SKALD: Against the Black Priory Developer Blog - Tests in Roleplaying Games
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If you’d like to learn more about the design principles behind Scape-IT’s upcoming old-school RPG SKALD: Against the Black Priory, you should read this developer blog that talks at length about skill and attribute checks and their role in SKALD. The post is quite lengthy, so here are just the opening paragraphs and you take things from there:
Attribute tests are a staple of the roleplaying game (RPG) genre. As a narrative, text-heavy RPG, “SKALD: Against the Black Priory “is no exception.
Even though such systems might seem trivial, I find that they require quite a bit of consideration to design and implement successfully. The following are some of my musings on the subject and hopefully this might serve as a basis for a broader discussion of the subject.
There is also a little treat for old-school RPG and Ultima fans at the end of the article so stay with me!
What do I mean by “Attribute-Tests”?
Basically, an attribute-test is a test against one of the attributes an RPG character has. This could be a test against the characters “lock-picking” skill to try and open a locked door or a test of the characters “strength” score to try and lift a chest full of gold or even checking a non-numeric character attribute (such as seeing if the character is the right class to join a guild).
For the purpose of this article, I’d also like to divide attribute-tests into two rough categories: “systemic” and “scripted”.
Systemic attribute-tests are hard-coded into the game’s sub-systems. Rolling for initiative at the start of combat, or rolling to hit an opponent are examples of this.
Scripted attribute-tests are added at the content level of the game (as opposed to in the engine itself) – often through some form of scripting language and they are often non-combat related. An example of this might be testing the characters charisma score to try and persuade an NPC during a conversation.
Note that scripted attribute-tests do not have to be dialogue-related! They can just as well be short “gamebook” style segments where the player interacts with the environment. There is however, a lot of precedence for using the dialogue system to present these interactions in modern RPGs and this is also the approach I use in SKALD.
We’ll mostly be talking about scripted attribute-tests in the rest of this article.
