RPGs Should Ditch the Stats
- Thread starter Susan Arendt
- Start date
Well, I'm going to be devils advocate here, and say that I'm agreeing with this man. Why? Me and my friends have been playing D&D for a while now, and recently, I came up with the great idea of playing a different style of RPG - Using the fudge system.
To be blunt, it went over like a keg of beer in a bar. A bar that lacked beer and everyone wanted it. The stats are kept to a minimum, being things that the players are defining, with a couple of "Generic" stats in case there's no skills that match up, but chances are the players'll just use a Fudge point to clear that anyway. We aren't stuck with those basic statistics, we have what we want our guys to do, not the same stuff as everyone else, only a bit different.
I don't agree that we need to drop stats almost entirely, but really, the less we have there, the more we're roleplaying, and let's face it, we aren't playing a "Roll the dice" game, we're here to BE the characters we made up for us to be.
To be blunt, it went over like a keg of beer in a bar. A bar that lacked beer and everyone wanted it. The stats are kept to a minimum, being things that the players are defining, with a couple of "Generic" stats in case there's no skills that match up, but chances are the players'll just use a Fudge point to clear that anyway. We aren't stuck with those basic statistics, we have what we want our guys to do, not the same stuff as everyone else, only a bit different.
I don't agree that we need to drop stats almost entirely, but really, the less we have there, the more we're roleplaying, and let's face it, we aren't playing a "Roll the dice" game, we're here to BE the characters we made up for us to be.
I was recently discussing this topic with a few friends of mine, though in the context of whether it was possible to developing an MMO which was not about stat hounding but did provide extensive character development and a carrot to follow.
The development idea that we came up with was based around character development in feats, skills and rank with item customization by attributes. Basically: your character's only stats were Health and a 'Heat' bar (the more skills you used, the closer to full it became. Once it was full you could still use skills - it'd just start damaging your character too, to the point of permanent mutilation and death). You had feats, which were very broad abilities describing your character (think: athletic, bulky, sharp sighted) and had passive effects. For example, a skinny character would move faster but build up heat faster, where a fat character would move slower but build up heat slower. Some feats would open up a new line of items to equip or allow for a bigger skill set to be used.
Skills were your combat and non combat abilities. Think Fire magic, Fisticuffs (who doesn't like fisticuffs?), Gun shots, Lightning magic, you know, the cool stuff. Everyone could learn (actually learn, as in player experimentation) and use all skills, but you could only equip a certain number of skills; equipped skills wouldn't build up Heat, activate faster and be more powerful and usable.
Rank would have be our equivelant of levels, where you can see how much content a character has done. The more content you do, the better you do it, the higher your rank (think: sergeant, general, grunt, major, etc). Higher ranks would allow for more armor types, skill types, give you free bodyguards, make NPCs react differently, give you discounts, allow you to make custom missions, etc.
Of course you could gather and equip armors and weapons, but instead of having any absolute stats they'd be assigned an attribute. For example, common platemail has the attributes 'Heavy', 'Full cover' and 'Iron'. Heavy means it impairs movement speed. Full cover means it covers the entire body, increasing your health. Iron makes it weak to, say, lightning but resists physical attacks. In comparison, chainmail armor wouldn't be heavy or full cover, and only have iron as attribute. Cloth armor might have full cover, but have cloth as an attribute giving no resistances while being weak to fire. Stuff like that.
It was some pretty fun theory crafting to design a game which was in effect statless and classless. What does a system like this have to offer? It's easy and obvious while allowing for heavy customization. Why would it be better than plain numbers? It adds to the immersion of the player, which is very critical to the experience of any RPG.
The development idea that we came up with was based around character development in feats, skills and rank with item customization by attributes. Basically: your character's only stats were Health and a 'Heat' bar (the more skills you used, the closer to full it became. Once it was full you could still use skills - it'd just start damaging your character too, to the point of permanent mutilation and death). You had feats, which were very broad abilities describing your character (think: athletic, bulky, sharp sighted) and had passive effects. For example, a skinny character would move faster but build up heat faster, where a fat character would move slower but build up heat slower. Some feats would open up a new line of items to equip or allow for a bigger skill set to be used.
