Considerations on Stats

Lately for the game, I've been trying to concrete the core stats and equations for the characters and their equipment.  I'd rather be verbose and "think out loud", so I figured I'd make a blog post about it.

In terms of standard RPG statistics, you minimally have something like the following for characters:

(obviously HP and MP or some equivalent ability pool, usually)
Strength
Vitality
Agility
Intelligence
maybe Charisma or something for interacting with npc's.

Most don't go past 6 or 7 character attributes for a game.  The first Diablo installment had four or six, 7th Saga is four, or six depending on how you view the fact that HP/MP increases aren't derived from other stats but a part of the characters:

HP/MP
Power
Guard
Magic
Speed

Most all Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale series, etc) had six:

Strength
Dexterity
Constitution
Intelligence
Wisdom
Charisma

which is based off of D&D rules.  Daggerfall for the PC (1996) had eight:

Strength
Intelligence
Willpower
Agility
Endurance
Personality
Speed
Luck

While I like the simplicity and added flexibility of a larger number of attributes, I do enjoy 7th Saga's "no frills" approach to their stats.  Of course, it's a difficult thing to quantify the effectiveness of these systems and compare them in an objective manner (at least for me).

It's a slightly different topic, but with Infinity Engine games you could drop your intelligence, wisdom and charisma for a non-leader fighter character and have no real negative impact, and max out the other three stats.  Unless you were dual-classing a character or were rolling a class that had a ton of dependencies spread out on different attributes (A paladin leader, per se), you could do some rather unrealistic things with how you allocated attributes.

However, in the game I'm planning out, there are very few playable characters that will even grant the player access to the names of attributes, let alone the values of them.  So I'm not too concerned about keeping the number of them to a minimum, really.  I'd almost like them to be another puzzle that people work together to figure out.

For my game, the only stats that would be additional to the standard fare would be something like:

Affinity: this would be a sort of alignment with the character and an environment / element.  I haven't thought it through in game terms yet, the ideas still need some translating from my story world writings.

Resonance: this would be the character's rating of potency with their Affinity.

Willpower: this would effect getting your body back after you've been incapacitated and need to return from a checkpoint to where you lost.  It would also effect some small parts of encounters.

That's all for tonight!