Eliminate all 'mental' stats from the game.

[Under the moon]

In a game, there are two distinct sets of skills that your character uses. The first are physical stats- Strength, Endurance, Speed, health related stats, Skills, and abilities. These are needed, as they define what your character can do, and how they interact with the world around them. A slim girl can play a bulky man in the game realistically.

The other side of the coin would be the mental stats, mainly Charisma and Intelligence. These can be done without in the game, as both rely on the -player's- skills, and not the character's. In the following examples, I will explain 'why'.

Charisma: This is a player skill when talking to other players -and- to NPCs (once the NPCs are smarter as well). It does not matter how high your charisma is, if you are a jerk in the game (as a player or character), then folks are not going to respond to you as if you are a charismatic figure. This creates a fracture between how players and NPCs would react to you, as the NPCs would still go by the high charisma stats, and would treat you like a highly charismatic figure.

A better way to do it would be to get riid of  character side CHA skill, and replace it with a response side reaction, as is already started in the game.. Saying something in a nice way would raise your charisma with players as well as NPCs on an individual basis., while rudeness would lower it. I am not sure how large a task it would be to attach 'charisma points' to NPC responses (in the far soon(TM)), so this may not be an option. Other options that could change how NPCs individually rate your charisma (how they react to you) could be what you are wearing/holding. An NPC is going to find you more pleasing to talk to if you are wearing nice clothing and not holding a weapon, than if you are in rags and running up to them with dual daggers all the time.

Intelligence: This is all playerside. Intelligence is used to learn things, figure out puzzles, and utilize your other skills in the best way -you- can think of, not your character. You can go beyond any set INT skill in the game by being smart enough to work around it. A smart person can still read complex books, or talk in 'bigger words' and higher concepts, despite how dumb their character's skills say they are. Then there is the other side of the coin, where folks have characters maxed in Intelligence, but do not have the ability to roleplay to that level. You know who I am talking about. This creates another fracture between the coded character, and the played character.

The best way to fix this is just to get rid of the Intelligence skill all together. "You are not intelligent enough to do/use/learn this," is not needed, nor are magical INT increasing objects. If intelligence is needed for doing/learning magic, I would sever that link, and just go with a magic ability skill, which would be a physical stat, meaning how much or how high a level magic your mind/body can handle/learn before they tire out. Or, even have magic that is too high for your character actually do damage to you if you attempt it. But, leave INT out of the equation.

Will: This is a tricky one. It is both a mental skill in the mind, but also a physical skill of the brain and body. Since players do not feel what their characters feel, the pain, the exhaustion, the spell effects, I would not change how it is used in the game now. The only 'Will' that is playerside is the will to keep training, even when it is boring you out of your mind, or just playing, even when you should have been sleeping hours ago. Or, perhaps that should be the will to quit.

[Draklar]

Ah, okay, this again...
Just no.

First of all, players cannot cover all aspects of mental skills belonging to their characters.
With Charisma, you can behave all sweetly-sweet you want and use very sophisticated language, but that won't change your character could be perceived as sucker, while a brute who just has "that something" may draw more attention.
Charisma may affect tone of voice, confidence with which character moves and speaks. The general way of being, which cannot be fully controlled by a player, nor can it be perfectly detected by our poor role-player base. Over the last months I think only one character reacted as it should be done to my character's lack of manners. You want to leave the perception of Charisma to people who cannot even role-play after their character's stats and personalities? Was that throughoutly thought out?
Intelligence is a mental stat responsible for perception, speed of learning and reaction to various happenings. It covers a large area of character abilitities, which cannot be controlled by the player unless we're talking about FPS games. Normally, in a well-balanced game, intelligence would be just about the most important stat as far as character development goes. This goes for fighting, learning and avoiding various troubles.

Second, would you want all the settings eliminated either? Many players don't play according to it. So, if we are to eliminate mental stats simply because we have a poor role-player base, why leave all the other stuff in? Shouldn't things be done differently? It's not a fault on the system side of things. It's a matter of faulty user-base.

[bilbous]

So if you remove those stats what would you replace them with to base your magic systems on? That is their real purpose.

[Unnamed_Source]

Charisma is hard to regulate around other Player characters since they are not restricted as the NPC are by the code regarding it.

