Personality stats or traits?

Game Development Writing and Content
1

So I’m almost done with my book’s first work in progress version, but there’s something I’m confused about and thought why not ask here.

So in my story you will be playing as protagonist who’s let’s say too powerful to have any stats on strength or agility, and since most choice of games stories works with stats so I thought about adding stats in personality, but then another idea comes into my mind. What if I let players choose their personality traits at the beginning of the game which you can later change, would you prefer it that way or your old stats system where players get different amount of personality points depending on the choice you have made ?

7 Likes
2

I’m going to be maybe slightly controversial and say you don’t need stats if they don’t work well for your game.

Look at Whiskey-Four. The stats page is mainly used to keep track of the player’s choices and provide more world building and flavor. It’s an amazing game and I didn’t miss them. It was super refreshing not to be bouncing back and forth between a Stats Page and the main game whenever a big choice popped up.

Really, if you are tracking choices and changes with variables and show reactivity in the story based on what the player is choosing and doing, you don’t need to have stats like Strength or Agility - you just need to remember what the player has been using that strength or agility to do.

I don’t like choosing personality traits at the start of a game, because I don’t know anything about the world, story, or characters yet.

Maybe my initial impulse is to play as a positive character, but the situation or characters I find myself introduced to make me decide my character would react negatively to them. (Help - I have too much fun playing defiant characters!)

So I guess I prefer where the game tracks your character personality through choices that effect stats - but I don’t like games where your choices are restricted by personality stats. I prefer that any personality tracking be used exclusively for flavor text.

If I’ve been a shy character for the whole game I may still feel compelled to stand up on a table and scream to get everyone’s attention if I feel the situation in the story warrants it. I just want the text to acknowledge how much difficulty my character has doing that, and maybe other characters reacting with some additional surprise that the shy quiet character decided to get loud.

What I do not want is the option to get up on the table and yell to be grayed out because my character’s “Bold” stat wasn’t high enough, or because my “Shy” stat was above a certain threshold.

I feel like all that does is encourage players to min-max personality stats. It means that instead of the player making a real choice of how they’d react in that situation as the character, they instead keep choosing the Shy option, or the Bold option, etc. so they can keep choosing those options, because they are afraid of the game locking them out of choices if they don’t focus on a single personality stat.

18 Likes
3

Thank you for replying to me, your message helped me a lot. I think I’m gonna use stats on personality for keeping a track of reader’s personality and will only let it affect some dialogues(like your inner thoughts in different situations), honestly I too would prefer not restricted by personality, maybe I needed someone to tell me just that.

Anyways if you like playing as defiant character then you are gonna have a fun time :wink:

4 Likes