Not your grandparent's Attributes & Skills! (But they still listen to the same music).

The posts for this week are likely to be somewhat abbreviated (or skipped entirely, in the case of Thursday-Friday), as I'm busy preparing for the week's holidays!

That said, I've recently been floating amidst an interesting conundrum concerning RPG (Role-Play-Gaming) statistics. From Dungeons & Dragons, to newer video games like Dragon Age, there's this... phenomena of attributes and skills. These may be renamed for the sake of setting or some gimmick, but the very core design mechanic works like this:

• A character has a series of attributes associated with their base, natural abilities. Strength, Intelligence, and Charisma are but a very small sample of the possibilities offered here. These usually number somewhere between 6-9, though some games have less and others more.

• A character also has a series of skills associated with their learned, nurtured abilities. Athletics, Marksmanship, and various Knowledges are but a small snippet of what can be an incredibly lengthy (150+!) list from which to choose.

This is ultimately a throwback to table-top war games and the genre as defined by Gary Gygax and his contemporaries. It has been copied and modified by too many games and systems to count since its inception, though the core of this mechanic ultimately remains the same: a) attributes modify skills in some way, b) attributes allow for skill selection in some way, c) attributes are "dropped" and "replaced" by some other mechanic that ultimately amounts to the same thing with new trappings (and still have some relationship with skills). I'm open to input, here.

Anyways, it has been suggested by some that this process be abandoned, as it smacks of the very tired nature/nurture argument and all the equally fatigued politics still on the dance floor behind it. In a moment of inspiration and madness, I decided to take up this challenge and attempt to do just that.

 ... Yeah that didn't work out so well. So far, I have discovered that if players are willing to make statistics a very, very low priority in their gaming (and prioritize narrative, instead), the attribute/skill system can indeed be dumped for something simpler, such as an archetype system. On the other hand, if players are married to the idea of statistics (as they would have to be in a digital setting, given current technology), there are ultimately no alternatives to the attribute/skill system I have found.

A savvy coding friend of mind made an intriguing point that "objects" in a coding environment demand "attributes" that detail the object, represent its purpose(s), and inform the script (or whatever is reading the object) how it should behave. Character "objects" in digital games work the same way, and I'm personally willing to transfer the analogy over to analogue games as well: For "mechanics" to work, they need to be able to "read" the character-objects and compute some sort of conclusion as appropriate.

What I have done in my current design attempt is to almost completely eliminate the typical attribute associations (Strength, Dexterity, etc.) and instead replace them with more vague motivation-oriented statistics as opposed to flawed direct representations of human (or whatever) ability. I say flawed for a rather complicated reason. But essentially: Simulation attempts to re-create that which it can never fully re-create, because it will always be preoccupied with creating a facsimile of the original, which can never fully be the original, because it will always be a facsimile - at least so long as the original exists. And if humanity is the original, we're (hopefully) not going anywhere any time soon.

I'm not going to draw a line in the sand and say that argument is flawless, because it's not. However, it's good enough, I think, to get across the idea that attributes are generally viewed as good enough a representation for purposes of gaming. Why fix what's broken? And so on.

Of course, if good enough remains the prevailing philosophy for using this system, I must agree. It's time for something fresh.

MCH