NaNoWriMo Blogging Six

I promised myself even though I have devoted all available creative engines to the production of my novel that I’d make an attempt to post at least once a day. So, since my novel’s on my mind and I have ream upon ream of notes, expect some NaNo blogging ahead. If you want to check out previous posts on the subject just click the NaNoWriMo tag.

As you might or might not remember I’m writing about a bunch of people who connect while playtesting a computer game. Specifically, an MMO like WoW or Guild Wars or something where a bunch of people get online and play a fantasy RPG together. Those sort of games, though, are extremely complex with a lot of moving parts to allow for a bunch of different people to find a way of playing that appeals to them. And, well, I’m obsessive enough about getting my details right that I’ve mapped out a lot of the mechanics of just how my imaginary game would play. It’s based, loosely, on several MMOs I’ve played as well as my own warped little ideas about what would make a game fun and my even more warped ideas about what would work best in my story. I’m not sure if it would all hang together if it were an actual game but I just want to have some consistent rules about how my characters can interact with the game. Not all of them will make it into the text but as long as they’re there then I can have a rough idea about just what can happen and that helps me, at least, to write. So, today I’m going to detail my attribute or character statistics system.

To really explain attributes (And, yes, I have some sort of obsessive compulsive overexplanative disorder so I really do have to do this.) I’d have to explain my elemental system first. But that’s really worthy of another post entirely. All you need to know for now is that there are five basic elements: Air, Earth, Fire, Metal, and Water. Each one symbolizes certain things to the fictional people within my little game world. And each of my five classes - Monk/Adept, Fighter, Mentalist, Ranger, and Sorcerer - is considered to typify the qualities of one of those elements. Mentalists = Air, Rangers = Earth, Fighters = Fire, Sorcerers = Metal, and Monks = Water.

Clans of the Highborn Primer: Attributes

Okay, so there are three main uses for attributes. Every character can use a weapon and armor and any and all equipment. Certain items, however, have attribute requirements which, if they aren’t met, drastically reduce the effectiveness of the item. Characters also have special abilities known as skills which can be affected by attributes as well. Certain skills cannot be used unless their attribute requirement is met and other skills will be more powerful as an attribute is leveled up. And finally all characters have basic characteristics – like health or mana – which can be affected by attributes as well.

There are five attributes – one associated with each element – that every character shares. For example, Strength increases the amount of damage, somehow, that a character will cause. Each class also gets its own attributes associated with some of the skills they gain as members of that class. For example, Sorcerers – my mage class - use elemental magic so they get an attribute for magical spells related to each element, such as Pyromancy. As my story begins passive benefits have been introduced for these class-specific attributes so that they do more than just increase the effectiveness of a character’s skills. Not all of them are in at first but over time each attribute changes an avatar’s characteristics in some basic way.
For example, Pyromancy grants resistance to fire damage. Sorcerers with high levels of Pyromancy will take less damage from fire based attacks.

Also, since my fictional game is in testing it’s subject to frequent changes. Just shake-ups in the way things are as the game gets closer to release. My basic healing class, the Monk, eventually transforms into the Adept class, for example, which is basically the same thing just going by a different name. And another major change in the game’s design is a shift in attributes. The system itself doesn’t change much once my story gets started but the attributes themselves get jumbled up. And some lesser used ones get replaced. The original basic, general attributes were:

(Original) Base Stats:

• Charisma: Water. Decreases merchant prices and influences NPC reactions.
• Dexterity: Fire. Increases movement speed, armor
• Intelligence: Metal. Decreases casting speed, mana costs, and increases mana regeneration
• Luck: Air. Increases critical hit chances, item drops
• Strength: Earth. Increases weapon damage, inventory space, health regeneration

As you might be able to tell, in this setup Intelligence is, as we say in the gaming biz, totally imba. Especially for any caster. It’s the sort of thing that no intelligent designer would ever intentionally put into their game. Unless they were trying to create an imbalanced stat that everyone would gravitate towards. Like I am. At least in the first part of the story I want my characters to encounter problems in the game that would be familiar to any playtesters, the stupid little things that get argued over and eventually fixed, somehow, before the game ships. I’ve sprinkled a few such intentional design errors throughout so that my characters can find them, fix them, and have a feeling of accomplishment if not ownership over the game. The first iteration of the Intelligence stat would be one of those. Not only does it lower the amount of mana a character has to spend by cutting the mp costs of skills, it also raises the effective mana pool of characters by speeding up the rate at which lost mana is returned. As if that wasn’t enough it also lets characters cast skills faster so they can better spend their greater mana stores.