Intelligence on the other hand could be made so the player cannot get around the obstacles imposed by it. Your book for example, either make it so it cannot be read by the "dumb" character or have the game interperate, so a dumb character might only read a few words or just the simple words with the other text being scrambled. And puzzles/quests are hard to solve if you aren't given all the peices, something that the intelligence stat could alter. So that high intelligent character would get the most out of a dialog with an NPC and maybe glean even more information that would other wise. Just like ot having enough strength to wear heavier armors, eventually intelligence could play a similar factor. Another good example, some games require intelligence to train skills, where as a retarded warrior would only reach mediocre levels in combat skills compaired to a smart warrior that could become a master.

As far as intelligence around other players, you can limit the number of languages you can learn and the degree of which you could learn them. Or, though it is something I don't agree with, code manipulation of what a character can or cannot say, eg limiting the number of words per sentence or the number of vowls per word. Though if these extremes are needed because the players are not RPing their given stats, those same players can easily side step these as well.

[Outrageous fortune]

There are many different types of intelligence. If you argue that it should be kept in the game from a realism point of view, one stat is not sufficient. The INT helps you decide how powerful other players are (apparently), this is a completely different skill from reading and learning things from books.

[Unnamed_Source]

The same argument can be raised about the other stats, the current stats refer to the broader sense of the term, encompasing all that fall with in its field. If you want to enter into specifics, you will have to do that with the rest and with some stats overlaping each others fields, this will get complicated fast and early.

[lorac]

I kind of see your point of view but also I see the settings now point of view
I am all for Intel cha will end str and all phys stats
if they renamed the chr or int to magic ability that truely takes away from realisim
one thing you failed to take into consideration
Crafting
Some of these stats impact the out come of a crafted product
Which I agree it is infact Realistic
If you lack in a mental stat your craft will stink in quality
Also Stats impact the way you train
There is a use for the mental stats
I guess this is brought up because you get the message "you cant (fill in the blank) because you are too tired"
This is all part of the magic of our world
in time they will perfect it but the world was not build in one day
and the devs ( no insult to devs) are not God so it is impossable to make a game flawlessly in 1 day
To be honest i think they have their hands full getting everything tweeked so they can actually run the server crash free
but this is my opinion :/

But why try to

[Under the moon]

* Under the moon claps.

Debate time!

Well said for the ‘nay’ side. Time for counterpoint. Let’s start with the definition of charisma.

Basically: a personal attractiveness or interestingness that enables you to influence others

In depth (since some of you folks love wiki links): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charisma

First, I will address Draklar’s comments. I would like to say that Draklar is a person I consider to be quite charismatic, due to his ability to influence others and gather attention to himself. This is, of course, with just his words alone. That is a personality trait. Personality traits can not be coded into the game, and obeyed by other players. They come from the players themselves. Charisma is not alone in this category of personality traits. I’ll give a few examples of it’s fellows:

Bravery, honor, humor, intimidation, confidence, and others.

However, charisma is the only one that is singled out and used in the game, despite that fact that the others are just as important to a personality, and indeed affect charisma greatly. You may think giving a value to your character’s charisma is just fine, but what would be your opinion if the game decided your character had low honor, or high humor, or very little bravery? Not so savory anymore, is it?

To go back to Draklar’s ‘sucker’ and ‘brute’ examples, I do not see anywhere in the game or code that says “You see a well speaking sucker before you.” or “You feel the urge to follow in the footsteps of the brute who stares you down.” In fact, I don’t see anywhere at all that tells you how charismatic another character is. The only place I ever see words like that are in the character description or the character’s speech, which are written by the -players-, not the code. You see, it is up to the players to decide if they are a hulking brute that folks seem to be drawn to, or the sniveling, but well-speaking ‘sucker’ that is looked down on by all. I have played both with great success and enjoyment without ever once looking at the CHA stat. You can not just assign a stat and say, “This is how others are going to react to you,” just as you can not say, “The person before you is charismatic and you are influenced by him.” Then what do you do when the person speaks… “Yo, I juss MAXED training in CHA! How cool is that? Now you have to listen to what I say! ”

Charisma is a stat now, but there is nothing to support its role in the game, or its reason for being. In the future, I would support a variable charisma ‘stat’ based on how you talked to each NPC, perhaps the tone of voice you used (angry, normal, etc), the idle stance you are in (imposing, meek, confident, etc), or the clothing you wore (fine, rags, shiny/battered armor), and even the weapon you carried, or lack of one. Change one of those things, and the NPC would treat you differently, depending on that NPC’s personality.

