System grab-bags:Statistic types

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Statistic types

Age

A character's age is often just a cosmetic stat, but very young or very old characters typically face penalties. Age is also important in games with aging rules where very long periods of time pass, or in games where the characters are children.

Game design challenge: Create a game where a character's age is used as a statistic directly, where even a single year's difference of age can be important, and which allows a very wide range of character ages (such as 20-80 years old).

Systems of note; The time-travel game Continuum uses "Age" (duration of existence experienced by the character) as a feature, tying the ability to learn skills and abilities to elapsed Age, effectively equating Age and Experience/Advancement.

Alignment

D&D's twin axes of Lawful/Chaotic and Good/Evil are the most famous example of this, but the Humanity rating in the Vampire games also qualifies.

Attributes

Add to skill

The most typical use for attributes - you roll your attribute + skill.

Determine skill starting level

Attributes aren't added to the roll, but instead they determine the starting level of the skills based on that attribute.

Game examples: Star Wars (West End Games editions), GURPS.

Attributes (reversed)

An attribute variant used in the Star Wreck Role-Playing Game. All the attributes are actually negative ones, such as stupidity or clumsiness. These increase during play, so the more experienced (and high-ranking) a character becomes, the more incompetent he gets.

Beliefs

Burning Wheel requires each character to have 1-3 different beliefs. These help define a character's goals and a player's interests, and help the game master craft an interesting story. Acting in accordance to them also nets mechanical benefits.

Class

Fighter, Mage, Rogue, Cleric, Psion, Astronaut, Tourist...

Clones

As used in Paranoia: each time your character dies, one of his clones eventually shows up to take his place, with nearly identical memories and skills. Subtract one clone for each death.

Family

A character's family may be given its own statistic in games where the players have the option to switch to a related character. Keep track of your children and siblings, so that you know who'll be your successor when you die.

Innocence

Little Fears keeps track of a character's innocence rating. It goes down as the character ages, experiences horrible things or realizes that her child's faith doesn't actually help. When a character has no innocence left, they become adults blind to the Other World.

Instincts

Burning Wheel has each character mark down three Instincts, things the character will always do without the player needing to specify them. They can work as scripts for automating certain actions (”when surprised, always draw my knife”), ensuring the character won't get in trouble (”always have enough ingredients for noodle soup”) or hints about the kinds of situations the player wants to end up in (”if there's a cave-in, then I push the youngest to safety”).

Karma

A robot character may have a limited memory storage, only allowing ver to have a certain number of programs or skills loaded at a time.

Game design challenge: Alternatively, an interesting game could be built around a system that kept track of a character's most important memories, and those had a game effect.

Oaths

Either ones your character has sworn, or oaths that others have sworn and that affect you. Characters typically receive bonuses to rolls made in an attempt to fulfill their oaths.

Game design challenge: Create a game where a character's only statistics are in the form of several oaths - each sworn by someone else than the character but having to do with her, such as ”I will mold my daughter into the most cunning rogue ever seen”, or ”I will make a blood sacrifice of my foe's daughter on her eighteenth birthday”.

Popularity

( http://gregorhutton.com/boxninja/bestfriends/index.html )

Story importance

Universalis and Fastlane have a ”story importace” statistic, derived from the sum of resources that have been spent on a certain character or object. This influences how powerful the object can be in conflicts, and how hard it is to eliminate. Something that a lot of players have spent their resources on is important for them, and therefore difficult to just remove from the story.

Visibility

In Primetime Adventures, a campaign's length is specified in advance, and each character's Visibility rating in each session (”episode”) is determined when setting up the campaign, so that one character will always be the center of the episode with others getting less attention, and so that each character will have the highest possible Visibility rating in at least one episode.

Minor variants

Unique statistics

Each player is given a set of generic statistics, and tasked with picking a more narrow, specialized statistic for each one. For instance, in the place of a ”body” statistic, the player picks ”speed” for his character. Unlike with a specialization, this doesn't mean his character gets a bonus for situations where the description applies - it means he can only use the statistic in situations where the description applies.