Advice for an Attribute System

[Knightmage Leinad]

Hi everyone,

Knightmage Leinad here and I am new here but I am on an IT course doing an assignment that requires me to make a game. The game I have chosen is a text based turn based rpg that is being made in visual studio with c# per the guidelines in the assignment. Now I have come up with a narrative and I have come up with a variety of locations but I am trying to whittle down the main leveling mechanics. I welcome any advice on this system that I have figured out.

Attributes:

Strength: Self Explanatory, Strength dictates attack points and will be combined with weapon attack damage to form the attack rating.

Constitution: Constitution, dictates the amount of damage that is negated in an enemy's attack and will be combined with the player's armour rating. It will basically be enemy's full attack damage - armour rating = damage with block.

Vitality: Vitality is the stat that dictates the amount of maximum health points the player can have.

Memory: This dictates how many spell slots you can have and will work similar to the attunement slot in Dark Souls. Basically at a certain number of points you can have a new slot added to the starting amount of slots 2.

Intellect: This dictates the strength of spells and acts in a similar way to attack damage except this can be buffed by any weapon that has a magical bonus on it and that magical bonus will be added onto the base intellect.

Dexterity: This dictates the evasion rate and also adds onto the attack damage for daggers.

Persuasion: This is mainly used in situations within the story that affect the narrative and will basically have options that open up according to a number of points you have. This may also come into play with other amounts of attribute points coming into play like The Fallout series.

Willpower: This is mainly used as a resistance stat for magic and other status effects and will basically dictate the percentage that will be taken off of the length of an effect.

Accuracy: This stat dictates the strength of bows and also dictates if you miss an attack by increasing the chances within the random number generator.


The attribute points will be handed out with 3 points per level and the level cap will go to level 120. The attribute points will work in this fashion, basically attack points and defense points will have a multiplication factor for the attribute points that we want to have added onto the current amount so for instance like attack 15x the number of points you're adding onto the attribute stat for the first 15 attribute points then next crank it down the multiplication rate to 10x at 30 attribute points and then 5x for the 45 attribute points with 60 being the cap. Then a similar thought process for intellect and vitality stats. For those wondering enemy levels will work like what I have proposed above.

Tell me what you think, I know this may not be very clear but I'm wondering if it is a good template.

 

[Kes]

Please bear in mind that this particular forum is not for feedback on individual projects, though you can use your project as an example. Therefore expect the discussion to be more wide ranging than just how how it might work out in your particular game.

Having said that - you say that Memory will work in a similar way to Dark Souls. This restricts a response to those who have played that particular game and so will recognize your reference. I suggest that you edit your post to give a bit of detail of what that means in practice so that more people will be able to respond to it if they want.

 

[Knightmage Leinad]

Please bear in mind that this particular forum is not for feedback on individual projects, though you can use your project as an example. Therefore expect the discussion to be more wide ranging than just how how it might work out in your particular game.

Having said that - you say that Memory will work in a similar way to Dark Souls. This restricts a response to those who have played that particular game and so will recognize your reference. I suggest that you edit your post to give a bit of detail of what that means in practice so that more people will be able to respond to it if they want.

Yeah sorry, I mean I did put that I am using another program to make my rpg, I just wanted to see if it sounded alright in practice and wanted any advice. Also thanks, will make things clearer. I'm still working out kinks but will update this post.

 

[Kes]

@Knightmage Leinad No, you didn't (as far as I can see) put that you are using another program, all you said was that it was a text based turn based rpg - which is possible to do with RM engines.

 

[Knightmage Leinad]

Okay, sorry. I understand, thank you.

 

[Basileus]

The first thing I would suggest is just looking at what other games do. I can see that you are at least somewhat familiar with some other RPG systems, but the key thing here is to really pick about the "Why?" of everything the game does.

Everything comes down to math. Everything. Statistics don't do anything by themselves. They are basically like creating INT variables in programming - they exist to hold and update a number that is called by actual functions.

• What does your "Strength" stat actually do? If you have weapons then can't you just use the weapon's damage number instead?
• Why in the heck do you have both "Constitution" and "Vitality"? As a longtime RPG player that's just confusing since they are usually the same stat by different names. If CON is just your defense, then why not just use the DEF rating of armor? And if VIT is just health, then why have it at all when the player has HP for that already?
• Why do you only get extra spell slots when you "reach a certain point" with "Memory"? If I put points into something and nothing actually changes then it seems useless and I'm not really inclined to put even more points into it to see if something changes after that.
• Why is "Intellect" needed if spells already deal damage? If some weapons already boost spell damage, then why is this stat needed on top of it?
• Why is "Dexterity" needed at all if the player already has an evasion rate that can be manipulated without the need for an entire attribute? If the only secondary effect is adding damage to only a single weapon type it seems superfluous. Also, why does it only affect daggers? That's really confusing since DEX in most games affects ranged weapons.
• Why is "Persuasion" an entire attribute? Does putting points into it just do absolutely nothing until you put in enough points to hit the next "threshold" for passing checks? Putting points into a stat should always do something and not having any secondary effects seems really bad.
• Why do you need a "Willpower" stat if the only thing it does is act like M. DEF? Again, couldn't this just be done with armor values?
• Why does "Accuracy" even exist? You already have DEX that should be affecting ranged weapons anyway and general Hit-Rate is not usually an attribute.

