Vault Dweller said:
Higher INT means higher learning capacity and it does imply that an intellectually gifted character can discuss things and grasps concepts that an average Joe can't.
What INT is meant to be and how it actually is implemented are two different things. When was the last time your character in an RPG communicated as intelligently as his mental and social statistics portrayed him, unless a roll was required at some choke point? When was the last time your character could use his experiences to progress in the game, instead of having to fall back on a statistic determining the best course of action?
As you see from the example, option A is over the top and does imply some very specific training or access to Google, but option B is very reasonable and reflects your character's intelligence adequately.
Is that example a reflection of actual knowledge or of the designer rewarding you with an ocasional intelligent-sounding dialogue option for dumping points into Intelligence? Is your character good at handling computers because he trained over the years and had firsthand experience with them, or because you’ve determined that is what he is good at in a metagaming way that does not necessarily reflect what the character is experiencing? I find it ironic that we often discuss just what it is that a character’s role in a gameworld means and how, for instance, the player’s skill or decision can sometimes take away from the character’s presence in the gameworld – yet, here we are defending that there is nothing wrong with a player being given the ability to take the character through a path that contradicts his character’s role. That we argue for the role to be put back into computer role-playing games, but then do our best to convince people that a “roll” is the best way of doing this.
First, a simple "increase skills by using them" mechanic (Daggerfall, Morrowind, Prelude to Darkness) fixes this problem easily.
Either system suffers from the same problem on similar levels. In the same way a character can kill goblins to advance itself in a way that does not correspond to his experience, so can a character repeatedly jump in the same place or stand still and take the brunt of physical blows to advance in a way that doesn’t reflect what the expertise should reflect. They both allow characters to develop in ways that don’t necessarily take into account what they have been doing. In Arcanum, the experience of killing wolves with melee weapons can translate into anything from better handling of firearms to better gambling skills. In Morrowind, a character that has been mauling Scamps can now also carry more items if you increase his Strength at level up since both are influenced by it.
Second, one's occupation is not an accurate tool to determine one's intelligence and what one is and isn't capable of.
In a cRPG your character’s occupation in the gameworld is one of the only tools to determine what he excels at and precisely why these systems are often so lacking. If you’re role-playing a Combat Boy in Fallout who lives and breathes combat it hardly stands to scrutiny that he’s suddenly going to move on to undertaking scholarly pursuits, or that years of experience with firearms allow him a better knowledge of scientific methods or negotiation skills. It just doesn’t fly, unless we’re moving on to justifying schizoid character decisions behind this development with “I’m role-playing”. If two characters went down the same exact path should one of them be robbed of a role-playing possibility because you tweaked a different statistic in the last level up, even when both experienced the same things and the only difference was in how you metagamed?
That's where the problem is. Your character is not necessary a mini you.
Do the words "role-playing", Role-Player, ring any bells to you? If you are playing a dumb character, what you, the player, figured out or not figured out is absolutely irrelevant. Similarly, should a martial arts master complain that his character is taking too long to defeat a rat?
It determines (or should determine) what my character can and can not understand and figure out. Ideally, it should custom tailor gameplay for your character. If you [role-] play a gullible dumbass, that's what your gameplay experience should be like.
What it should be and how it actually is are different things. Does siding with the humans or the orcs in Gothic 3 have any less of an impact on the character or the gameworld because there is no INT stat telling you what to say? Is it less of a choice or less of a long-lasting choice because your character won’t be able to say “Fngah!” if he were asked to make his allegiances clear? Is it your intelligence or the character’s that determined how to deal with the heads of the New Reno families? The decision-making process is always yours. It’s you that piece together the clues, sort out the best way among all other options, come up with tactics and strategy in combat.
INT 1 says your character is dumb and that you should role-play accordingly. Ok. So other than less skill points per level and special dialogue, what else is there telling you you’re role-playing a dumb bastard? When you go about role-playing a dim wit, is there an option to drool when looking at walls? Suddendly and inexplecably reach out and feel some tart’s left breast? Is there a chance to emulate some jangly walk or voice affectation? How does this translate into deciding what items he should carry, what purchases he makes, what paths he takes?
It doesn’t. Because it’s always your intelligence calling the shots.
Either we decide this should be left up to a set of reactions on behalf of a character with specific statistical values (thus removing our input on the role-playing aspects of the game and letting predetermined reactions govern his decisions on areas other than dialogue) or decide it should be the player to take care of these specific role-playing cases that cannot be contemplated by the game (thus allowing the player to get back into controlling the character and having his intelligence, reasoning and deduction determining how the character is being played – which is how cRPGs have always worked). Fallout is a typical example of this – a dumb character who can barely talk and finds himself in token “funny” situations or being the butt end of jokes, but is then able to perform great decisions in combat, maximize his life experience into becoming better at whatever it is he does, and of making other important decisions. That is not role-playing a dumb character, it’s playing a regular character who ocasionally is given very few or poor options in specific situations and at regular intervals.
