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| Uh-oh, am I going to have to murder you by Rafiki 03/21/2011, 12:52pm PDT | ||||
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| I've been wanting to impotently nerd rage over stats for a long long time because they're one of the genre conventions of RPGs that need to almost altogether up and fucking die already as far as the player is concerned. They're useful as a programmer for representing game data, but as a player they just obscure useful information behind arbitrary conversions. And then beardy names are attached to make sure they're understood by fucking nobody. So seeing things like "cunning" and "brutality" make me want to roll barbarian and hope your house fails a saving throw against me punching it over.
I'll give you an example from WoW. Each monster has a fixed % chance to dodge a player's attack, which is the useful information you care about. There's a stat called "expertise" that reduces that chance until a monster has a 0% chance to dodge a player's attack. Equipment has expertise rating, which converts into expertise points, which converts into -% chance to dodge an attack. So the useful information is obscured behind 2 layers of stats and then given the name "expertise" which no one would think of to describe that. See what I mean? So going over your stats: hitpoints: Hit Points/Health Points/HP/Health. No point in getting beardy here, because everyone is just going to call it "health" or "hp" anyways. damagepotential: Damage (1-whatever) Just call it "damage" and show me the damage they can do. armorclass: I'm assuming this reduces the above, so "Damage Reduction" and show me how much damage is being reduced. Whether it's a number, a range, a percentage, I don't care. Don't just say "Armor Class: 15" and then expect me to run a log file that I can import into Excel and calculate what that amounts to. attackadjust: Chance to hit/Hit Chance/something telling me this is going to increase a monster's chance to hit me initiative: I have no idea what this or "speed" are referring to. Basically I just want a character sheet to be as plain and straightforward as possible. Maybe I'm alone on this, but it's not going to break my immersion if it's easier to understand what your game is trying to tell me. To give you another example from WoW, your health is in terms of hit points, all damage taken is in terms of hit points, all healing received is in terms of hit points, but when you get a piece of armor that increases your hit points it's in terms of stamina. I've had an account for 5 years and I still don't know what the conversion from stamina to hit points is, and it's not documented in-game anywhere. It's pointlessly confusing and inconsistent. I like you, Jonsey, so I don't want your game to be as dumb as that. |
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