Skills were your combat and non combat abilities. Think Fire magic, Fisticuffs (who doesn't like fisticuffs?), Gun shots, Lightning magic, you know, the cool stuff. Everyone could learn (actually learn, as in player experimentation) and use all skills, but you could only equip a certain number of skills; equipped skills wouldn't build up Heat, activate faster and be more powerful and usable.
Rank would have be our equivelant of levels, where you can see how much content a character has done. The more content you do, the better you do it, the higher your rank (think: sergeant, general, grunt, major, etc). Higher ranks would allow for more armor types, skill types, give you free bodyguards, make NPCs react differently, give you discounts, allow you to make custom missions, etc.
Of course you could gather and equip armors and weapons, but instead of having any absolute stats they'd be assigned an attribute. For example, common platemail has the attributes 'Heavy', 'Full cover' and 'Iron'. Heavy means it impairs movement speed. Full cover means it covers the entire body, increasing your health. Iron makes it weak to, say, lightning but resists physical attacks. In comparison, chainmail armor wouldn't be heavy or full cover, and only have iron as attribute. Cloth armor might have full cover, but have cloth as an attribute giving no resistances while being weak to fire. Stuff like that.
It was some pretty fun theory crafting to design a game which was in effect statless and classless. What does a system like this have to offer? It's easy and obvious while allowing for heavy customization. Why would it be better than plain numbers? It adds to the immersion of the player, which is very critical to the experience of any RPG.
I think that stats in RPG's are necessary but that does not mean we need to be shown everything from DPS, crit rate, chance to proc, hit % etc...
Take WoW as an example. They have made all of ther stats available to everyone which has naturally led to min-maxing. By giving everyone all of the information the game effectively stops being an RPG. You play an RPG to become someone else or a version of yourself you have always wanted to be. If you are able to min-max your character, you lose all of the flaws that make your character unique. Instead you are just the next generic warrior number 6284. Games like WoW become an action game with no individuality, everyone is the same, and if you don't follow the min-maxing trend it is next to impossible to run any of the end game content with your "gimped" character.
Single player RPG's also do this by not scaling the encounters or giving other altrernatives for your character to accomplish their task. See Titan Quest, playing a straight up warrior or or a mage. After the first few levels the mage can walk through the game without breaking a sweat. The warrior however will be tooth and nail most of the way.
RPG's need to be able to account for any way we want to play them, "gimped" or not. By hiding the stats we end up creating the characters we think are cool, not the ones we know will win. This gives me far more enjoyment and a sense of accomplishment than building the min-maxed character the game or the players are forcing me to be.
Should we get rid of stats? No I like my stats, but only when it comes to my character stats or possibly skill stats. As for the rest, hide them in the code so we never see them and let our characters truly be our own unique, flawed creations that we enjoy.
That to me is what the spirit of RPG's is all about.
Take WoW as an example. They have made all of ther stats available to everyone which has naturally led to min-maxing. By giving everyone all of the information the game effectively stops being an RPG. You play an RPG to become someone else or a version of yourself you have always wanted to be. If you are able to min-max your character, you lose all of the flaws that make your character unique. Instead you are just the next generic warrior number 6284. Games like WoW become an action game with no individuality, everyone is the same, and if you don't follow the min-maxing trend it is next to impossible to run any of the end game content with your "gimped" character.
Single player RPG's also do this by not scaling the encounters or giving other altrernatives for your character to accomplish their task. See Titan Quest, playing a straight up warrior or or a mage. After the first few levels the mage can walk through the game without breaking a sweat. The warrior however will be tooth and nail most of the way.
RPG's need to be able to account for any way we want to play them, "gimped" or not. By hiding the stats we end up creating the characters we think are cool, not the ones we know will win. This gives me far more enjoyment and a sense of accomplishment than building the min-maxed character the game or the players are forcing me to be.
Should we get rid of stats? No I like my stats, but only when it comes to my character stats or possibly skill stats. As for the rest, hide them in the code so we never see them and let our characters truly be our own unique, flawed creations that we enjoy.
That to me is what the spirit of RPG's is all about.