Past experiences and actions should influence and change gameplay, opening and closing options as you move through a game. Nobody would ever argue against it. However, that doesn't mean that past experiences alone should influence gameplay.
They already do. They always have, only in unrelated ways. Whatever past experiences you have in a cRPG are what determines how you will manage to advance the character in statistical terms. The difference between current design and what I proposed is that in the latter there is a better correlation between the character’s experiences and his development, instead of unrelated processes that contribute to an end result by means of metagaming these systems behind them.
Stats and skills are valid and realistic "problem solving & progression" elements and should not be discarded. Some people are naturally better at certain things than other people. Have you not seen in your life very charismatic people who can charm almost anyone, talk their way in, and get away with pretty much anything?
First, I’m not advocating a removal of all statistics and skills – just the removal of two specific statistics. This isn’t to say the same case could not or would not be made for other concepts such as, say, something like Dexterity depending on combat system, but that’s a different matter for another time. For the purposes of discussing what I wrote now, I’d prefer we didn’t generalize about what is there. So let me reiterate – I’m not suggesting the removal of all statistics or skills so I’d appreciate if you didn’t reduce my entire argument to that. We’ve been down that road before in the past and if you recall, it didn’t work out very well.
Second, stats and skills may be based on very valid and realistic concepts but their application is not. The wargaming roots which PnP were grounded on were developed to abstract from reality, to create a system of rules which made things easier to track down and manage. This is why reducing your IQ score into a method of evaluation may help determining that wizard’s spellcasting abilities but doesn’t say anything about the character. The same applies to real life: an IQ test may be a great way to determine academic aptitude (or ineptude, depending on how you look at it) but unreliable to determine overall intelligence. The brain isn’t a static organ – why should it be analyzed as if it were? Because of this, things like Intelligence and Charisma are just something you can’t realistically track down.
If you want to look at Charisma from a realistic perspective, then I can’t help but wonder why you’d vouch for its quantification. Your charisma in reality is defined by your social experiences in life, what you’ve learned from them and how they can help in similar situations. A cRPG has a very limited, distanced interpretation of this. Let’s say you think about acquiring a small shipping warehouse and retooling it to the local community’s needs may help you bolster your company’s reputation as well as improving your distribution network in the area. Do you:
a) call up the distributor and set up a meeting. You’re confident about your skill. You’ve done it a hundred times before, but you know the gift of gab doesn’t always work. So you you think back to your past achievements – how you’ve convinced someone to join your company in the past by showcasing your company’s reputation among your consumers, your customer support expertise, and any other examples of your companies’ efficiency – and find just what you should bring up in conversation to show him why you and your company are his best choice.
b) tweak your Charisma from 12 to 13 because you know reaching that invisible threshold will allow you to successfully convince the distributor without any chance of failure.
This is neither realistic nor valid since it’s not about developing the character in a way that actually reflects the development, it’s going on a will goose chase to see what the developer was thinking. It’s having to metagame and be intimately aware of the background system instead of focusing strictly on the game. This isn’t role-playing.
There is the reason I disagree with the concept of these social attributes, because they lend themselves to a somewhat false role-playing experience. It’s the designer who ultimately decides how characters express themselves and not the players. Granted, this complaint could be made to nearly all aspects of cRPG design – such as the (in)ability to influence story progression and outcome – but these two are still left largely unsolved. Sure, you design the character and role-play it to your heart’s contempt but it’s the designer who manually sets up a number of instances where he defines where your character is going to come across as intelligent, diplomatic, moronic and so on. You can’t even decide at what times you want to role-play an intelligent character, you have to wait until you reach a predetermined crossroads where the designer felt like giving that option to you. This ends up translating into a handful of predefined solutions and reactions to a circumstancial game problem that may go against your role-playing because it doesn’t allow you proper expression.
And you’re not playing your game nor are you role-playing your character, you’re playing the designer’s game and meeting up with his expectations of how characters should act in certain situations. It’s numerical determinism at its worst. Your “role-playing” is not deciding how to act, it’s picking up the obvious dialogue branch that was suddenly made available because you made the right metagaming choice a couple of hours ago, or going with the token stupid variant because that’s supposed to mean you’re
reallyrole-playing. Your character is not recognized as being intelligent in the gameworld because of how you’ve been playing him but by how you’ve been managing his attributes. Your character can’t make intelligent choices because his intelligence is being funneled into only those situations the designer could think of and implement. And this comes down to the main problem in the genre regarding the application of social components – the game is structured around the only thing the designers can track regarding your character: specific actions in the gameworld and spreadsheet tweaks. Motivations behind your decisions or actions are impossible to account for, and so are abstract concepts such as a character’s personality and intelligence. Charisma not as much but as I’ve said before, it stumbles on trying to convey something complex through simplistic, numerical tracking.