It’s just amazingly good. Too good, really. What some people would call degenerative – it creates a state in the game where there is no other reasonable alternative so the game becomes balanced for everyone having high levels of Intelligence. Compared with the next to useless Charisma, which only lowers item costs and gold pieces, while not being limitless are trivial to get (It also changes NPC reactions which means you’ll get some different flavor text from time to time and maybe an extra non-essential quest or two). The only way I can see that stat becomes useful is if a player is making a lot of trades with the NPCs. There are people who play these sorts of games for the economic game, so to speak, but the real money there is in trading with other players – computer controlled merchants are, by and large, a gold sink taking money out of the economy and acting as an unofficial tax to keep inflation down if not a break on rapid player advancement – either in-game or through some form of RMT. And there Charisma doesn’t help you a bit. Luck is also a bit on the underpowered side as, in my game at least, critical hits only occur with weapons not when using skills. The item drops are nice but like the crits it’s a random, hard to observe die roll added on top of an already random and obscured mechanic. It’s hard for players to get a sense of feedback from that sort of device as opposed to Intelligence where the effect of a few points difference is consistently and measurably effective.

So, at some point during the test (which I might or might not get to at this point. Chapter One is swelling and might top out at 50,000 words in and of itself.), the developers decide to scrap the old attributes and implement a whole new set:

(Redesigned) Base Stats:

• Dexterity: Earth. Increases evasion rate (percentile chance to avoid attacks) and weapon accuracy (percentile chance to hit target)
• Intelligence: Metal. Decreases casting time
• Strength: Fire. Increases melee weapon damage and accuracy
• Resilience: Water. Increases magical resistance (percentile chance to avoid debuffs)
• Vitality: Air. Increases health regeneration, recovery rate from adverse effects

So, the first change is the drastic one to Intelligence. It’s still nice but not as completely and utterly insanely good. Now it doesn’t affect mana at all it just cuts casting time (By up to half at 100Int). Its mana related duties get shifted to other, class-based attributes (Which, as this is running long I’ll talk about if and when I ever post about my character classes). Luck is dropped in favor of Vitality which helps characters to stay healthy. And Charisma gets the boot in favor of Resilience which provides some protection against magical attacks. Dexterity changes elements from Fire to Earth (to better suit Rangers as they evolved in the test) and likewise offers protection from physical attacks – by switching from flat protective armor which would cover almost all damage sources to evasion which only works against weapon attacks. Strength swaps its element with Dexterity, of course, and becomes much more offensively oriented by ceding health recovery to Vitality and concentrating on making weapons more powerful. Both ideas of attribute variable movement speed and inventory space are lost in favor of making everyone equal in those areas (Well, some skills can affect movement…) and having attributes more easily customized on the fly.

Every character has those five attributes but they also get attributes from their class. These attributes are mostly linked with skills – increasing their effectiveness – at first, but as I said, they start to have passive benefits like the base attributes do shortly before my novel begins. As each class has at least four unique attributes I’ll leave them aside for now until I decide to go into greater detail about my imaginary classes – for the most part the important part of each of those attributes is what they do to the various skills in the game. The important thing to glean from this paragraph is that each character will have at least nine attributes to invest in. Five that everyone else has and four from their class.

Now, each character starts off with 50 attribute points to be spent on any of their attributes. As they level they gain 100 more points for 150 total. Each attribute can be raised from a level of 0 to a level of 50 through spending one attribute point to raise an attribute one level. So each character has enough attribute points to max out three different attributes (Though most characters find it better to distribute their points across several more). This also means that a max level character has only two better stats – potentially, at least – than a starting character. If, at this point, you’re guessing that I think that you shouldn’t have to be max level with the best gear in order to compete in MMOs, then you’d be on the right track. 50 isn’t the maximum in any attribute though, as stat bonuses from equipment range up to +50 and are added on top of a character’s base attributes making for a maximum level of 100 in any one attribute – 50 from attributes and 50 from items (bonuses from items don’t stack past 50, so it’s a firm cap). Certain skills, effects, and items can provide temporary bonuses that push attributes past that point on occasion, also. Although, as my story begins that’s become a problem as players have found ways of getting their attributes to ridiculous levels. So those skills that create attribute bonuses are being toned down while those items that proc stat bonuses are being phased out.

So, there it is: Attributes in my fictitious game have a variety of effects. Each character has nine or more of them and up to 150 points to spend in improving them. The attribute cap is 100, fifty of which comes from a character’s items although characters can temporarily push past that limit through special means.