each stat in Choice of Robots to ridiculous levels. Great! I bet it was fun. Others just ignored that aspect. That’s okay too. I like the game aspect of Choice of Games, and see it as a first-class citizen, rather than thinking that my creations will only be truly great once they’re basically novels. This is a new thing we’re doing here and for me the game aspects are a part of the craft, not a sideshow.

Speaking of that, as other posters have mentioned, the stats can really tell a player up front what your themes are. When a reader hits the Choice of Robots stats screen and sees a humanity bar that starts full, that’s intriguing. For Choice of Magics, my opposed personality stats are Optimism versus Pessimism, Empathy versus Calculation, and Humor versus Solemnity, and these play into some of the big themes of my “upbeat post-apocalyptic fantasy game.”

Finally, I think it’s good to give players something of a mental model of what the game is going to respond to, because otherwise they will be potentially disappointed by trying to do something impossible. I have a zillion variables in the background for each of my games, and it’s nice to surprise the player with callbacks, but it’s nice to offer the player a few promises: hang out with this character long enough, and something’s going to happen. Make choices along this dimension, and it will probably do something. Games are also artifacts, and to some extent need to advertise their affordances. Not always, because sometimes it’s nice to surprise people, but you want to have at least a few outstanding promises that encourage not just finishing, but encouraging people to try it a different way later. Choice of Robots, for example, offers a totally different penultimate chapter for each robot stat specialization, and Choice of Magics will do the same thing. Some people didn’t get the memo for Choice of Robots judging from some feedback, so I really intend to bang on this and be like OH WOW THIS CHAPTER IS ONLY HAPPENING BECAUSE YOU PICKED AUTOMATION MAGIC this time. Because replays with the expectation of something very different are more likely to be completed replays, and that means the player’s getting more enjoyment out of the game.

Randomtest is complaining at me, but I hope you found all that interesting.

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31

I see I am not the only one up in Boston hacking away at randomtest errors.

I agree, especially about how the stat page suggests theme, and various ways to play with the toy that the writer has provided. I think about this sort of thing a lot, especially when I am writing lengthy dialogue trees that don’t feel like they have obvious ways to give stat changes.

I have a little argument with myself that goes something like “no, the original dialogue for each path is the reward” and then the other side says “you have to make stat changes to make the conversation meaningful rather than cosmetic” and then I tell that second voice to go jump in a lake. Because if I find that I’m looking at some good prose and then say “I have to wedge some stat changes in here” the result ends up weird.

I’m also happy to hear you talk about the “promises” of a game without referencing achievements. A game as an artifact can signal (I think) many or most of its crannies without the blunt instrument of an achievement. It can get that work done narratively, and that’s far more interesting to me.

The one thing I’m chewing on most in your great post is the idea that one has to “bang on this” and wave the banner of reactivity so hard. CoR had the “Requires x Grace” thing near that special-chapter section, and that interesting and signaled pretty strongly. You want it signaled even more strongly? – you know, how some visual novels have a little symbol on the screen when it’s “new” content, or tell you when “something has changed” because of your action?

Is the notion really just to head off people grousing and saying “that wasn’t reactive”–I’m trying to think about the effect on a reader when the narrative is shouting “here’s the new content!”

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32

I agree that interesting content doesn’t necessarily need huge signs, but I think some signaling when a player’s potentially missing out on a big part of the experience is good. There was a way to totally skip a big section of Chapter 4 in Choice of Magics, and I found my early playtesters would just kind of blindly skip it and wonder why the chapter was short. So I made the path toward it a little shinier and the path away from it a little scarier, and then they started getting a big dungeon to explore and were happier while understanding that the other path was better for a later playthrough.

I also happen to really like the affordance aspect of achievements - again, it just adds to the life of the game when you can’t be there beside the player saying, “did you try X?” Of course, this requires the player to have faith that your achievements are pointing toward cool content and not just random crap you thought you could come up with a good pun for.

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33

Maybe there needs to be two styles of achievements–one for paths and one for “which song is your robot singing”? Maybe a different naming scheme for each, or something like that. That’s a good idea. I’m going to try that.

I have mixed feelings about signalling skipping big sections. I totally take your point, and yet I think I’d rather have a narrative poker face about it so that when people talk to each other later they say “wait, you can burgle the ambassador’s house and have a whole big adventure instead of spending all of chapter five just playing parlor games?”

