f13.net forums - Character Traits in MMOGs

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July 19, 2025, 06:40:51 AM

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Remember the traits in Fallout? Traits were based on the GURPS rule set’s advantages and disadvantages. The traits were a way for role-playing to have a real effect on gameplay. While it is true that the old pen and paper rules were used much more often to reiterate the characters’ quirks, for example, "character answers every question with a question.” The fallout videogame showed that these kinds of character traits could carry tangible effects which could reinforce role-playing.

There's another more modern example of this in Psychonauts. In the game Rasputin has a quark in the form of a curse that states that every member of his family will die in water. Obviously as a hardcoded aspect of an adventure/platformer this is integrated much more than anything I am suggesting, but the idea is that the game could have been played without that particular quirk. As an example for those who've played the game during Mila’s dance party she demonstrates that use of the levitation power makes the player immune to fire or electricity and radioactivity. The levitation is also supposed to give protection against the water but as soon as the player rolls over the water they are attacked by it. Why can't players select these sorts of game altering character traits for MMOGs.

To be clear I don't mean necessarily that the only thing that we should expect is disadvantages. The point in the original pen and paper system was that the character would take a disadvantage in exchange for character points for use elsewhere including quirky advantages. This would put a whole new spin on min-maxing.

There are plenty of disadvantages that can make for some really interesting play especially in persistent worlds. You could have a disadvantage for an addictive personality so players could get hooked on heals of buffs. You could have a water phobia so the players couldn't cross even streams without finding a bridge. Another easy to implement trait would be Distractibility, so that the furor in a fight with more than one enemy might cause the character to jump targets randomly throughout the course of the battle. And there's my personal favorite, delusions whereby a player might hallucinate an enemy attack where there isn't one. So that, for example, the player's system would act as if a fight was going on damage points flying on either side but any other player walking on the scene would see a character running around flailing wildly at nothing.

You could of course also have advantages, like pyromania which might act like a buff anytime there's a fire within range of the character. A player could choose to be a naturalist which would make animals less likely to agro the character. Another possibly would be the system most like fallout where advantages and disadvantages are linked beforehand. A character with bloodlust for example would attack faster but on the other hand would lose the ability to target specific opponents.

These interactions would cause players to behave a certain way based on the characters they played. In other words it's role-playing without being pointlessly gay.

Edit: Spelling in topic title.

Interesting characters are always defined by their flaws rather than their virtues. Flaws are conflict factories... and conflict is grist for the roleplaying mill: "I'd love to, but..." So I'd love to play a game like this, but... I'm a roleplayer. I play on roleplaying servers even in the sad state they tend to be in. Notice they are even more rare than PvP servers, the other conflict factory.

MMOGs go out of their way to construct a one-size-fits-all experience. The goal is to keep as many players happy as possible for as long as possible. Conflict, even fascinating and well designed conflict, breaks up groups and spoils plans. If Mad Leroy has to take the long way to Duskholm because he won't cross the river without a bridge, then we might leave Mad Leroy behind. That's interesting, but it's not necessarily fun. Bloodlust is popular with soloers, but folks are wary of inviting them along on a war party, so when the Sashka the Barbarian gets tired of soloing she's SOL. After a certain point those disappointed players stop making alts and cancel their subscription, and the guys at corporate ask why we included features specifically designed to fuck the revenue stream. The guys at corporate make carebears look whiny.

This idea has a lot of potential... it would certainly generate wonderful pre-game hype. Just be careful to remember that flaws work in Pen and Paper games (and single player CRPGs) because the whole story is written with them in mind, and the player never has to see somebody else effortlessly doing what is a tedious struggle for them because they happened to choose that stupid flaw.

The experience I've had with these in tabletop RPGs has not been, on the whole, positive. Seeing them implemented well in a PC MMO would be a serious challenge, in my opinion.

Will Joe Newbie know the pros and cons of picking a specific power? If I decide to take that "cannot cross running water" trait, I have no idea how badly I'm gimping myself until I already know how the world is set up. It could be a very minor annoyance (in a game like Guild Wars), or it could mean that there are huge and important islands which I will never, ever, be able to access. How am I going to know that as I'm rolling up a character?

