Three is the Number of Attributes, and the Number of Attributes is Three
I’ve been told that blogging is a prerequisite for the cool ttrpg designers club. Hopefully, quality blogging isn’t required.
What I’m Going To Do Here:
- Mostly at the start, I’m going to talk about We’re In Danger, the tabletop roleplaying game I’ve been tinkering with for years now. It’s my personal system, best used in one-shots or very short campaigns (franchises). More details here.
- I might eventually talk about Gut Space, a more involved ttrpg project I’m working on, using the bones of WiD and my own sci-fi setting.
- I might also talk about Adventures in Lollygagging, the streaming group I run that got me started on this ttrpg venture. That means I’ll talk about my experiences with actual-play (AP), and how that’s influenced my views on ttrpgs and ttrpg creation.
- If I get super excited, I might even start doing some more in-depth reviews of the games we’ve played on the channel—what worked for us, what didn’t, how or why we choose games, that sort of thing.
But for this post, here are some ramblings on attributes, what I chose for WiD, and where I’m headed with the concept.
In a nutshell, here’s how attributes work in WiD: A character has athleticism, composure, and reasoning. The player ranks these attributes based on what their character relies on most regularly to solve problems and deal with conflict. One attribute gets a 1 (i.e. the best, or what they use most often), one attribute gets a 2, and the last gets a 3 (i.e. the worst). The game uses a d6 dice pool system, and rolling equal or under your attribute results in negative consequences, but not necessarily failure.
The first decision point for attributes was whether or not to even have them. Plenty of other games have them, perhaps as statistics or characteristics, but there are those that do not. Most recently, I’ve quite enjoyed the Mist Engine from Son of Oak Game Studio (Otherscape and Legend in the Mist), which eschews statistics in favor of narrative tags. But the decision point for WiD preceded those games by a few years. Ultimately, I went with attributes primarily because of ease and familiarity. They felt like an easy thing to teach, and most decisions kept ease in mind.
The next decision point was the number of attributes to include in the game. Here, I was certain fewer was better. The traditional strength, dexterity, constitution, wisdom, intelligence, and charisma array is all fine and good, but it functionally felt excessive for what I wanted to accomplish. I settled on three, influenced somewhat by Electric Bastionland (an all-time favorite). For the base game of WiD, I felt I needed something to convey physicality, another to convey knowledge, and a third to vaguely convey social aptitude.
Physicality was easiest. No doubt there is a difference between a strong character, a dexterous character, and a character with high constitution, but (a) most WiD characters don’t survive, and (b) if a player wants to play a shifty rhythm gamer with great dexterity, what’s the difference between the player simply describing their physical actions as agile, and the player taking their dexterity to 18 (with a +4 modifier or whatever)? Something, surely, but not something convincing enough for me. I settled on athleticism, which seemed like a good, simple catch-all. When a player rolls an athleticism test to defend against a chainsaw maniac, they can flavor their action as dodging, pushing the maniac away, or simply outpacing the maniac up a hill. What do I care? Each of those sounds cool.
Intelligence was an odd one because I wanted to flavor it more as an action-forward attribute than a passive knowledge attribute. Since WiD actively invites players to build the world and the scene on-the-fly, I didn’t see a need for a knowledge check. The only canon is the one you make along the way (a mantra of mine). I settled on reasoning because, to my mind, it has the flexibility of athleticism. Blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth characters might apply reasoning through common sense and practical experience. Others might use book-learning and theory. Again, it’s functionally all the same to me.
With social, I wanted to focus less on whether or not someone was charismatic and more on how well they play with others when the proverbial shit hits the fan. We’re In Danger is named as such because that’s what happens: You, and your would-be allies, will 100% get into terrible, life-threatening danger. When everything is shiny and happy, charisma might buy you good will and a sandwich. When a great white shark is trying to bite you in half, I don’t think it’s going to hesitate because you have a winning smile (unless your table's canon says otherwise, of course). Anyway, composure felt right. It’s applicable in high intensity situations, but still useful when in a less dangerous group setting, where you still might blurt out something embarrassing or lose your temper when someone baits you into an argument.
And so athleticism, reasoning, and composure became the core attributes for the “normal people” of WiD. When I started designing genre kits to plug into WiD, it became clear that I needed to shift some of those attributes. With the Heckboy kit, I leaned into monstrous/mutant “superheroes”, and wanted at least one attribute to reflect the degree of difference a character is from humans. Aberrance feels like a bigger word than I should probably use, but it also underscores the vibe of that genre. In Oldheart, I wanted to play around with the struggle of customer-facing jobs. You are required to be kind, but honestly, most customers can fuck right off (except for those of you who bought WiD; you’re all right, LaRusso). Hospitality and depravity were born from that dichotomy. In Ball Season, which plays around with Regency and Victorian era horror, I really just went for a long-standing inside joke with Adventures in Lollygagging and threw yearning in there.
And then, somewhere late in the design process of WiD, I realized I had all these different attributes lying around, and there was probably something within that to explore. Something more complex than I wanted for WiD, but something I knew could be interesting—this blend of numerical characteristics and talents. While it’s still early days, I’ve started messing around with a deeper version of the system I created for WiD. A version where attributes aren’t universal across all characters, and where the attribute choices a player makes define their character as much (or more, really) than the number they assign to it. A character with depravity 1, yearning 2, and ferocity 3 can live in the same world and use the same system as one who has athleticism 1, instincts 2, and charity 3. But boy do they come at that world differently, and I kind of love that.
Anyway, I have more to say on this front, but I’m still iterating as I work on Gut Space, the game that will use the variable attribute approach and the deeper WiD system. More to come.
If you read this, you’re a champion. If there’s something in here that you want to know more about, or think would make a good blog post, let me know and I’ll rip it.