Systems like this are often referred to as Derived Attribute Systems because one set of numbers is used to help create another set. This is because the actual purpose of the attributes are to serve as one number in a formula. There are countless ways that each number can be used. The important thing to remember is Ratios. Attribute systems at their core are math. Don't just have a number for the sake of having it - each attribute needs a purpose. Creating overlapping attributes is a sin of game design and needlessly clutters things. Good game design is understanding "What do all of my numbers do?" and "Where do all of my numbers come from?" to create a balanced and efficient system.

For example:

In DOTA 2, all Heroes have 3 attributes - Strength, Agility, Intelligence. The attributes do nothing by themselves, they are simply used to derive the actual gameplay stats. Increasing STR increased both maximum Health and the Health Regeneration Rate. Increasing AGI increases both Attack Speed and Armor. Increasing INT increases both maximum Mana and the Mana Regeneration Rate. Additionally, each Hero is attuned to a specific attribute and gains 1 point of Attack Damage for every 1 point in their main attribute. The reason for this is because all Heroes share the same items. A Strength Hero will gain more STR per Level and thus will always be tankier than a squishy mage even if they both buy the same items. But because increases to STR boost health by the same flat amount for all Heroes, a squishy mage can still buy a STR item to become more durable if they want to. All Heroes benefit from all attributes, but they benefit more from the one they specialize in to help maintain balance between a Hero's intended function and the items they are allowed to buy.

In the Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, the player has a variety of attributes that all serve specific functions to their overall build. Strength and Endurance both affect starting Health, but only Endurance affects Health gains after the game begins. Endurance also affects the player's maximum Fatigue (read: Stamina) and the rate at which their Fatigue meter gets depleted by running and fighting. Strength also affects weapon damage and the player's carry weight is 5x their Strength stat. Intelligence increases maximum Magicka (Mana/MP) while Willpower affects the spell failure rate for both spells the player casts and spells the player is hit by. This ensures that all stats are worth putting points into while differentiating builds based on which stats the player chooses to focus on.

Hopefully this is able to help you start sorting things out. Figure out what can be handled by weapons and armor and what actually needs a base stat on top of it. Every stat needs to have some use outside of simple stat checks, even if you only use a % of the total stat amount. Think about what the player actually does in the game and build your stats around that. Stats should make challenges easier. Challenges should never be built around stats.

 

[Knightmage Leinad]

Thank you, it's been very helpful. Yeah, I guess my problem was that I was trying to find an easy way as I was kinda rushed and thus not really thinking about the overall why's. As for constitution and health I was thinking more like constitution would be a value that would take off an amount of damage from an attack. I shall heavily revise this in the future though, and I will go back to what I originally planned and I think I will make the strength, Intellect affect the scaling multiplier of a weapon and magic strength respectively instead of adding damage or constitution on top of each other.

As I said this has been supremely helpful, mistakes are a part of learning game design and everything else.

 

[Wavelength]

First of all - for the purposes of a school assignment, I have to assume what matters is that the game works, is bug-free, and hits any bullet-point requirements that the teacher/professor asks for. Your attributes/leveling system is perfectly fine for a school assignment. The "bug-free" thing is a lot easier said than done, so put a lot of your effort into testing and re-testing, because that's going to be much more likely to secure a good grade than creating a brilliant system in terms of game design.

That said, if you do want to take the plunge into good game design, the best thing you can do is think about what players are most likely to do with your system, and how that use of your system will enhance their experience. I'm seeing several problems or at least places where the system would not deliver on your intention (which I assume is supposed to be a flexible system where the player can make choices about what they want to specialize in without breaking the game balance).