Ultima has a similar system. Heck just grab Ultima Online and play on a freeshard and you'll see what a fantastic stat system it has. Someone out there needs to develop a more modern iteration of Ultima Online. Not just some client with updated graphics, but a full fledged update that streamlines the whole experience.Kiutu said:
Actually, the Sims did, and indeed even the latest incarnation has stats. Sure, they're for things like cooking and fitness etc. but they're starts nontheless.Ultratwinkie said:
I think a more apt example would be Fable 2. And, I felt a little disappointed that there was very little choice based roleplaying. You got saddled with either good missions or evil missions. Do good everyone loves you, do evil everyone either hates or fears you, but, it wasn't set up in such away that your character ever felt like someone you'd made. More like a doll that you could occasionally choose to dress up and overfeed. *shrugs*.
If you don't like stat based games, that's just fine, but most fans of the genre do. An RPG without stats would be to the RPG genre what Halo Wars is to the PC RTS genre, a watered down version sacrificing depth for casual gamer appeal.
And saying fallout 3 is held back, just because it has stats and levels, and old games have stats and levels, is just ignorant. You might as well whine that similar guns keep showing up in shooters, or that racing games all use similar mechanics
And saying fallout 3 is held back, just because it has stats and levels, and old games have stats and levels, is just ignorant. You might as well whine that similar guns keep showing up in shooters, or that racing games all use similar mechanics
Isn't stats the main compodent of an RPG? The article bacially says well everything has changed except the core so it's basically the same as older RPGs. But isn't that like saying all FPSs are the same because all you do is kill people?
We should remember why there are stats in the first place: in role-playing games the most common way to decide if a certain action succeeds (for instance swinging your sword at an armored ogre or picking a difficult lock) is by rolling dice. At the lowest of levels you don't get any modifiers to the result which means the result will not be in your advantage. However as you level up you gain modifiers to this roll (for instance in the form of an attack of skill bonus) which gets added to the result of the roll. This makes the results much less random, and if you become good enough the roll might not even matter anymore. The stats are there for a reason. In an FPS it's your own accuracy that determines if you hit someone. In an RPG it's your stats.
I think if anything they should have mores tats, the real problem is that it all comes down to the level. Getting rid of the concept of levels and instead having different proficiencies in various skills would make it a more immersive system. Like in Elder Scrolls were the raising of skills give you levels not the other way around.
It's an MMORPG, so no the story isn't central to the game play. It's a game from 1998, and MMOs back then had shit for story. Otherwise it's a fun, yet crude game. It looks muddy, it plays rough and the world is tough. You'll probably log in and get killed within 20 minutes by some player if you got into it now.Kiutu said:
i said this the other day and i'll say it again here. levelling is a core part of the RPG genre. it's one of the things that defines an RPG as what it is. without this element it would just be an adventure game. perhaps it could be changed in some way, but to remove this aspect altogether would be changing the games in a way that would stop them from being RPGs. i ask, why not take the shooting element out of FPSs, which would be a similar idea. maybe this is more extreme, but it is in the same vein, so no i wouldn't suggest removing this form of character progression from the RPG genre is a good idea.
The ubiquity of stats is due to the fact that it gives you the illusion of character customization. It's a genre defining thing, if you get rid of them, you end up with a bastardization like in Mass Effect. Don't get me wrong, I liked the game, but the character system was the weakest part of the game.
Study in game design theory is still in its infancy. Theirs hardly even a common language to help identify common characteristics in good games. One of the few examples of well established traits in enjoyable games is intentionality and feedback. Put simply, Intentionality is the capacity for a player make a choice between many that effects the game state. Feedback is when the game makes clear what effect the choice had on the game state. Action games can generally rely on twitch movement, and choices between synergy of skills to create meaningful choices and feedback. But RPGs are very different. Stats are so popular because they provide a way for the player to gather information from the stats in order to make meaningful choices, and provide the tools necessary to give the player meaningful information about the game state. Efforts that would remove stats would simply obscure them from the player. After all, a game is a formal system at the core, so there must be mechanics governing the actions within the game. But if you obfuscate stats from the player, that just means that the player is less capable of makeing meaningful choices, and has a diminished capacity to understand the game state and there effects on the game state.
