Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
door. He has a strength of 17, and rules state that he must roll three six-sided dice
and add their values. If he rolls higher than his strength, he fails to break the door.
If he rolls lower than or equal to his strength, then the door splinters to pieces.
This play mechanic forms the basis of all the combat and most other activities in
the game as well. As the character's attributes go up, the probability that a charac-
ter will be successful at a given activity improves. Because character growth is a key
element of all RPGs, their core mechanics are designed around the character
attributes.
TIP
If you haven't
already done so,
please read the
ection “Random
Numbers and the
Gaussian Curve” in
Chapter 10, “Core
Mechanics.”
Rolling Dice
Adding dice together is a pretty good way of generating random numbers in role-
playing games. It means that most of the time a player will get a middling die roll,
and only rarely will she get an extremely good die roll or an extremely bad one.
However, as a designer you must understand the probability distributions of the
possible die rolls when you're assigning difficulty levels to tasks in the game
because those chances are not evenly distributed. As Chapter 10 explained, the
chance of rolling an 18 with three six-sided dice is less than one-half of 1 percent.
If you specify that a task requires a die roll of 18, it will almost never happen. On
the other hand, if you specify that it requires a die roll of
less
than 18, it will almost
certainly happen—over 99.5 percent of the time. Know your probabilities!
Character Attributes
There isn't space in this topic to give any more than a general introduction to
implementing characters in CRPGs. If you haven't played any kind of role-playing
game before, take a look at the
Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook
(Wizards RPG
Team, 20 08) for an introduction to how one partic ular game system describes and
designs characters. Although character attributes vary from game to game, many
games borrow from, and sometimes expand upon, those in
Dungeons & Dragons
because they are the oldest and most players are familiar with them.
Remember that in Chapter 5, “Creative and Expressive Play,” the section “Self-
Defining Play” divides attributes into
functional attributes
and
cosmetic attributes
and further subdivided the functional attributes into
characterization attributes
and
status attributes
. We'll look into these next.
CHARACTERIZATION ATTRIBUTES
Characterization attributes determine the general abilities and qualities of a charac-
ter and change only infrequently; status attributes describe the current state of a
character and may change often. Choose attributes for your game based on the
actions that you want characters to be able to take. The attributes will determine
whether the character can in fact perform those actions and if so, how well, how
quickly, how powerfully, and with what probability of success. For instance, in the
