Should attributes be divvied up according to playstyle, or balance, or "realism"?

[Greywander]

There are... a lot of ways you could split up an attribute system, and assign related skills. I was just reading through the rules for Shadiversity's Cogent Roleplay system, and comparing it to some other systems I've read, such as Vampire, GURPS, and even D&D 5e, and I noticed that each system seems to handle the idea of attributes differently. Here's a rough concept of how I could see dividing the attributes up:

Playstyle

Vampire is a good example of this one. It has three main attributes/attribute groups: physical, mental, and social. Each one then has three subattributes that let you specialize in different areas of those broad categories. Now, I haven't played a lot of Vampire, but IIRC Stealth is actually a mental skill (this might actually be wrong, I can't for the life of me find it). Seems odd, right? But it actually does make sense when you think about how the attributes are split up.

In D&D 5e, there are supposedly three pillars of play: combat, exploration, and roleplay. Vampire's three attribute groups line up with those pretty well: physical is mostly use for combat, mental is more for exploration and puzzle-solving, and social is of course for roleplay. There's also a weaker correlation between the three pillars and the Gamist-Narrativist-Simulationist model: combat is usually "the Game", exploration typically involves interacting with the simulation, and roleplay and Narrative go hand-in-hand. You could, of course, have a game built around, say, political intrigue, in which case that would be "the Game", which is why its a weaker correlation, but this is a useful observation nontheless.

The point is, based on my own playstyle preferences, I can know going into a game of Vampire that I probably want to max out my mental stats, and then put any leftovers into physical, and basically ignore my social stats. I'm a heavy Simulationist who's more into the exploration and puzzle-solving aspect of RPGs, but I also enjoy mastering the rules of the Game and coming up with interesting builds or optimized characters. I'm not opposed to RP, but it's hard for me to get into character and get into the roleplay.

And that's why Stealth is a mental skill (still not sure about this, but let's pretend for the sake of argument): because it relates to the exploration pillar, not the combat pillar.

Balance

What I mean by this is that any attribute can be used to get the result you want, each one just does so in different ways. An example of this would be finesse weapons in D&D 5e, as well as cantrips. Between these options, you can turn any ability score except Constitution into your offensive ability score. There are consequences to raising one score over another, though; Strength gives you the widest array of melee weapons to choose from, including the strongest options, while Dexterity is requires for ranged weapons, and, outside of specific class features, any of the mental ability scores will pigeonhole you into using magic since they don't help with weapons.

Basically, while a stat might be focused on one pillar over another, they all have something to contribute to each pillar. I'm not sure if this is entirely true for D&D, but this does seem to be the general design philosophy for 5e at least. Everyone gets a few skills for out of combat, everyone has access to a decent weapon or cantrip in-combat, there should never be a time when you're entirely useless, even if you're not the most optimized for the task at hand.

Realism

Understandably, it's kind of hard to roleplay if everything is too abstract. If a character is strong, we would expect them to be good at strong stuff. If they're fast, they should be good at fast stuff. Smart, good at smart stuff. So, even if we say "X stat is for Y pillar", X still represents a tangible quality, not an abstract one. And that tangible quality has consequences for what that character should and shouldn't be good at. If we find out that our character has no bonuses to a certain task, even though it should fall under the purview of one of our attributes, because that attribute is arbitrarily assigned to a one pillar while the task in question belongs to a different pillar, then it's going to shake our suspension of disbelief and bring us out of the game.

At the same time, if attributes and skills are assigned in an entirely "realistic" way, then it can come off as haphazard and random. To be truly good at a certain type of playstyle, you would need to invest in all attributes and specific skills within those attributes. It becomes difficult to play the game you want to because the different aptitudes you need are locked behind different attributes. "That's how it works in real life" is often a poor argument when it comes to rule arbitration or game design. This isn't real life, this is a game. And it should be designed as a good game first, and an accurate simulation of real life second.

Now, all that said, I think the best approach is probably to use a bit of all three methods of doing attributes. Group your attributes according to playstyle so that those playstyles are easily accessible to those who want them. Then use the "realism" argument as an excuse to add balance, so that even a character who is heavily focused into one playstyle can still find limited effectiveness in other playstyles.

What do you think? Are there other ways you'd model attributes? What is your preferred method, and why? Have you played any interesting games that do something different than what I've talked about here?

[noob]

There is also a lot of games without attributes.
Attributes are not needed for representing most of the characters people imagine.

[Morty]

I've become increasingly convinced that making attributes "realistic" is a fool's errand. A handful of numbers that are meant to be easily calculated won't represent the breadth of human capability - much less non-human. There are always going to be weird and unrealistic interactions, so it's best to treat them as a mechanical abstraction and balance accordingly. It's also worth considering if attributes are necessary to begin with - oftentimes a game might do just fine without them.

[Amdy_vill]

this depends on the system you are building or playing in. if the game is based on a story or non-comp gameplay you should use a playstyle based system to emphasize Story roles or mechanically abilities. a Comp gameplay focused game should use a balanced system to put players on a fair playing field with the dm and other players. Realism should be used in a game that is "Crunchy" or focuses on realism.

