I have been playing games, wips and beta testing games from choice of games, and the most problem I had that have stomped me time and time again when playing through the story, is personality stats, at first I was a total moron about the personality stats and I was just playing freely with no guidance but my personal opinion alone, which is what unknowly ruined my gameplay because I didn’t know at the time, there were stat checks for personality, I thought it was just to show how the people that the MC meet, how they perceived and reacted to the actions of the MC, which it does but as I gained understanding of these game, I started following the personality stats but it felt as if I was a machine doing what is restricted to what it creators ordered and not a human being of my own who once followed they own path, it was in 2025 that I just decided that I want to replay the classics and one of these classics was choice of a pirate, which made me feel like a human being, so I am curious what is everyone take on personality stats and how do you approach it, I also maybe doing this to find inspiration for a wip game, I wanna create
Honestly, I struggle with writing personality stats. I do have them in my story, because my natural inclination is to write the main character being happy and jokey (my own personality) but of course not everyone wants to play like that, some want to be serious and so on.
But I must admit I’m not doing very much with the stats, and even when I do I have way more choices that don’t have personality stats. I like to write very freely, so I find it constraining to just think inside the stats. Still, it’s necessary to remind me not to make the main character independently snarky and optimistic.
… So yeah, I don’t think I’m doing personality stats very well. They’re just functioning as a boundary for me. I don’t like to play with them either.
In my WIP, The Rise of Cthulhu, I have three opposed pairs of personality traits, and half of them came directly from H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu. The first one that occurred to me was Curiosity vs. Ignorance (Ignorance coming from the opening paragraph of the short story). This can create an internal conflict in the character, as boosting your Ignorance often comes at the expense of investigating the mystery, but it’s also more likely to preserve your Sanity. Reason vs. Intuition was one I came up with myself. Audacity vs. Caution comes directly from the short story’s final line, where Lovecraft himself sets them up as an opposed pair. I’m still early in the adventure, so I haven’t actually done any tests against them yet (I’m only up to the early part of Chapter 1 so far, and you can get these stats to the upper 60s, or maybe 70 if you push it, by this point), but there are ample opportunities to shape them with your choices.