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34

Hey. My cute little robot singing “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs IS cool content, okay??? (I mean, have you seen that video?)

I do like surprising people with paths they didn’t think were possible, too. But, I think it’s also important to write with the understanding that a LOT of people will never play the game more than once, and some won’t even finish the first time. I can’t tell you how many people have told me, “Yeah, I started Choice of Robots” and it comes out that they basically only finished the first chapter. Which is too bad, because it gets better. In fact, I actually cut some early life stuff in the first chapter because a playtester didn’t even make it past the first scene when it started out with a five-year-old MC. “That’s cool, you’re like a five-year-old in this game, good luck with that” is a paraphrase of what he said, and he found something else to do at that party. And he was a pretty smart guy.

So to get back to the issue of stats: that’s what we’re up against. Not the perfect reader who plays ten times and catches every subtle allusion - they’re actually easy to please, because you like the same things - but the guy who on a scene by scene basis is deciding whether to actually watch Netflix instead. Smart guy, and he’ll like your game and give it five stars on Google Play if he really gets into it. But you’ve got to fight for his attention, and stats are a way of putting more of the game up front.

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35

I like to think of CoG more as an interactive story than as a game. There are two main types of readers- those who only play once and those that like replayability. An author wants to try to satisfy both groups.

Stats can be a good way to add replayability without writing completely different stories. If the MC has to be accused of a crime and exiled for the story to work, allowing NPCs to look apologetic and secretly voice dissent for a “good” MC but be too scared of the strong government to do anything ,would better the interactivity without a whole lot of work. It might not make sense for a NPC that the MC has been cruel towards to want to help the MC, however adding an extra sentence about the NPC only helping because they believe the MC is innocent and because of their view of justice and not because of a good relationship, adds some variability without a lot of work.

Stats can be done poorly and lock the MC into one specific play style when sometimes it’s better to use finesse than brawn or you’re scared to take an action you want because you think it’ll end poorly. Some people like seeing stay changes because it immediately shows that their choices have some impact (even if the stats are never really used) and some feel stats are restrictive especially if there is no clear connection between how choices impact the stats and what the stats mean. I would not immediately not play a game just because it had or didn’t have stats, but I do feel games with less skill stats are better.

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36

I’ve purposefully stayed out of this thread for a bit to get a larger sample of what others think before writing my perspective.

I’m going to start with the following:

My background is gaming and the gaming industry. When I see authors approach the CS script as just a glorified text editor I cringe inside. The stats and the means to display those are mechanics and should be viewed as part of the structural integrity of your story. Most authors do not grasp what this means. Stats are not just to add interactivity to your story and used in a superficial manner; if you do this, you will often lose a major part of your audience.

Your audience is a full-spectrum and not just ven-groupings of two types. There are as many motivations to playing a game (and CS games should be acknowledged as such) as there are players that actually do play the game. They may share some commonalities but I guarantee you that their differences outweigh the commonalities.

Because differences outweigh the commonalities, your job as a developer of games is to find as many points of nexus as you can. A mechanics structure (of which stats is an important building block of) is one such nexus point creator. By signalling that a relationship is strong, you form a point in your game where all the different readers and their motivations can collectively relate to common ground. This is why relationship wars and shipping fan-fiction/fanworks thrive so much.

Stats also are a visual way to relate information to those that learn from visual cues more readily than from written cues. This is more necessary with CS games because you want to reach all of your audience as much and as clear as you can. Most games are visual, so cuing a horror-filled face at your lack of humanity is easier via art then it is for us when dealing with the more visual of our audience. Stats and their displays are where we can visually relate our written word to those who are not able to get the concept completely through written prose.

A well executed mechanical structure is necessary with CS games because of the inherit purpose of the CS script. Stats showing visually what we try to write in prose, is a way to relate the mechanics of the game to our audience and a way to explain what is happening under the hood of our game.

Others have talked about sign-posting content and signalling important mechanics. @kgold has wonderfully laid out various reasons why this is good and I agree with him. I also agree with @Gower that each path in a game is its own reward (at least theoretically) but practical experience over the last decade has taught me, painfully something more. To be successful, a game’s utility needs to be constant. Stats and their display provide the tool which often even outs the utility of a game to a constant from beginning to end.