Note: no one game builds itself around only one idea(you point this out kinda but don't seem to notice it). you used Vampire as an example for Playstyle but Vampire is also a great example for Balanced style. general all 3 are used but to different degrees.

[Yakk]

What kind of game experience do you want? That is what matters.

And that follows from who you want to play the game.

You can have an RPG where being an incompetent buffoon is (structurally, in the game) more fun than being "perfect", or where your characters last an average of a few minutes and are thus disposable.

Such a game is going to have vastly different answers than a power-fantasy combat engine with a story attached RPG.

The game rules and mechanics are ways to get players to have the experience the game is designed to deliver. How well they do that is what matters.

[Maat Mons]

In WoD, Stealth is a Skill, not an Attribute. Skills don't have the Physical/Mental/Social breakdown that Attributes do. The Stealth Skill, like all Skills, could potentially be paired with different Attributes, depending on what exactly you're trying to do. Stealth would typically be paired with either Dexterity or Wits. Dexterity for literal hiding. Wits for being inconspicuous.



I like dividing things up by classical fictional archetypes. You actually cite several of those in your "Realism" section: Strong, Fast, and Smart. I'd typically add in Magical too. Or as I like to call them "Strong, Skillful, Smart, and Spooky."

However, it should be noted that, even though you mention them in the "Realism" section, the classical archetypes are not ties to realism. Realistically, a medieval longbow has a draw weight of 150 pounds, so the most important thing for using it effectively is Strength. Archetypically though, it's the Skillful/Fast character who's good with bows.

I say go for the archetypes. Not realism. You should design the game so people can play the characters they want to play. And the characters they want to play are generally inspired by fiction, not reality.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

The basic purpose of attributes is threefold. First, they act as a kind of roleplaying prompt or aptitude test. Pretty much every system that uses attributes has a character creation flow that goes Determine Concept -> Generate Attributes -> everything else, so your choice of attributes winnows down your later options and helps determine what you're good at or qualify for--and Generate Attributes is generally the first mechanical step, with Determine Concept being mostly brainstorming, so nearly all of those games let you go in with no concept chosen, generate your attributes, and then look at those to help pick a concept and flesh out a background, as was commonly done in OD&D and other "old school" games.

Second, they act as mechanical defaults. If you want to do a thing you'll generally roll a skill or use a character ability or expend a resource or whatever to accomplish that (often incorporating attributes somehow), but if what you're doing doesn't have an applicable skill or ability or resource, well, you can always fall back a plain ol' attribute roll. The number and kind of attributes is the part where playstyle vs. balance vs. realism mostly comes in: rules-light games tend to have few very generic attributes (e.g. Body, Mind, and Spirit) because it's assumed that the basic set of generic rules generally covers everything so either you don't need to default often or you're almost always using just the attributes, for instance, and games where you're expected to have multiple characters in the party capable of X tend to have more attributes related to X for role protection and character diversity (e.g. WoD has 3 dedicated social attributes because it's assumed everyone will be able to "social" things, while D&D has 1 because it's assumed you'll have a "party face" doing most of the social-ing).

Third, they're the "hooks" on which the mechanics of your system hangs. An attribute is tied into lots of things, from being added to skills to limiting character options to determining number of uses of things and so on, so the specific attributes chosen influence how characters will be built and used. For instance, if a game has a Stealth skill and a Perception skill, that implies that characters can train to do sneaky stuff, but if it has Stealth and Perception as attributes that implies that everyone has a basic stealth capability and the game is probably going to involve that a lot. And if a game has 3 social stats instead of 1, that implies there are enough social-themed abilities that the extra granularity is needed and useful.

So when coming up with your attribute system, those are the things to focus on. When coming up with character concepts, should players care if their characters have high Strength and low Agility and moderate Toughness to decide whether they'll be an agile duelist or a beefy bruiser, or just high or low Body to decide whether they care about physical stuff at all, and what does that say about the system and setting? When there's a hole in your skill system regarding intellectual skills, should a character fall back on their Intelligence, their Logic, their Smarts, or their Mind, and what does that say about the tone and breadth of the game? When coming up with character abilities, do you want to tie a particular ability into a character's Wisdom or Awareness or Intuition or no attribute at all, and what does that say about how abilities of that kind will be used?


I like dividing things up by classical fictional archetypes. You actually cite several of those in your "Realism" section: Strong, Fast, and Smart. I'd typically add in Magical too. Or as I like to call them "Strong, Skillful, Smart, and Spooky."

This is actually how D&D's attributes originated. In 3e and later they're arranged Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis, Cha to group the physical stats and the mental stats together, but before that it went Str, Int, Wis, Dex, Con, Cha because the main purpose for ability scores was to be "prime requisites" (most important attributes) for the different classes...and the first two classes for the game were Fighting-Man (Str) and Magic-User (Int), then the Cleric was added (Wis), then the Thief was added (Dex), then everyone's shared stat for health (Con), then a stat tacked on for reaction rolls and henchmen loyalty and such (Cha).