Attribute Prioritization

[Bushranger]

First I would like to say that attribute prioritization has been an excellent addition to the game. Three thumbs up! It has really aided in character creation and tailoring characters to the vision a player has for them.

Secondly, I had something odd happen. At least something I thought was odd. When I created my character I entered my attribute priorities as such:

Attribute A
Attribute B
Attribute C
Attribute D

Highest to lowest, exact attributes are unimportant in this example[/list]
When my character rolled his attributes while moving from the Hall of Kings into the IC world they ended up looking like this:

Attribute A
Attribute D
Attribute C
Attribute B

Am I wrong in believing that this shouldn't happen? Or do I not understand the code correctly? I'll also mention I'm quite happy playing the character as is, and am not fishing for any changes. I'm just curious about the mechanics.

Bushranger.

[flurry]

Modifiers, like for age and guild, are applied after the fact.  So that can definitely happen.

[X-D]

Also, as has been pointed out before. The word title to the stat may be the same but that does not mean it is the same number.

IE Very good strength on an elf is NOT the same number as Very good agi.

SO, you could have a higher number on a stat but still have a lower word.

[jstorrie]

It's likely that the guild you chose valued stat D above stat B. Flurry's post, above, is mostly-on-point–race choice won't alter your stat preferences, though, because the stat words are relative to your racial averages. Age is a factor only really for young PCs (who tend to end up with wicked agility and shit in everything else, no matter what stat order you assign.)

It's probably nonkosher for me to offer my direct speculation on which guilds get which stats, but I've found a general rule of thumb is that fighting guilds get higher physical stats, casters/casterlikes/merchants get higher wisdom, sneaky guilds get higher agility and sometimes higher wisdom or strength based on what bent of sneakitude they specialize in, and jack-of-all-trades guilds get jack-of-all-trades stats. The different flavours of templar probably get appropriate stat adjustments as well, and who knows what sort of stats super-sekrit undocumented guilds get.

If you are aiming to get a certain stat combination in order to match up with your character concept, you might want to take the guild adjustments into account–it's difficult to get a feeble warrior, no matter what stat order you put in. Then again, I have a feeling the imms are only too happy to offer stat deductions to anyone who requests them, so don't get too wrapped up in minutiae.

[Coat of Arms]

Stats are affected by a lot of things that can change the order that you chose at creation. When you prioritize your stats, you simply choose which order your original dice rolls will be. Example:

You might pick (first) endurance->strength->wisdom->agility (last). If the character you made was a 16 year old human warrior, it might end up like this:

Agility (big bonus for being young)
Endurance (small penalty for being young, small bonus for warrior)
Strength (big penalty for being young, small bonus for warrior)
Wisdom (penalty for being young)
(these bonuses are not necessarily accurate)


Once, before stat ordering, I made a character who was maximum age. I think it's 56 or something. Despite being a warrior, the character had poor in all three physical stats, and average wisdom. Age, race, guild and even size matters.

[jstorrie]

Race doesn't matter. The descriptive terms you get are relative to your race. The average elf has average, average, average, average, it's just that some of his averages are different than human averages.

I have never seen my weight/height affect which stats I get, though I believe they are taken into account for armor sizing and for certain other skills and checks.

Guild and age are basically the only teo things that will unorder your prioritization.

[X-D]

Race DOES matter jstorrie

Because Though you are correct on the descriptive terms being based on race.

Stat ordering does NOT work on descriptive terms but instead, hard numbers.


SO, if you have say a HG, and you order str/agi/end/wis

and you roll and the orders are 20/15/10/8

BUT 8 is AI wis for a halfgiant and 20 is poor str for a halfgiant it will SEEM that the order was changed.

And that is exactly how this...

Secondly, I had something odd happen. At least something I thought was odd. When I created my character I entered my attribute priorities as such:

Attribute A
Attribute B
Attribute C
Attribute D
Highest to lowest, exact attributes are unimportant in this example

When my character rolled his attributes while moving from the Hall of Kings into the IC world they ended up looking like this:

Attribute A
Attribute D
Attribute C
Attribute B

happens.

