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Descriptive stats for lowbies

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Posted by Amadio on 12/15

This idea may or may not have been suggested before, I'm not really sure. I was thinking, it seems a little silly that low-level (ie under 10) characters have no direct sense of their stats, beyond what skills they can use and how much they can carry. I don't object to not letting low-level characters see their stats in numerical form, but just about anyone, no matter how inexperienced they are, is going to have a fairly good idea of how strong, or smart, or agile they are in relation to other people. What I'm proposing is some sort of descriptions to replace the [?] when low-level characters look at their stats. For example, say I make a character who I'd like to be a strength fighter. Let's call him BigGuy. Now, BigGuy knows he's buff and tough, and can move around fairly well, but he doesn't have very good eyesight, he's not the smartest guy around, and he hasn't gone to church in ages and ages. So, what if, when BigGuy looks at his stats, he sees something like
Strength- Great
Constitution- Great
Dexterity- Very Good
Perception- Average
Mind- Below Average
Spirit- Awful

This obviously isn't a high-priority sorta thing. Mostly, I think it would help out true newbies. I remember that, as a newbie, I had very little idea of what happened when I put those stats in an order during character creation, and even less of an idea what kind of character I should try to make with these stats I had chosen. I would have been thrilled if I had had some sort of relative idea what my strengths and weaknesses were.

I'm curious to see what people think of this, so please append if you'd like.

Amadio Alvarado, Last of the Lustful Spaniards

From: Rhungwynn Wednesday, December 15, 01:08PM

I think this seems like a fairly useful idea. Especially if the descriptions overlap, so that people still can't figure out absolute numbers, which i believe was the reason for changing the weight carried and the number of items carried, unless i'm mistaken. Anyway, i think it's a neat idea.

From: Manticore Wednesday, December 15, 08:22PM

other than for trying to figure out the stat order of your char before hitting lvl 10 (which you prolly still could looking at allskills) i'd say it'd be fairly useless to have descriptive stats, simply because they won't tell much at all.

Stats range from 16 to 50 as a newbie, and classifying that into two or three categories would tell you next to nothing (esp for somebody that has at least some knowledge of skill reqs) and classifying it further would simply encourage reroll. It's fairly silly as it is that you can easily get a char to lvl 10 in 3 hrs if the char can learn kick (sooner if you care to, but prolly not too much longer than 5)... and at lvl 2 you'll get to know a lot of stats simply because the skill reqs are pretty straight forward. Combine that with the fact that stats are paired, you end up with a pretty good guestimate.

in addition to that, unless you want a 100/100/100 char, it doesn't even half matter what the rolls are.. as a mage any stat order can let you be any kind of mage (just about), as a surgeon it's the same thing. warrior chars, yah it's preferrable to have low spi, but even that's only a few points of difference, and unless you pull a roll with over 26 spi (which you could, i guess, if you ditch chars at lvl 2) you can almost always end up with 100/100/80ish.

oh well, dunno, personally i wouldn't mind a char rolling system where you can actually type in the exact number of the stats you want for each stat, simply because it doesn't make a whit of a difference as long as you are not creating a new char everytime a new item goes in. what's the harm, really?

From: Skar Wednesday, December 15, 11:11PM I made this suggestion a long time ago, but here it is again:

Number the attributes according to the order in which they were selected when the character was created. After the character reaches level 10, replace the order with the actual stat.

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