• The splitting of "attack damage" between Strength, Dexterity, and Accuracy is going to make balance a nightmare since the latter two also have other functions you will need to balance around for non-dagger/bow users. Additionally, because a stat like STR is useless (or at least much less useful) for someone who equips a bow early on, you are making it very hard for them to try switching to a sword if they decide they want to later on (because any smart bow-user will invest in ACC rather than STR).
  • If I were to make a minor redesign to the system, I would reconcile all attack damage into STR, and allow DEX and ACC to function on their own merit (evasion and hit rate respectively). Since video games generally shouldn't have high miss/evade rates in the first place (it can be frustrating and slow down battle), these two stats probably won't have a lot of utility on their own now - you would want to reconcile them into a single stat that influences both rates instead. Then, to ensure that weapons like swords, bows, and daggers feel different, I would give the weapon types themselves different types of stat bonuses. Swords would tend to have high attack power, while daggers would increase your evasion stat while equipped and bows would do the same for hit rate.
• I understand what you're going for with the "diminishing returns" system, and the intention is good, but this particular incarnation of it looks dicey to me. For the first 60(!) levels of a stat, you are getting an average of 83% of the "full value" of your points, and I think this will encourage players to overload their points into a single stat in the first third of your game (probably STR, INT, DEX or ACC), until they build it up very high and start putting points into defensive stats like END. This encourages overspecialization (and makes balancing tough) - because why would I use a medium-powered ability plus a medium-powered basic attack when I could make INT a dump stat (and focus all my points into STR) and use two high-powered basic attacks instead? (Additionally, the lower gains at higher levels could be a "feel-bad" thing for players who like gaining power and do a lot of postgame grinding.)
  • If I were to redesign this, I might create a system where the number of points you currently have in an attribute, compared to the character's total attribute points, determines the amount of the actual stat increase. Perhaps the character starts out with some spread of attributes at level 1 (so that diminishing returns won't hit upon the first level-up), and if more than 20% of a character's attribute points have been placed into a single stat, those additional attribute points will act at 2/3 effectiveness, reduced again to 1/3 effectiveness beyond 40% of the total attribute points. So if a character has 100 total attribute points and 25 of them are in vitality (where you normally get 15HP per attribute point), the character gets (20 * 15) + (5 * 10) = 350 HP from those points. However, if they level up a bit, and now they have 140 attribute points and they don't put any more points into Vitality, now they get (25 * 15) = 375 HP. This system is slightly complex, but what it does is discourage overspecialization at all levels (so that players can enjoy more aspects of your combat) and balance out early-game versus late-game power gains.
• When designing a stat system where the player makes significant choices about how to build their character's stats, like yours, it is super important to ensure that stats are approximately equal in value (ideally to every individual character, but at the very least when considered as a whole). Often, to achieve this, you will need to change the underlying system - for example, in a game where Critical Hits merely double the total damage you deal, doubling a stat that influences Crit rate and will increase your Crit rate from 15% to 30% means an average of 15% more damage dealt per attack - whereas doubling the stat which influences Attack power and will increase your Attack damage dealt from 15 to 30 means an average of 100% more damage dealt per attack! So, without knowing all of the underlying mechanics of your system, it's impossible for me to say which of your stats are under/overpowered, but here are the possible concerns I can spot right away as a game designer:
  • Some of your attributes are "multiplicative" with each other (for example, Constitution and Vitality become more valuable with each point you have in the other attribute - e.g. the less damage you take per hit, the more valuable each point of HP becomes in terms of total damage you can deal to enemies before you drop). Other attributes (for example, Persuasion and probably Intellect) don't really have any other stats they make more valuable; they just do their job on their own. You might have created the opposite of the so-called "Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards" problem, which can be a problem when balancing difficulty of enemies, etc. Overall, you haven't done a terrible job with this - most of your attributes combine well with exactly one other - but ideally, you want to either make each attribute stand alone on its own, or combine reasonably well with every other attribute in your system. Or, you can even make it so that generally-stronger stats multiply well with generally-weaker ones, encouraging players to invest in both as the game goes on.
  • Memory stands out to me as a possible dump stat, but it depends on how your "spells" mechanic works. If you are mostly working off of a mana system, and the spells don't have cooldowns (or limited uses) of any sort, then all a wizard needs for most situations is a single bread-and-butter spell that they can use over and over. Having a lot of spell slots might make the gameplay more interesting, but the added versatility won't increase their power by a lot. (Additionally, I agree with Basileus that it could be problematic to have an attribute where you increase it by a few points and nothing happens.)
  • Persuasion is in a really weird place here. In a Pen & Paper roleplaying game like D&D it makes sense to place points into adventuring skills like Charisma, Presence, and Woodsmanship alongside combat skills like Swordsmanship, Spellcasting and Endurance, because combat, like skill-checks, is essentially a difficulty-based dice roll that is punctuated by storytelling and leads to a result (even losing a battle can lead to compelling storytelling hooks). In most video game RPGs, combat is the heart of gameplay, and the player needs to win in order to progress in the game (you don't just "lose a battle", you get a Game Over!). Since Persuasion does nothing to aid in combat, it feels very odd to include it as a stat among all the combat stats. If you want to allow a character's build to affect the narrative or anything else in the adventure, I would sooner create a set of additional stats that you earn points in a separate pool from combat stats (e.g. you get 3 points to spend in combat attributes, and 3 to spend in noncombat attributes, per level) - and if you're looking for ideas for noncombat attributes to use, I'd recommend the free PDF of Ars Magica 4e. Alternatively, you could give the combat attributes uses outside of combat - for example, someone with a high intellect might be able to use logic to persuade a hostile scholar to defect to his cause, whereas someone with a high strength might be able to move a huge fallen object that is blocking his path. I think this would be much more elegant than including a single noncombat stat like Persuasion alongside the others.
  • Finally, as a general warning, in games that I have played (especially RPG Maker games, but it extends to most indie and many professional games as well), HP and Damage stats tend to be the most important, whereas stats that influence occasional occurrences such as Misses, Evades, Statuses and Crits tend to be the least important. (Speed is usually either really overpowered or really underpowered.) You can figure out some of the flaws through mathematical thought (see my example of Crit rate versus Attack damage above), but once you figure out the obvious ones, the best way to test for imbalances in your attribute system is to play through the game multiple times, using different builds in each, and take note of any gameplay or balance problems you encounter.