[IntuitiveApathy]

I rolled up an adult human warrior.

I ordered my physical stats A > B > C.

I ended up with B > A = C.

[Morgenes]

I rolled up an adult human warrior.

I ordered my physical stats A > B > C.

I ended up with B > A = C.

Your attributes ended up rolling very close to each other.  When it got modified for age, it appears that your B attribute got pushed slightly higher than A and C. 

We can only do so much with attribute prioritization.  Glitches like this can and will happen.  It's still a far sight better than the random that was before.

[Adiadochokinesis]

Oh, random stats.

This warrior-type looks pretty big and beefy and stupid.

AI wisdom. Poor strength. 

[mansa]

I blame Morgenes.

*shakes fist*

[Malken]

I'm still pretty sure that if you put strength as your first stat, you'll never end up with poor in it. (Of course, that's following the logical part that you don't apply for a sixty years old warrior.)

[Throttle]

If all of your stats roll low enough to be poor and the age/guild/size bonuses of your character do not boost your strength up enough, you might end up with poor strength. I suspect that the warrior class probably gets a bonus to strength that is high enough for humans to never actually end up with poor unless they start at old age, but I believe some of the races with a larger strength scale can. But I've only ever heard of one person who rolled 4*poor, it's probably as likely as rolling 4*exceptional.

[Ghost]

But I've only ever heard of one person who rolled 4*poor, it's probably as likely as rolling 4*exceptional.

murphy rules say you are wrong

[Throttle]

Murphy is not the boss of me!

[jstorrie]

Stat ordering does NOT work on descriptive terms but instead, hard numbers.

Proof? This doesn't seem like a reasonable way to have coded the system. If this was the way the system really was, prioritizing a stat that your race receives a penalty to would mean that you would get lower stats overall, and vice versa. Which doesn't seem at all like something that would have been intended.

[manonfire]

I'd still love to see a distributed point system for stats.. Kinda like the greatest game ever, Fallout 

[Morgenes]

Stat ordering does NOT work on descriptive terms but instead, hard numbers.

Proof? This doesn't seem like a reasonable way to have coded the system. If this was the way the system really was, prioritizing a stat that your race receives a penalty to would mean that you would get lower stats overall, and vice versa. Which doesn't seem at all like something that would have been intended.

Stat ordering works by rolling four percentiles and ordering them across your attributes.  That percentile is distributed over the race's range for the given attribute.

Using terms from a popular role playing game, a human has a range of 3-18 in all ability scores.  We would roll a d100 for each score, and interpolate that percent within the range of 3-18.  So if you rolled a 1% for an attribute, you would end up with a 3 in the attribute.  If you rolled 100% you would have an 18.  if you rolled 50% you would get a 10.

After we've done that for each attribute, we adjust based on your age (and different races have different scales for how age affects stats) and based on your guild.

There's your proof that it's based off hard numbers and not descriptions, and a pretty big look into the cogs of how the Attribute Prioritization system works.

[mansa]

I blame Morgenes.

*shakes fist*

[jstorrie]

I'm going to sound like I'm splitting hairs here, but that's kind of what I meant–that you'd get a poor or an average or an AI or whatever (in percentile terms) and then those would be applied to your race's natural spread. So your choice of race shouldn't affect what the 'descriptives' look like in the end, right?

[flurry]

The way X-D described it, it makes it sound like not only the percentiles are being shuffled around, but the racial modifiers are too.  As jstorrie points out, that would introduce some serious problems into the sytem.  If it worked that way, an elf's agility bonus could be effectively reshuffled to a strength bonus.

Enough beating a dead kank, though, since Morgenes' clarifies the situation.

On a side note, I think the situation the OP describes has to happen sometimes, or else you could basically circumvent the appropriate age penalties (i.e. order however you want, but you're not likely to get a senior citizen with the agility of an adolescent).