Even without taking it as a realistic option the same still applies. The statistic rarely says anything about your character’s past experiences in a logical or even satisfying way. Is it sound design to let a static value determine what your character can express in situations where he could choose much more options, or better ones?
Third and lastly, I agree that, quote,
“some people are naturally better at certain things than other people”. I also agree, from experience, that charismatic people don’t always get what they want and intelligent people may not always know the best ways of dealing with problems.
Second, why "intelligence applied to problem solving and deduction skills" is a low point all of a sudden? Where is the proof?
I was talking about how they were handled, not the concept itself.
You article does a good job showing many design flaws and that, perhaps, what you should have focused on. Instead you followed in the Bethesda footsteps - saw a problem, but instead of fixing by improving the design, you decided that cutting it completely would be a better option.
I think it’s out of place to claim I’m pulling a Bethesda here considering I’m not following their modus operandi – ie. defending the article with a call of ‘use your imagination’ or using appeal to popularity (which I could use judging from the positive reception some of my ideas seems to have garnered but have not and will not do, unlike what Human Shield tried at least once to defend his viewpoint).
It’s also specious to claim I’ve decided the best course of action was to completely cut out the statistics as if that was the bulk of the argument when I clearly was supportive of the concept, which should be apparent by virtue of the alternative methods I suggested to preserve choices and consequnces. It was (is) about letting the player determine what he wants to express, not having the designer tell you when and how the character may express itself. It’s not about being able to role-play thanks to how you’ve been metagaming, it’s about being able to role-play because of how you’ve been playing. Of how you’ve actually been playing the role rather than the numbers. What are Intelligence and Charisma really used for in cRPGs?
Intelligence:
*Bonus to skill point gain. This increases the rate of skill point gain, most often during level up.
*Bonus to spellcasting abilities.
*Bonus to skill checks such as dialogue and other Int-related activities.
Charisma:
*Bonus to number of maximum party members.
*Bonus to skills such as bartering.
*Bonus to skill checks such as dialogue and other Cha-related activities.
What does this actually mean?
*
Arbitrary use of either stat. Intelligence is the most blatant byproduct of D&D-derived systems which could not conceive of any other mechanics to determine the rate of skill point gain or of a statistic that defined the more conventional spellcasting classes. Dialogue options that reflect intelligence are a genre staple and a fan favorite but the implementation is terribly one-sided and provides no real advantage over being given the ability to determine these outcomes yourself. It leaves the player hanging when the solution is automatically gained by the character, or when the character seemingly can’t make use of something the player has already been clued on. Charisma follows on the same premise by adjusting certain reactions or possibilities – different bartering levels, added dialogue options and other elements. The best case for the existence of Charisma are diplomatic options and another method of character diversity, both of which are in no way lost in translation to a system that tracks past decisions in the game rather than past decisions in the character sheet.
Are they really necessary in these situations?
*
Bonus to skill point gain. There are many ways of determining this that do not require Intelligence. Deus Ex awarded skill points by performing certain actions or achievements in the gameworld (in a very similar to how a Dungeon/Game Master rewards players in PnP). Planescape: Torment awarded experience by how you interacted with specific characters, including those in your party (although some of these situations were only possible if The Nameless One actually had a specific statistical value). Arcanum awarded a fixed amount of skill points per level that were not based on any statistic, attribute or skill whatsoever.
*
Bonus to spellcasting abilities, party size or bartering. This can also be made to depend on many other things. Caster level and specific training can handle spellcasting availability. Party size can depend on something as simple as hiring mercenaries, past actions that may have NPCs want to follow you or not. Bartering doesn’t provide any worthwhile option that merely finding different stores that pay more for your good or offer other items can’t.
*
Bonus to skill checks (dialogue and other INT or CHA-related activities). As before, I don’t think my suggestions eliminate the time tested social and mental characteristics. They simply approach them from a different angle, one that doesn’t suffer with the poor depiction of these attributes.
If you disagree – which you naturally do – and want to make a case of how my suggestions don’t really improve the design then that’s fine. You should do so and we can discuss them as well as other alternatives. Otherwise implying I’m not trying to “fix the problem” when I’m actually doing so is pretty disappointing coming from you VD, specially since you know i don’t have the time to reply to everyone or to every single concern, and that I’ll lose that ability very soon (in two hours, actually!). Lumping in this kind of trite accusation is uneccesary stuff for me to reply to and doesn’t show the best of judgement on your behalf.
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