In conclusion for this round on the subject of charisma, I give you several related theoretical statements you could get while talking to an NPC with the current system, since that is what charisma is meant to affect..

“You do not have enough charisma to convince this person to deal with you.”
“You do not have enough humor to understand this person’s joke.”
“You do not have enough honor to give that item back to this person.”
“You are not brave enough to talk to this person.”

I see those as all being in the same category, and thus sacred to the personality the player is trying to create. So being, it does not belong in the strict realm of the code.

I give you back the floor to discus my points on charisma, and will move on to discuss Intelligence at a later date.

[bilbous]

As far as I am concerned the social stats are for interacting with the NPC's and influencing your magical abilities in their specific ways. You may be able to influence a lot of people by what you say and how you say it but some others might just think you are a blowhard. It is easy to talk people into doing things they are predisposed to do, not so easy for thing they do not favor. Character stats are integral to game mechanics and player-player interactions are always on a different level.

[Feline Prince]

UtM gave an alternative for how things are done with NPCs and the Stats don't seem vital to magic as there are plenty of other, more useful factors that could be taken into account instead. For ways that require charisma the same ideas UtM had for NPC interaction could be used.

[bilbous]

Well now that you mention it, we should get rid of agility as a skill because it is superseded by my hand-eye coordination and manual dexterity, not to mention my ability to come up with key press saving macros. Eliminate endurance because I can keep running at least as long as I can stay awake steering with the mouse.

I appreciate the fact that people are looking for ways to improve the game and I have nothing against odd ideas, per se, I've floated a few myself. I just don't see this going anywhere.

If you remove the stats magic is based on you will have to replace them with something else. I suppose you could make it so that the skills that rely on them are improved only by practice but I do not understand why some should be stat based and others not.

Maybe what is needed is more applications for them. I am not sure if it is the case but you could have spells requiring a certain level of the base stat in order to be learned. You could also require a specific amount of intelligence and willpower to learn from an advanced trainer (for any skill) and charisma to get him to take you on as a student.

[Induane]

Well now that you mention it, we should get rid of agility as a skill because it is superseded by my hand-eye coordination and manual dexterity, not to mention my ability to come up with key press saving macros. Eliminate endurance because I can keep running at least as long as I can stay awake steering with the mouse.

I'm not sure I see that as a valid point, sarcasm not withstanding

The problem is physical attributes are easier to employ ingame as far as interaction.  You currently cannot continue to run indefinitely because the game play mechanics use your characters endurance stat to stop you when you are exhausted.  Agility is not superseded by macros or better eye hand coordination other than that people who have bad real life coordination and can't write the macros are limited in their initial response.  Once you click and attack a monster though the agility stat kicks in and your leet mouse and keyboard skillz are not of much use to you though your agility stat is.  The issue isn't that intelligence ingame is superseded by intelligence in real life, its that in game the intelligence stat can have absolutely no bearing on your interaction with real players.  You physical stats can.  If your buddy has better endurance than you and you want to run somewhere distant, he'll have to stop and wait for you to rest.  If you character is a moron and you sit down to play that chess like game together, there is nothing in game mechanics that affects the outcome of the game if you are controlling where to move the pieces.

Maybe what is needed is more applications for them. I am not sure if it is the case but you could have spells requiring a certain level of the base stat in order to be learned. You could also require a specific amount of intelligence and willpower to learn from an advanced trainer (for any skill) and charisma to get him to take you on as a student.

Something like that definately helps make mental stats more important but it seems to me to just be a bandage - a means of trying to force relevance onto a statistic. 

The issue is that physical stats can be easily migrated into what a character can and cannot do ingame at all times.  if they really wanted people to have to sleep ingame that could be implemented.  If you want people to be able to do certain physical things - piece of cake.  If you want to affect how a character interacts with other people you have to rely on their role playing because you cannot rely on mental stats.  Just as a smart player playing a dumb character can act perfectly intelligent with no recourse, a stupid person could play a highly intelligent character and there would be no way of telling ingame from his behavior that his character was "smart".  This is a problem which I don't see an easy solution for and am struggling with as I work on PT as well.  You can continue to bandage by forcing relevance onto stats that aren't easily manipulated by game mechanics or you can try to solve the problem in a different way.

I'm not saying that the way its done now is bad, just that its a difficult problem to solve and UtM's ideas are worth in depth discussion here.