[Pale Horse]

EDIT: After once again looking over what's been previously posted, others have said the same thing as I, but with much fewer words.  Feel free to skip my post.

From what's been said, it seems to me that the stat allocation seems to be like this (Disclaimer:  All the following numbers and "data" are in my own opinion.  I have no idea what the actual code is like.  Also, my math skills are dismal, so yes, things are going to be off):

Race: Elf
Age: 21

Stat priority: Agility, Endurance, Strength, Wisdom

The stats are rolled based off of the racial scale for "Elf", which runs from a scale of 1-20:
Strength: 2-15
Endurance: 2-15
Agility: 5-19
Wisdom: 5-19

For perspective, Human scale is like this:
Strength: 3-17
Endurance: 3-17
Agility: 3-17
Wisdom: 3-17

Our Elf ends up with the following "hard numbers", from the percentile rolled in her scale:
Strength: 14
Endurance: 15
Agility: 17
Wisdom: 14

Now, the age and guild modifiers are taken into account.  She's 21, and let's say her guild is Ranger.  Since 21 means roughly 18 or so for an elf, that makes her fairly young, so her stats are modified as such:
Strength: 14 - 13
Endurance: 15 - 14
Agility: 17 - 18
Wisdom: 14

Her strength and endurance went down due to age, but not by much, as she's nearing adulthood and isn't a babe.  Her agility went up for the same reason, but her wisdom stayed the same, as she's nearing the point where her "intellect" will reach the level it will have for most of her adult life.  Next comes the modifications for guild.  As she's a ranger and an outdoorsy combat guild, she gets a boost to endurance and agility, popping her constitution back up to what it was, and further increasing her agility.  In the end, her stats are as followed:
ST: 13
EN: 15
AG: 19
WS: 14

Descriptive wise, they are: Very Good, Absolutely Incredible, Absolutely Incredible, Above Average.

She ended up with Stats that followed her priority, but read as having two of them be the same, due to her race, age and guild modifiers.  For an Elf, that 15 is absolutely incredible.  A human with the same age and guild and stats and priority would read as: Above Average, Very Good, Absolutely Incredible (Knocked down to 17, due to racial limit), Very Good, due to the fact that her racial scale is different.

[jstorrie]

Shouldn't the human with the same race, guild, age (scaled for racial limits) and priorities come out with the exact same descriptives? If stats were rolled as a percentile which was then applied to the racial range, and descriptives are based on where in the percentile you land, the descriptives should be essentially race-independent.

[Pale Horse]

Shouldn't the human with the same race, guild, age (scaled for racial limits) and priorities come out with the exact same descriptives? If stats were rolled as a percentile which was then applied to the racial range, and descriptives are based on where in the percentile you land, the descriptives should be essentially race-independent.

Theoretically, yes.  But, that human had the same hard numbers as that elf.  So, what her percentage ended up being in the beginning to get those numbers, was different from what the elf's had been.  I was using the human as a comparison and not a "clone" of the elf, although I can see how my wording could lead you to think that.

[Dan]

I wonder how well a system like this would work...

You begin by choosing which stat order you want. Strength, Wisdom, Agility, Endurance for an example.

The game will roll up random stat points between the four and then modifiers will be put in place from age, size, guild. You'll not know where they stand at this point.

Now you have another random stack of points you can allocate how you wish. Once you add in your points it then gives you your standing. It may even be random, such as the game rolls you three extra modifiers which are +3, +4, and +1.

So at the beginning:
Strength: 12
Wisdom: 9
Agility: 15
Endurance: 8

-becomes-

Stat preference:
Strength: 15
Wisdom: 12
Agility: 9
Endurance: 8

Then modifiers are added making your stats look like this:

Strength: 13
Wisdom: 14
Agility: 8
Endurance: 10

Now you have the additional randomly rolled modifiers you can put in place-

Strength: 16
Wisdom: 17
Agility: 9
Endurance: 10


This system allows for some further customization while still ensuring a random element to what stats you end up with. It isn't the exact preference, but your never going to end up with poor strength if it is your first in line. Ever.