You can never remove stats, but it might be possible to present stats to the player in a different way that provides just as much information. However, you have to realize that it is in the nature of playing games to want to simplify the information given to the smallest, most understandable quantity. Most situations where you try to present stats in an alternative way would simply lead to players doing the boring busy work of translating the non-stat information you are giving the player into there own version of stats. A dull task half of the time, and a frustrating lack of feedback the rest. But if you could make the way in which the player translates the information given into statistics interesting in and of itself, then that might work. But it also sounds like you are starting to cease to be an RPG.
There is a massive amount of work to be done before you can create an RPG without a list of stats that still provides the robust level of intentionality and feedback. If it is even possible, then a game that does so needs to come along so later games can adapt similar mechanics. Until that happens, I think a safer bet would be to try to design games with different sorts of statistics that create new and different sorts of patterns and choices which reflect on new and meaningful possible game states. And don't worry, as an art form, games are probably evolving and innovating faster then any other artistic genre in the history of the world. It just might not feel that way because the surface presentation is evolving even faster, and it's only natural to want to grow up faster when all the other forms of art have decades, centuries, or millennium to get ahead. Were doing okay.
You can never remove stats, but it might be possible to present stats to the player in a different way that provides just as much information. However, you have to realize that it is in the nature of playing games to want to simplify the information given to the smallest, most understandable quantity. Most situations where you try to present stats in an alternative way would simply lead to players doing the boring busy work of translating the non-stat information you are giving the player into there own version of stats. A dull task half of the time, and a frustrating lack of feedback the rest. But if you could make the way in which the player translates the information given into statistics interesting in and of itself, then that might work. But it also sounds like you are starting to cease to be an RPG.
There is a massive amount of work to be done before you can create an RPG without a list of stats that still provides the robust level of intentionality and feedback. If it is even possible, then a game that does so needs to come along so later games can adapt similar mechanics. Until that happens, I think a safer bet would be to try to design games with different sorts of statistics that create new and different sorts of patterns and choices which reflect on new and meaningful possible game states. And don't worry, as an art form, games are probably evolving and innovating faster then any other artistic genre in the history of the world. It just might not feel that way because the surface presentation is evolving even faster, and it's only natural to want to grow up faster when all the other forms of art have decades, centuries, or millennium to get ahead. Were doing okay.
You know if you blanket statement wide enough everything is hardly distinguishable from its ancestors.
I mean shit people still die so obviously nothing has changed in people since the very first humans. FPSs all have guns in them so there really isn't anything that has changed since the very first ones.
Sure you could argue that going the other way and picking out tiny differences is unfair too...but to say that RPGs haven't really changed is kind of...I dunno...I wanna say Retarded. I can't remember is Retarded is legitimate these days or not.
Frankly the more numbers I have thrown at me the bigger my brain penis gets.
That's why I love WoW's achievement general info section. It tells me shit like how much total damage my character has done. I can feel my conscious spewing its thought goo all over the low income apartment its shacked up in.
I LOVE numbers, I mean damn have you ever played any Nippon Ichi game? It's numbers to the extreme and its quite pleasant.
Then again I was that guy who used to talk about calculators like other guys talked about football teams.
I mean shit people still die so obviously nothing has changed in people since the very first humans. FPSs all have guns in them so there really isn't anything that has changed since the very first ones.
Sure you could argue that going the other way and picking out tiny differences is unfair too...but to say that RPGs haven't really changed is kind of...I dunno...I wanna say Retarded. I can't remember is Retarded is legitimate these days or not.
Frankly the more numbers I have thrown at me the bigger my brain penis gets.
That's why I love WoW's achievement general info section. It tells me shit like how much total damage my character has done. I can feel my conscious spewing its thought goo all over the low income apartment its shacked up in.
I LOVE numbers, I mean damn have you ever played any Nippon Ichi game? It's numbers to the extreme and its quite pleasant.
Then again I was that guy who used to talk about calculators like other guys talked about football teams.
They're RPGs because of the stats. Think about all the game you're losing without them. They've got items to increase stats, weapons requiring certain stats, abilities to follow suit, hell, there are even quests that require specific stats. Without them, we can't improve our character, and because it's Role Playing, we can't improve ourselves.