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 |
- Diablo (attributes)
- The Elder Scrolls (attributes in Arena, Daggerfall and Oblivion)
- Angband (attributes)
- 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 choice 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 of the top 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 44, 46% 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.
