Design Analysis: Attributes

Design Analysis will be the counterpart to the Design Excerpt series. In Design Analysis, I'll explain the reasons behind each design element from the excerpt.

Today's excerpt and analysis is the Attribute system.

In Fate, Attributes and Skills are inexorably linked. Actually, Attributes are essentially "super-skills" that provide bonuses to every linked Skill. They actually don't do anything on their own. The strongest character in the world would gain no benefit from his Strength if he didn't have any Strength-linked Skills at rating 1 or higher. However, as soon as he invested experience in raising one of those Skills to rating 1, he would instantly have a significant boost to that Skill -- all the way up to +50 effective rating for a major link. As you'll see when I get to the Skills excerpt and analysis, +50 rating is absolutely huge.

So, why design the game this way? Well, one of the design goals was to have an "open" system, where you could mix-and-match abilities and character designs to make whatever kind of character you wanted to play. That lead directly to the Skill system design (as well as the level-less experience system). At first, Attributes were going to be a more standard "Strength raises damage with melee weapons, Agility makes you harder to hit, etc" design. But then I looked at it and realized that sort of system can limit options pretty severely. For example, if only Strength increased melee damage, then only a strong character can be an effective melee combatant. That prevents even such basic character archetypes as the fencer or the dirty tricks-using rogue.

Since I wanted to keep character design open, I therefore couldn't restrict such basic concepts as damage, avoidance, and the like solely to Attributes. The next logical thought, then, was to do a mixture -- Attributes had direct effects like before, as well as distributed effects as described in the excerpt. However, after running a few simulations with my preliminary combat Skills, I decided that I really didn't see a good way to mix-and-match direct and distributed benefits in a manner that wouldn't overly bias character design. And, too, as I did some more brainstorming, I realized that using Attributes only as Skill bonuses actually made things neat and streamlined.

With the system as designed, if an Attribute ends up being "too strong", I have about 20 different "dials" I can turn. Since the entirety of the worth of an Attribute is in how much effective Skill increase it gives a character, I can modify which Skills it bonuses, at what rate it bonuses those Skills, and at what rate performance in those Skills increases with Skill rating. With the original, direct system, I would only be able to alter the equivalent of the bonus rating it provided.

At the same time, from the player's point of view, things are very direct. You know exactly how much every Attribute rating increase will help you. There's no nebulous "increases melee damage" or "reduces chance to be hit". Every +1 Attribute rating provides a straightforward +x bonus to Y skills. You'll know exactly which Skills will be bonused by what amount, and you'll know exactly what that amount will buy you. This means you can easily plan how to spend your precious experience to improve whatever you want at the best rate. In general, Attributes are vastly more expensive than Skills, but they bonus many Skills at the same time. If you have an Attribute with many links to Skills your character uses, then that Attribute will be a good buy; similarly, if you have an Attribute with few or no links to Skills your character uses, it won't be a good buy and you probably won't spend on it.

That leads me to another important concept for Attributes: they don't really measure anything objective. A character with a Strength of 2 is not twice as strong as a character with a Strength of 1. Attribute and Skill ratings are purely game mechanics constructs. A character with a higher Skill or Attribute rating is more skilled/stronger/etc, but there's no definitive measure of how much better they are. In addition, there's no link at all between two different characters' Attribute ratings -- one character with Strength 10 may be "stronger" in melee combat than a character with Strength 20 (by virtue of having higher effective Skill rating). That kind of distinction, in my opinion, is something better kept to the individual's concept of their character. It also gives me a lot more design freedom. I can give some giant boss monster a Strength of 30 and not have to worry about having a character of the smallest race being "stronger".