Death is another thing thats hard to really explain ingame and I struggle with in PT from a settings perspective.  If a person is really omnipotent and cannot really die then how are his or her actions brave?  These things are simply tough.

[Under the moon]

* Under the moon nods to Induane.

Well said.

As far as I know, charisma has nothing to do with magic, so I am a bit confused by the reference in a few of the posts. Intelligence as a needed skill for magic is debatable (and will be debated after all points are made on charisma).

I would like to make a few points on the other side of charisma. This would be the perception of other’s characters, or how you see them. You can look at other characters and see that they are tall or short. You can see that the are also Kran or Lemur, for example. You can see that they have good agility by how well they dodge in battle. You can see the color of their hair, or lack of it. The game tells you all of this. Is it right for the game to also tell you that you see the other character as charismatic? Is it just as right to inform you with a few lines of code that you find the person funny and enjoyable to be around? Is it right for the code to tell you that you are influenced mentally or emotionally by the person you just met, despite what you, the player, may think?

Since bilbous has taken the extreme to one side, I shall go to the other side, and see what happens if  -all- character personality traits would be coded.

Bilbous logs into the game to find that the new totalitarian stat rules have been coded into the system. It does not seem all that bad… at first. Then, he tries to talk to one of his old friends. But, his friend turns from him and spits on the ground. In a few moments, Bilbous gets a tell. “OOC> Sorry about that, but my Rudeness stat is too high to greet you kindly.” Bilbous is a bit miffed, so goes to the tavern to relax with a drink. On taking the drink, however, his character spits it all over the bar. It now seems that his character does not like the taste of that drink anymore. Bilbous is getting more irritated all the time, so decides to just go out into the woods to be by himself… That is until it starts getting dark, and his character starts to shake and cower. It seems he forgot to check to see if his character was afraid of the dark. Frustrated, Bilbous goes back to town to do a little bit of roleplaying with some folks, who seem to be ignoring him. He come to a tall man who tells him to go do something. Bilbous tries to say, “No,” but gets a system message: “You can not resist the urge to obey this character‘s charismatic presence. Please do what he says, and do not interrupt the roleplaying atmosphere.”   Finally, he opens up his skill window to see what, exactly, is going on. he sees the following:

Charisma: 20 (why no one listens to him)
Bravery: 30 (why he is afraid of the dark and deep water)
Rudeness: 15
Honor: 90
Fussiness: 100 (why he now hates beer)
The list goes on as the horrid truth unfolds before him and he gets to the last stat.
Humor: 350.

Bilbous does not think that is funny. His character, however, finds it hilarious.

[bilbous]

Charisma (CHA)

    Represents the ability to convince an audience of your ideas, to lead your soldiers in battle or to attract followers. It is used in casting spells of the Crystal and Dark Ways. ...

...Mana Points are the sum of all the bonuses given by your character's mental stats. Intelligence, Will and Charisma all influence Mana Points in an equal proportion. ...

...Your character's mental stamina is based on intelligence, will and charisma

pswiki
I believe you will also find some of this information in character creation or elsewhere, Way skill descriptions??

The point I was trying to make (no sarcasm was intended) is that there will always be a disjunct between player capabilities and character abilities. As it stands now, if I try to match myself in combat with someone thirty years younger than me ( a teenager) I am going to be at a real disadvantage due to my slower reflexes and my fading ability to zone in. It is a natural effect of aging but my character might have 2-3 times the agility of the younger player and it might not make a significant difference to the outcome.

Like I said I have no problem with this discussion, I just think it is not viable in the long run. If you can come up with something specific to replace the stat system I'd be glad to hear it.

One problem I have with "how you talk to the NPC's" is that it puts the international player struggling at speaking English at a real disadvantage or complicates the code unnecessarily to account for their lack of linguistic polish.

[Induane]

Here is my current mental statistic list in PT and I'm considering knocking out Intelligence after reading this thread.

    * Intelligence
    * Regeneration
    * Resilience

Intelligence doesn't seem to fit there anyways.  The other two statistics would easily be enforced ingame.  Regeneration would be the rate at which your mental endurance returned, and Resilience would be be the amount of mental endurance you posses.  Mental endurance would be used in a manner similar to mana in some games for spell casting, as well as for calculating your ability to focus for long periods of time on tedious tasks.  Sometimes keeping it simple is better I think though I'm not sure this system works either Untested you see...