Attribute Design

Comments · 261

• BI

  @bigbutterbuns360 · 1 year ago

  Tim, I&apos;ve been a gamer since I was 6, now I&apos;m 30, and I&apos;ve been a designer for 9 years in the industry. <br>Really really appreciate your work and your insights here man. What a massive gift to share it in such detail.

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• S7

  @s7robin105 · 3 years ago

  Tim just wanna say Fallout came out the year I was born and my introduction to the series was with 3. I recently played through fallout 1 during my final semester in college and it was a blast. I love your work and you are an inspiration ❤

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• RI

  @rileymosman2808 · 1 year ago

  The &quot;Cornerstone of Objectivity&quot; sounds like a sweet perk and I&apos;m taking it the next time that my real life character levels up

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• SO

  @SoFishtry · 3 years ago

  Strong recommendation for Josh Sawyer&apos;s GDC talk on attribute design/tuning in Pillars. Really great insight about the history of D&amp;D attributes and how they designed Pillars&apos;.

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• LI

  @LiraeNoir · 3 years ago (edited)

  The thing with Amber DRPG, is that the bidding system is there to emulate a narrative theme. In the novels there is this group of princes and princess who mostly all grew up together, and knew each other. They competed against each other all their life. So they knew, in advance, who was the strongest, or the best fighter, and so on. Because they tried to beat that brother or sister dozens and dozens of time before, and they couldn&apos;t (they&apos;re all immortal, so we&apos;re talking as fully formed adults).<br>That&apos;s what the system tried to emulate. Which of course can very easily fall flat, when new characters come in, or if player character didn&apos;t grew up together or at least competed for years together as adults. Because that narrative of close knit family works for that generation of protagonists in the novels, but not often in a rpg campaign, and indeed in the novels the second generation doesn&apos;t follow this narrative theme.<br>But to its credit, that system also handled something from the book, is the unknown. Some people could chose to buy attributes but not bid, so they could not be the best, and if tied they would lose to the official bidder, but nobody else knew what they had.<br>Plus, that point pool to buy things, covered everything. Not only attributes, but also powers and abilities.<br><br>But indeed, there are a lot of interesting thing out there. As an old far, one of the less old interesting thing I&apos;ve seen is the system in FATE Core, where skills and attributes are merged. There is no distinction between them. There is a list set for a campaign, with a default generic list provided as example in the rulebook. And that default list has to be the best one I&apos;ve ever seen. It&apos;s short but not too short, a total of 17 irc. And it cover everything, from shooting or coercing people, but also money (or general resources), or contacts and networks and allies. So in FATE when you&apos;re presented with a challenge, you can attack it in many different ways. Sure you can get into combat with the tower guard that&apos;s stopping you from entering, and sure you can sneak past, or bluff them. But you can also try to build a contraption to get you to zipline from another tower, or you can bribe them, or you can have a ally give you permission to enter. And every single example there can be handled with a single skill check, each with the same mechanics and difficulties.<br><br>But however elegant it is, it does remove one of, imo, the greatest aspect of attributes in most system: they are additive to skills, and broad. In many rpg there is a variation of &quot;well you&apos;re very strong, sure it help to bonk people on the head and move things, but it can also help you move someone past traps now roll Strength+Traps, or help your male show off to someone compatible roll Strength+Seduction, and so on. Skills tend to be vertical, they rule over a single specific domain of actions; while attributes are more horizontal and can affect many things. <br>Bonus design points to rpg who let this additive property freeform (with guidelines of course), to cover edge cases and inventive usage by players: yes maybe this part of the heist could be done by swapping out faster a whole computer rack from two different datacenter buildings, roll Strength+Computers.

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• AN

  @aNerdNamedJames · 3 years ago

  FWIW, Todd Howard has explicitly said that they&apos;ve made an overt decision to make Starfield &quot;more hardcore of a role playing game than we&apos;ve done&quot;, to &quot;go back to some things that we used to do in games long ago that we felt have really let players express the character they want to be.&quot;<br><br>Which, at least to me, does sound like BGS actually registered the lukewarm reception of Fallout 4&apos;s basegame (for, among other things, the dearth of stat checks).

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• NI

  @nichan008 · 3 years ago

  What if you bid against a rival character in the game? So you end up designing your rival by designing your character?

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• BL

  @bloodaxis · 3 years ago

  I&apos;m one of those people that really enjoy complexity in character building, and appreciate the fact that you can create hyper specialised characters or generalists but not master of everything, unless you cheat, which is your choice I guess. I also love in dialogue stat choices because it&apos;s just one of the ways where you can roleplay your specific character and see the impact of the character you chose to make.

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• YV

  @yvesgomes · 4 months ago

  That bidding concept is awesome.

• BO

  @bobbertmoss5940 · 3 years ago

  Wow, this came at the perfect time, literally when I was in the middle of figuring out the attributes for my TTRPG!

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• IR

  @IRONthumbs1 · 3 years ago

  I love it when you look furious in your thumbnails

• RE

  @re_loco_22 · 3 years ago

  i just found this channel and its like the fountain of wisdom about fallout i always wanted