Would you prefer to keep track of your relationships with numbers or percent? Note that both have their uses. Especially for more in depth games that takes time to develop relationships.
Being able to go above or below 0-100 is useful though on the downside it can be quite confusing and awkward looking. Although SWTOR and games of its kind have adapted it. Yet percentiles can do just the same as demonstrated in the Dragon Age trilogy.
I prefer text/numbers to manage my relationships. Rather than percentages.
I learned the hard way how difficult fairmath percentage bars are to track over the course of a game, especially for relationship stats that will necessarily rise and fall.
I found it impossible to project what a âgoodâ relationship score should be at a given point so I just switched to numbers. MUCH easier to track (but not as pretty on the stats page).
Thatâs the thing with the development It just doesnât look rightâŚand I am one thatâs obsessed with how things look =p Yet Iâm also indecisive.
The poll will aid in my deciding. I think Iâll just break things down into a tier systemâŚ
Personally, I think âstagesâ described with words are best in most cases, but thatâs an aspect of preferring relationships to be less binary than âyou like/you dislikeâ.
It wasnât too difficult to manage for Tin Star. I broke each relationship up into roughly ten point chunks and made sure to keep it open ended on the higher and lower bound. Then I inserted several early-outs in case the person in question hadnât been met yet, had been killed, or was in a romantic relationship (Different descriptions applied).
The question for me here is, what kind of world am I trying to model? For the original Marine Raider, there were no relationships per se, since Marines obey orders. Similar thinking applied for Apex Patrol. For Tin Star it was the long arc, an accumulation of interaction over ten chapters, and therefore it made sense to have all those subtle descriptions to illustrate that personal development. In Shadow Horror there are really only two other characters and the situation is too intense for much long term development.
But if you are writing a romance then lots of detail and a gentle but steady gradient seems appropriate. For a High School saga friends should be able to have a falling out one day and bounce back the next week. An apocalyptic tale might be better represented with a brittle percentage system to illustrate that trust, once broken, is hard to regain. A redemptive story might likewise benefit from the reverse by illustrating that a good turn can right innumerable past wrongs.
on the stats page).