Real quick, I want to add that I don't necessarily agree with Basileus' implication that attributes like Strength and Willpower are superfluous just because you could place the same values on equipment. While you certainly could place them on equipment alone, many players (myself included) enjoy feeling like it is the character themselves who is increasing in power (rather than just the things they buy/pick up), and additionally the ability to make permanent decisions about attribute growth (much more doable on character growth as opposed to equipment) can add a lot of impact and immersion to the decision-making process (even though it also decreases the player's flexibility and ability to experiment somewhat). I personally think having these stats is fine - you just need to be more thoughtful about making the choices interesting rather than obvious, and ensuring that balance issues won't result from your system.

Okay! That's a huge wall of text to consume, but hopefully it's a good introduction to what should be going through your mind if you want to think about the player experience like a game designer does. What appears really simple on the surface (choose attributes to increase stats) often has a thousand calculations and what-if scenarios behind it. As I mentioned at the beginning - this is probably not the kind of stuff you need to worry about when you're making a game for an IT course to show that you can program the technical nuts and bolts. But if you're interested in creating good games for commercial audiences, I highly recommend using some of your free time to think about and practice game design, so that you can not only build games but also make them interesting and fun.

Best of luck with your project!

 

[Knightmage Leinad]

Thank you Wave length, I have been redesigning since Basellius' Suggestions and have decided to base it upon the dark souls system and using that but I will have a max level cap of 240. Attack will affect scaling of any weapons base physical attack . Strength won't be that high tho, I kinda did a big example but I was trying to communicate with that example the way I was thinking of doing it at the time.

Same with intellect for magical damage for the spells however they will scale and the intellect will affect the scaling of their damage. To clear up the confusion about magic I will have as like a D and D system for spells which will have a set amount of charges that you can use and has a set value of magical damage or effect. With Memory what I mean is that the player will have 1 or 2 slots for the beginning of the game but as they invest in points into that stat at a certain number of points a new slot for a new spell will be added. Memory will also allow the player to have their charges on spells increase by a certain number that will also have diminishing returns placed on it til the points reach a soft cap and they don't increase at all and that no more slots will be added, I know this could potentially break if not handled right but it will be small percentages, 10% at most tho this is off the top of my head so due to change.

I have decided to roll dexterity and accuracy into one tho as, yes, it was strange to as basically they could be just the same thing, so accuracy, as I'm now calling will just affect the critical hit rate and the hit rate.

With Persuasion I have been thinking like to do it in a way like you suggested to do it akin to D and D and Fallout where your combat skills will affect the availability of choices within the dialogue. I have been thinking tho that persuasion/ charm could be useful as well to make the enemies a lot weaker due to them being enraptured by you but that's an idea and I will probably scrap this stat

Finally with Defence I have decided that it will basically be quite simplistic with the base defense and armour rating being added together. The base defence will change over time with a rate that changes what amount of points will be added on. Still working out the kinks on this one so.

Thanks for all the advice I am taking in all the game design lessons I can find and I have welcomed any criticism so this has really helped too.

 

[Wavelength]

Great! Just as a bit of follow-up, your version of Memory sounds fine. It will be useful to players and the choice between Intellect and Memory is interesting for spellcasters. (Also, consider the fact that it now Memory's utility "multiplies" with Intellect - each charge of a spell matters more when your Intellect is high than when it's low). Exactly how useful Memory will be depends on how easy or reliable it is to refill the spell's charges (which in turn is affected by factors like Dungeon Length because that determines how many battles must be done before returning to town to rest, and possibly the game's Item Economy if charges can be refilled via items). Sometimes answers tend to raise several more questions. Sounds like you're on a good track, though.

Thanks for taking all my advice to heart!