Stats will tie the enjoyment received over the content of any one branching and it will provide a way for your audience to translate their “happiness” received at any one point in that branching. Mechanics tie the entire game together and they promote all the various purposes your audience may wish to accomplish. Romance, conflict, resolution, learning, and whatever else you can think of is facilitated by mechanics - stats are just one tool of the mechanic toolbox to use.

Stats a mechanics are often the easiest to use because most gamers have been exposed to them, their entire gaming life and as such they require more skill in deployment to get the same “bang” that our other tools need. “Everyone” knows what “strength”, “charisma”, “intelligence” and “agility” mean - or so they think. Which is why when they are presented in a structure (such as opposite pairs) that confuses, frustrates or mystifies our audience they will complain.

This is a major weakness in many author’s ability to write CS games and it is often a reason many gamers score their titles low.

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37

I have a general question for writers.
I don’t doubt that creating a game requires a lot of careful planification. So, how was the process that make you choose what stats you wanted to include in your games? I feel that hearing about the experiences of others during the development of their games can provide a better insight in these subject and help new writers.

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38

For me, it’s all about the theme I want to explore. In Midsummer, the theme was about the pull between responsibility, silliness, and freedom, so the three major derived stats all linked up to that.

But on a broader level, since Midsummer was comic, I didn’t have a “combat” stat, but instead a “courage” stat which could be used to fight, but also for facing challenges head on. That makes a more flexible stat. You can think of more ways to use “courage” than “fight.”

Even better, that lets you look at your stats and think of your character’s personality, not just what you can do.

Ideally, you can look at stats and know what sort of game it will be–its genre, and the sorts of themes it will deal with.

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39

I tried to pick the stats with both theme and gameplay in mind.

A key theme of the forthcoming Choice of Rebels is that when you’re in revolt against e.g. an evil fantasy Empire, it’s often non-obvious where to stop rebelling, or whether you even can. Where does a corrupt social order retain some value, and how much can you destroy before you lose the ability to build back? What if anything does your rebel leader MC value as a source of social order?

The game’s three opposed stats are all centered around major potential sources of social order – nationalism (or cosmopolitanism), religiosity (or skepticism), and ruthlessness (or compassion). These values affect every stage of the rebellion, not just the rebuilding (which we won’t get to for a few games yet). And, importantly, I find each one fun to write. There are interesting trade-offs and dilemmas and colorful outworkings for each side of the stat.

There’s also an Anarchy stat which is visible as a number on the stat screen (zero, at the beginning). Other important variables like notoriety and morale aren’t ever shown to the player as numbers; they’re periodically suggested in the text, so the reader gets a sense of whether morale is e.g. strong or dismal, but not whether it’s 2 points away from some critical threshold. That’s because the artificiality of having too many stats in precise number form (rather than described in text) can be immersion-weakening for me. But the level of Anarchy you create is so vital to the theme that I want it visible to the player throughout the game.

I also included three skill stats – combat, intellect, and charisma – because I thought they could lead to fun variability in the gameplay. There are distinctive ways of rebelling as a great general, an effective user of the world’s best thinking & technology (in this case, magic), or a charismatic leader; writing three different specialisms feels like it should be manageable. And as Gower suggests, the choice of stats here also signposts that if you like fantasy RPGs, you should give this a try. (Nothing like calling one of your stats “charisma” to give the game away.)

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40

Agree with both @Gower and @Havenstone on building around a theme. We wanted our stats in So, You’re Possessed! to be more literary in nature and revolve around character development, as opposed to needing to build up super powers, magic, or strength for battle. Not that there is anything wrong with that kind of game, it’s just a different flavor. With a story and humor driven game, even though there are fight scenes, we figured any stats we use will need to complement that in a way that emphasized personality and worldview over combat mechanics. And as mentioned above, being more assertive might also give the MC more to say and do if they are outgoing, and naming that stat “Confidence” as opposed to “Courage” or “Will” helps further designate it as an urban fantasy as opposed to a DnD style RPG.

Our MC’s choices and resulting stats do have a more subtle impact on the reader’s opportunities and the tone of the story in ways that might not be immediately obvious within the text (i.e. characters who choose more hostile/aggressive options may be met with more hostility/aggression than those who don’t).

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