Attribute Design

After the previous two videos where I talked about the specific effects of attributes in Fallout and Arcanum, in this video I talk about attribute design in general, including where my current thoughts lie on how they should be used in games.

[srobin]

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 ❤

[SoFishtry]

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

[bloodaxis]

I'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's just one of the ways where you can roleplay your specific character and see the impact of the character you chose to make.

[aNerdNamedJames]

FWIW, Todd Howard has explicitly said that they've made an overt decision to make Starfield "more hardcore of a role playing game than we've done", to "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."

Which, at least to me, does sound like BGS actually registered the lukewarm reception of Fallout 4's basegame (for, among other things, the dearth of stat checks).

[naomihunter]

I think the way Attributes are setup in a game is more important than some realize. Since they are typically sort of your 'base layer' of your character build, they tend to effect everything in some capacity. They are a foundation for the rest of your character system. Even simply removing them all together has a profound effect on a system. It's an interesting area to tackle and think about.

[michaelblosenhauer]

I comment on your videos more than any other youtuber I watch. I hope you never stop saying, "oh, I could make a video about that." Also, I tend to have to rewatch parts of the videos because you will say something that sends me down a rabbit hole of design in my brain while I'm trying to watch.

[plaidchuck]

I think one issue regarding your thoughts on the next Fallout, is the expectation now a player should be able to do all the content of the game on one character, mainly because the games are so huge and long. So in the end class or attributes mean nothing because your character can do everything at the end.

I’d much rather have a shorter game where you cant experience everything on one playthrough yet each character you make feels and plays different and the world reacts differently to the character. I’m not sure if you have insider knowledge but it seems the mantra in the industry is that longer equals better.

[BobbyJensen]

As a hobby, I've been writing a homebrew Fallout campaign/ruleset piggybacking off of 5e's rules [Yes, I know what that sounds like.] for quite a while now, and this insight gives me confidence that I'm doing something awesome for my friends and I. Thank you so much for this channel.

[bobbertmoss]

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

[LiraeNoir]

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't (they're all immortal, so we're talking as fully formed adults).
That'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'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't follow this narrative theme.
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.
Plus, that point pool to buy things, covered everything. Not only attributes, but also powers and abilities.

But indeed, there are a lot of interesting thing out there. As an old far, one of the less old interesting thing I'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've ever seen. It'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're presented with a challenge, you can attack it in many different ways. Sure you can get into combat with the tower guard that'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.

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 "well you'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.
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.

[allluckyseven]

OMG, Amber. Such great memories of playing it in the late 90s. Another thing about the bidding process in it is that you could overspend, and then you'd get Bad Stuff! And if you underspent, those points would become Good Stuff! Amber was a fun game, full of intrigue and just the craziest sh*t happened. Some of the ideas contained in that book still influence my game design lobe to this day.
On 0-5 attributes... It depends on how your 'dice system' works. A bonus of "1" in V:TM isn't the same as a 4pt bonus in D&D or a 20% bonus in a d100 game.

[lucasbarcellos]

As usual a great video, Tim!

I'm currently writing a cyberpunk TTRPG (which btw started as my own little unofficial Fallout RPG) and one of the choices I made when deciding to make the game into its own thing was to have attributes permanent, but skills and derived stats could shift with bonuses or penalties and advantages and disadvantages.

I was never exactly sure if that was a good idea and wondered if I'd be shooting myself in the foot, but to hear you talking about how you'd do something like this if you were designing attribute balance right now when you have so many years of RPG experience is very encouraging!

It is always wonderful to hear your insights.

[chevkoch]

How delightfully complex attribute design turns out to be, and how fun tinkering with it seems, playfully turning knobs aiming for balance. Great video as always, thank you.

[BogusMeatFactory]

Hi Tim! I am late to thia conversation, but being an indie tabletop rpg designer, I absolutely ADORE this discussion. I've built a system that is a low stat 1-5 system that allows players to hand craft their skills and combat abilities completely. What makes it great is that players have agency in deciding what stat dictates what bonuses to skills and combat abilities as long as it is contextually relevant. Those attributes will stay MOSTLY static through a campaign and instead what players gain are new skills, combat abilities and items that offer quirky new features.

My brain has always felt that the players should have that agency to make the character the way they want and as a DM, you build your campaign around the features of the players. So if someone wants to be a half-orc bard that is low charisma and cant sing, we can now adjust the system to allow the chance to hit of their bardic abilities to be bonused by the inverse of their charisma modifier and since they hand made their combat abilities, they could be more offensive damage based.

Talking attribures and design is so fascinating and I can not stress enough how enriching it is to hear your talks on design.

[plebisMaximus]

I was just thinking about attributes for a hobby project over the last few days, this video is gold, thanks Tim!

[Dagarvs]

I may not have the Cornerstone of Objectivity, but with my unique Orc strength attribute, when I do find it, I will carry it away. Loved the vid! Love it when you talk char design!!

[Amberclad]

This have become my favorite game design videos ive ever seen. Love to see how you chat in depth about these systems!!

[Vladimyrful]

Regarding starting attributes you've talked about ~3:10 onwards, my biggest thing when making a character is not knowing whether it's possible to increase attributes during the game or not - and which ones (e.g. in Fallout you can increase all of them in Fallout 2 you can't (excluding perks)).

[zackiz]

One thing, I think, that doesn't get brought up in these cases is how long these games are. If they were shorter but more replayable, i think many problems with choosing your attributes at the beginning of the game goes away. In fact, if games were shorter, more people would probably play more characters. Tyranny did this somewhat but it was still long(20h-ish) for a playthrough, Outer Worlds to some extent as well.

[TheYashakami]

Wow, I never thought of penalties in that way. That puts an entire new perspective on attribute design. Thanks!