OK, I suspect the answers to a lot of these questions will turn out to be ‘how long is a piece of string’, so if that’s the case, I’m hoping for ballpark answers.
Assuming a game has 10 chapters, for how many chapters would you continue to create choices that alter primary stats? Is it actually necessary to pick a lane, here? Could I, for example, have all opportunities to improve primary skill or personality type stats finish after chapter 1 or 2, but have relationship stats continue right up to the end?
Does it make more sense to kind of phase out primary stat building over the first, say, 4 chapters, and phase in secondary stat building over the same period?
Relatedly, how many opportunities to build a primary stat would you expect to see? And what should the maximum score it’s technically possible to get be? I feel like it should be possible to get 100% with absolutely consistent decisions, because otherwise the scale feels a bit unbalanced.
At present, I am planning to give maybe 10 chances to build each primary stat in chapter 1, then say 5 in chapter 2, 3 in chapter 3 and so on, phasing out by the end of chapter 5 at the latest. I am planning to increase building secondary stats in inverse proportion: 1 in chapter 1 (probably only building 1 or 2 secondary stats, though), building to about 10 by chapter 6. I am planning to balance the numbers so that if you chose every available choice in favour of a particular stat, it would technically be possible to max it out, and using fairmath. I’m planning to make an exception for relationships with NPCs, which I think you should be able to build/sabotage throughout the game.
Pieces of strings can be long or short, but we can use tools to determine how long they need to be. Stats are one of the abstractions you can use to gate certain paths a player can take. Let’s take a simple example to make sure we are on the same page.
Say you have 3 stats: strength, intelligence and dexterity, and each starts with a value of 1. You give the player two opportunities to raise one stat. That means the possible outcomes are:
STR: 3, DEX: 1, INT: 1
STR: 2, DEX: 2, INT: 1
STR:2, DEX: 1: INT: 1
…
and all other permutations using the other stats as the next stats.
Now, when you have a skill check, you have to ask yourself how much freedom do you want to give the player to play a certain style. For example, if you make the highest strength check 3, that means you are effectively barring the player from playing other styles that don’t involve the strength stat (since the others are 1). If you have your highest strength check 2, that means the player has more flexibility at the cost of “wasting” one point. Obviously, when you have more stats and more opportunities to grow them, you will have a vast number of combinations.
To find the answer to your question, I would recommend creating a spreadsheet and mapping all the stat distributions and asking yourself how many “builds” do you want your player to have and what are the possible combinations to play those “builds”. This will give you the answer as to how strict you are with stat increase opportunities; about how ok you are with players “wasting” stats in order to have more opportunities for them, or having a strict gate where they have to allocate everything in precise manner. In a broad sense, I’ve noticed that IF players tend to want more leeway in the way they build their characters. Hard gates that come very late in the game should be avoided because the emotion cost of restarting the game is way too high.
Thanks Quartz, this is very helpful. I will go and draw up a spreadsheet. And, since I don’t want to restrict any builds, really, and I am working with like 13 stats, it is going to be… quite a complicated spreadsheet…
I’d say ideally all the way to the very end. Consider how people play the pen and paper rpg games – a large part of the draw is in being able to continually improve the character; if you stop that early, it can create a sense of stagnation (and consequently, boredom) Changing relationship stats isn’t going to alleviate it, because relationships and character’s own skill levels are apples and oranges.
I would ask yourself the question, at what point does building on a stat become redundant?
Rationale
If the player is facing increasingly difficult checks, and the stats are to pass those, then they obviously need to be able to carry out the choice-game equivalent of ‘continuous professional development’ lest the choices they made when they were young and naive come to haunt them later on and there is nothing they can do about it… but then again that might be the point? Then again if the stats are to figure out a personality type so you know what sort of MC you are writing later on, then how do you figure out if the MC is having/or wants to have, a change of heart half way through?
Example (or perhaps a little ramble)
I think it really depends what the stats are doing, e.g. Goodness, opposed Evilness, might have actions in a coffee shop, such as buying food for the beggar outside (high goodness) and taking the barista hostage (high evilness). A strength stat on the other hand tests whether you can physically carry out the action (if you chose the gym membership instead of the book club, then ‘no’ because its so expensive and ‘yes’ because you’re built like a tank). But whilst you might expect behaviour to be modifiable throughout in either direction, something like strength you might expect to be less quickly modifiable over a given timeframe… unless you choose the potion of strength before fighting the dragon in chapter 10….
So I would sum up any stat usage as: depends on context.
It must make sense in the narrative, it must make sense to the player in how it is applied, and it must be meaningful.
Ah, thank you so much for this! Really interesting points, and the article you linked is genius. Incidentally as someone who started learning to code last week, I felt immensely smug understanding that joke!
