Encounter!

Fulldamage
STR 10
DEX 13
INT 11
WIS 9
CHA 8
CON 12
LCK 8

I love building RPG characters.

Hell, I'm one of those people who can take 20 - 30 minutes pondering my character name, before I even get to my initial stat arrangement. But figuring out whether to spec for speed or strength, wizardry or armor, stealth or personality - it's seriously a buzz to me. I'm not even a min-maxer -- I just need to get the character so that it matches the picture and/or origin story I've got in my head. For my imaginary character. Because I'm crazy in my brain.

But what's even crazier is how many of you immediately understand what you're looking at when you see a list like the one above -- and not because of tabletop games, where character attributes were born. You recognize what these stats are because they are in so damn many video games that it is almost impossible not to have encountered this type of system before. Because any time you slap the bullet point "RPG Elements" onto a game description, then suckers like me will give even the snooziest game a second glance. And this is why we need to move past them - not just for hopeless RPG addicts like myself, forsaken and damned beyond all hope of redemption or normal conversations. But for everyone, because we can do better.



Problem #1: The stepchild stats - Personality and Luck
How many times have you gone to a forum, looked up some information while thinking about a character build, and heard people saying the same things -- "Charisma is useless. With (x) spell or (y) amulet you can get anything you need from any conversation in the game. Luck doesn't do anything." Whether you're playing an action-RPG, an FPS-RPG, a straight up dungeon crawler, whatever it is, people are saying these things about that game right now. Sometimes they are dead-on correct, and sometimes they just don't understand the game system as well as they could (understandable, given that the actual mechanics in these games are often hidden way down in the basement, like adopted children after the social services worker leaves).

We don't need to get into all that, but the amount of conversation about it indicates that it is, in fact, an issue. This is because, for a beginning player, these types of stats represent a gamble. In nearly all games of this type, you absolutely can get to the end by hitting, shooting, or magicking opponents, and avoiding their attacks. Why, then, gamble on values like your personality or your luck, when it's not clear at the start how and when these things will help you? And when your choice guarantees that you will get hit harder and dodge less? And yet we keep seeing them, over and over. Wisdom is lucky enough to have clerical magic or spell resistance attached to it, otherwise it'd be in the basement with the other kids.



Problem #2: They limit what we can experience
I'm totally going to quote myself: "In nearly all games of this type, you absolutely can get to the end by hitting, shooting, or magicking opponents, and avoiding their attacks." Why? Because your character is valued by strength, agility, and magical ability. And because 9 times out of 10 you're playing a juvenile power fantasy about dominating your opponents and saving the world.

Understand, I'm not complaining about these types of games -- I play them, I love them. But you can see how sort of closed-off this cycle becomes. Why have we let Steve Jackson and Gary Gygax tell us that those values up there are, for all time, the way by which we rate game characters? Why are THOSE stats the only stats we really use?

Think about all of the other things that go into making up a real person. I know there's way more to you than the amount you can bench press, or how long you can jump rope, or how many books you've read. Why isn't Memory a stat? It's a very real aspect of you, it differs from person to person, and it governs how long you can retain skills, how many skills you can retain, how you react to the world around you because of your recollection of past events. What about Attention Span? Some people are really focused and can get very expert at what they work on, but suffer in other areas because of that focus. Some people seem to have no focus, but are in fact really excellent multitaskers and can do more things at once... they have "more menus open" at a time than your average person. What about balance? Some people would argue that balance is far more important than strength or speed when it comes winning a fight. Or there's creativity, which can let you see solutions and opportunities that no one else can see.

Now you can stretch the definition of any of our established stats to cover some of those situations. But I'm not criticizing the system for being bad - just overused. Take a moment to imagine a game where your character was defined by their growth in Memory, Focus, Balance, and Creativity. If you were to put that on a marketing bullet point, it would get my attention just as surely as "RPG Elements." Because it describes a type of character that I've never played before, a different type of experience. What else do you think could be used as a stat?



Problem #3: Marching in straight lines
So you have attribute points. And you want more points, because more points is better. And the more points you have, the more powerful you are, and the more points you can get, and so on and so forth. All very standard, easy to work with, makes sense on paper.

But people don't really work like that. You don't just get better and better at everything forever. Sometimes you stop working out in order to focus on class, and you get smarter but lose some tone. Sometimes you're good at martial arts, and then you quit training and get into music, and you develop a good ear but lose some of your reaction time. Sometimes you're good at drinking, and then all of a sudden you're that dude that keeps taking off his pants at parties and never remembers meeting you. Whatever, my point is, people change and develop in different directions, and it's not always straightforward.

Action<----------+---->Cleverness
Morality<-------+------->Sympathy
Practicality<-------------+->Inspiration
Bulk<----+---------->Flexibility

What if you had sliders, instead of raw points? In this type of system, you couldn't "accumulate" points, there is only a finite number to go around. But suppose your actions in the game caused those sliders to be in constant movement, adapting to the way you play the game. Suppose that you could unlock new skills and abilities based on the positions of those sliders in relation to each other? (Achieve High Cleverness, Medium Flexibility, and Neutral Morality to acquire "Steal", for example). Or what if you got new skills, HP or abilities based on how far you move a certain slider, to reward your changing potential.

That's just one possibility. I'm going to skip the other ones I thought of, because they involve graphs, and this is a wall of text already. My point is simply that there must be other ways to express character growth, and the more we explore them, the more we stand a chance of discovering new ideas and new types of gameplay. And I think we're all in favor of that!



In closing: RPG Stats, I'm really happy for you. And I'ma let you finish. But there's more out there waiting to be discovered, and we're going to have to learn to change up the game if we want to see it.