In my experience, 90% of the time that someone reaches for the sourcebook with the character traits, they're looking to min-max themselves, not add depth to their character. They're going to take some obscure phobia that they'll never have to deal with (fear of snakes? Well, I'll just avoid the areas with the snakes then) to balance out some bonus that they will frequently use (like a universal +1 to strike). I've had a player who seriously tried to convince me that he'd be able to take "one armed" (a flaw that sees one of your character's arms amputated) and "ambidexterous" (which allows the player to wield weapons in both hands with equal skill) on the same character, because it wasn't expressly forbidden by the rulebook. Min-maxers are drawn to these things like bees to honey. That means that it's essential that these traits are perfectly balanced. Plus, the fact that you probably won't be able to change them mid-game means that changes are going to piss of the players, so they'll have to be balanced on day one, with every possible combination of class/skill/race/equipment/group in the game. That sounds like a lot of work for some fairly negligible gain.

Negative traits in a PnP RPG like in the Hero system (Champions was the first PnP RPG that I saw them in) can work because the DM/GM ultimately has control over how often they affect the Hero. In a single player CRPG the game designers have less control but it doesn't really matter all that much if the player munchkins his way through the game. In a PvE MMORPG it can be a big problem because of the rate of content and resource consumption and in a PvP MMORPG it's ripe for abuse and almost certainly unbalancable for a system of any reasonable complexity.

Didn't Daggerfall have something like this? I remember playing a Wizard that could only regenerate spell points in the sun or something like that.

It works well when you use a bit of imagination. Oddly role playing seems to work better in single-player games where the incentive to min/max is less because you aren't passively competing with everyone else.

Quote from: Kail on March 11, 2007, 10:35:50 PM

I don't mean to say that a character should be required to use a disadvantage. If your not sure if you should use it don't. Just make a normal character. I'm not saying disadvantages will be advantages in disguise they should be challenges player take because it gives them a chance at an advantage somewhere else perhaps that the truly interesting advantages would only be available to those with disadvantages or of course there is the other case players simply taking the disadvantages for bragging rights. but they are elective only.

Quote from: Kail on March 11, 2007, 10:35:50 PM

In my experience, 90% of the time that someone reaches for the sourcebook with the character traits, they're looking to min-max themselves, not add depth to their character. They're going to take some obscure phobia that they'll never have to deal with (fear of snakes? Well, I'll just avoid the areas with the snakes then) to balance out some bonus that they will frequently use (like a universal +1 to strike). I've had a player who seriously tried to convince me that he'd be able to take "one armed" (a flaw that sees one of your character's arms amputated) and "ambidexterous" (which allows the player to wield weapons in both hands with equal skill) on the same character, because it wasn't expressly forbidden by the rulebook. Min-maxers are drawn to these things like bees to honey. That means that it's essential that these traits are perfectly balanced. Plus, the fact that you probably won't be able to change them mid-game means that changes are going to piss of the players, so they'll have to be balanced on day one, with every possible combination of class/skill/race/equipment/group in the game. That sounds like a lot of work for some fairly negligible gain.

I would rather have a one armed ambidextrous player than a thousand elite clones.

Yes your right about the pressures on devs on the two fronts, that they must keep balance, and that they must have no pointless traits like your snake example. But that just means the devs cant suck at their job. It's only by assuming that developers couldn't pull of this sort of balance would one think it's improbable or even impossible, but they are not impossible goals to overcome. To take your example, if you have a phobia class then, when people start rolling up arachnophobics, the game automatically ramps up the number of spiders running around the world (either through natural selection because no one is killing them off or by simply spawning more based on the numbers of phobics). Then on the other hand you allow for therapy to cure the phobias at the cost of time, money, and perhaps stats. Finally let players acquire phobias naturally (say by a mechanic where if you die by a spider two or three times you get a spider phobia). There, you have a phobia system that works, and works automatically.

The purpose of this idea is not just to make character creation different, it's to make roll playing a matter of day to day reality for a player by creating mechanics instead of just relying on players to pretend to roll play.

Shadowbane had a sort of trait system, in that you got a certain number of points to spend on race, stats, and 'traits', and the traits affected your skill and stat caps, and granted other powers/abilities.

IMO, character creation was one of the better parts of SB. Very flexible from the stats/engine side, only as configurable art-wise as mattered, which is to say, not a whole lot, given most would cover themselves in armor eventually.

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Alkiera

I've always thought that this type of system would work well. Shadowbane's system was geared around min/maxing of course but that was on purpose. Hell, that whole game was about templates...which added a lot of fun. I saw people with the same traits but different skill levels play entirely differently.

I believe that MMOs could definitely use traits, but for them to work beyond stat changing they'd require some serious coding. I guess what I mean is, the further you move into the abstract ("Can't cross moving water" was noted above) the more coding you'd have to do.

As far as people knowing what they're choosing...most people look up stats and abilities on the net before they make a character...and if they dont, that's their loss.

Frankly, Im surprised this isnt done more often.