Archive:Attributes

Attributes

Below a list of attributes encountered in today's role playing games. The idea is that we'll pick a subset of these that gives enough flexibility and allows for a nice combat system, but is also easy to understand.

Name	General effect	1	2	3	4
Strength	Increases damage and max inventory weight	X	X	X	X
Agility	Increases chance to hit and walking speed		X		X
Dexterity	Increases chance of evasion and missile accuracy	X		X	X
Vitality / Endurance / Constitution / Fortitude	Increases health and stamina regeneration rate	X	X	X	X
Energy / Intelligence / Magic / Mentality	Increases mana and mana regeneration rate	X	X	X	X
Wisdom	Increases how much you can remember (spells)			X
Spirit / Willpower / Awareness	Increases magic defence		X		X
Personality / Charisma	Related to bartering, getting information, getting into fights, diplomacy skills		X	X	X
Luck	Increases luck in many areas		X
Speed	Determines how fast you can do things		X

1. Diablo (attributes)
2. The Elder Scrolls (attributes in Arena, Daggerfall and Oblivion)
3. Angband (attributes)
4. The Mana World (proposal)

At the moment, ElvenProgrammer and Bjørn agreed to have the following 7 attributes:

Strength, Agility, Dexterity, Vitality, Intelligence, Willpower and Charisma.

Derived attributes

Derived attributes are the ones that are visible to the player, representing certain necessary concepts. These include:

• Your maximum health, mana (or magicka) and stamina (or fatigue)
• Damage dealt on hit (usually comes with min and max)
• Chance to hit when attacking
• The amount you can carry (encumbrance)

Skills

Interesting notes about possible skill systems were made at skill system, stat system 2 and at the master skill list.

I think that the master skill list is still a nice proposal, but I think we should leave out the "Stat skills". --Bjørn 11:53, 10 June 2006 (CEST)

Deriving level from skills

Several choices will have to be made. For example whether we'll have character levels at all and how skills and attributes are increased. This section describes a possible was to derive the character level from his skills. In Daggerfall, this was done as follows:

   (A - B + 28)/15 = level.

      where  A = All Primary Skills + The 2 Best Major Skills + Single Best Minor
             B = the starting value of these same skills.

In TMW we do not have a distinction between primary, major and minor skills. However, if we want to derive the character level from his skills it is important that its not easy for the player to increase his level simply by training his not so popular skills. Crush and Bjørn discussed another way of doing this, but with less arbitrary numbers and without any assumptions about the skill category.

We could simply multiply the skill level by a factor based on to what extend the skill is one of your top skills, and devide the sum by a given amount. When n is the index of the skill in the list sorted on skill level, 0.9^n could be the factor. An example with 10 skills for a typically average trained character (with skills and level going from 1 to 100):

0  1.0 * 78 = 78.0
1  0.9 * 65 = 58.5
2  0.81 * 53 = 42.93
3  0.729 * 40 = 29.16
4  0.6561 * 40 = 26.244
5  0.59049 * 38 = 22.43862
6  0.531441 * 33 = 17.537553
7  0.4782969 * 23 = 11.0008287
8  0.43046721 * 20 = 8.6093442
9  0.387420489 * 15 = 5.811307335

Sum of factors: 6.513215599
Sum of skills * factors: 300.231653235
Character level: 46.0957646298544 (level 46, 10% progression to next level)

The best thing the character can do to work towards the next level is to raise his highest skill. The downside to do this that this will be the hardest thing to do because it will be exponentially harder to increase in a certain skill.

From level to character attributes

I think when you increase level you should get a fixed amount of points that you can use to increase your attributes. Let's say attributes go from 1 to 100, and start at 20. With the current number of attributes, that's 7 * 80 = 560 points necessary to get the theoretical maxed out character. The character goes from level 1 to 100, so per level increase we need to get 560 / 99 = 5 points. I said "theoretical maxed out character" because with it being exponentially harder to increase your skills as they come closer to 100, we can easily make it virtually impossible to actually achieve this. When starting with attributes at 20 seems too high, we can also start with attributes at 5 and go for 6 points per level. --Bjørn 17:13, 10 June 2006 (CEST)

Crush has noted that he'd like players to be able to decrease their attributes as well, in order to increase others and thereby allowing the players to "correct their mistakes" if they think they have previously made the wrong choices when deviding the points for their attributes. As a solution we could choose for a system where for each level increase, one or more points can be substracted before proceeding with distributing points amongst attributes.

More refined, the idea is now that for each level increase you get a certain amount of '-' points and a certain amount of '+' points. The '-' points can be used to decrease an attribute, and results in the gain of a '+' point. '+' points can simply be used to increase an attribute. To make sure that players cannot collect '-' points in order to make big changes to their character attributes later, the maximum amount of '-' points you can have is the amount you gain on a level increase.