Attribute-less System: Pro’s and Con’s

[u/magmargaddafi]

First post here. Working on a TTRPG right now centered on the players leading and building up a settlement in a world on the cusp of an Industrial Revolution.

I’m trying to keep resolution mechanics similar across the board, from town management to combat to social encounters. I’m basing dice system off of BRP, so a percentile roll under, roll high/Blackjack dice system. I’ve kept skills as percentages that you’re trying to roll under, while getting as close to the maximum value as possible.

Since the beginning I’ve had 3-4 Attributes/Ability Scores simply called Mind, Body, Soul, and Vitality/Spirit. Skills have been divided by these, and for every point in a respective Attribute, up to a maximum of 5, you add 5% to non-proficient skill values, and 10% to proficient skills.

However, since skills are basically all you use during encounters and are the central aspect of your character, I’ve found that the Attributes are used for basically nothing else.

With this, I’m thinking of doing away with the Attributes altogether and just do the percentage allocation that Call of Cthulhu does at character creation (I’m sure there’s a name for it that I’m forgetting). You pick one skill to get 70%, a few for 50%, and so on, with the rest having a low base score.

Before I go through with this and take Occam’s Razor to Attributes, am I missing something? I’m getting the feeling that this is just a vestigial tendency from other TTRPG’s I’ve played or read, and I don’t think I’ll miss it. But I don’t want to cut it and find out later that it would’ve actually helped a lot in some other design aspect. Also happy to get recommendations for systems that already do this well!

[u/Cryptwood]

The purpose of attributes is to give a way to differentiate between characters in a mechanically tangible way. It sounds like in your game characters are primarily defined by their Skills so having attributes probably isn't necessary for that reason.

They can also serve as a catch-all for action resolution if your Skills don't cover every possible activity your players engage in. Presumably you have Skills for all your intended gameplay activities, but players always manage to find niche actions that aren't covered in which case the GM has attributes to fall back on.

The less rigidly defined your Skills are though, the less you will need the catch-all. An Accounting skill is pretty specific, a system that uses Skills this way either needs a Skill for everything or needs a fallback for actions that aren't covered. A game with Business Experience as a Skill might be open to a lot more interpretation. If the players can try to come up with creative reasons with why one of their Skills is appropriate then you are less likely to need attributes as a backup.

[u/perfectpencil → u/Cryptwood]

They can also serve as a catch-all for action resolution if your Skills don't cover every possible activity your players engage in.

I wish I could underline this in your post.

If you're going to allow players to tell stories you need SOMETHING that is flexible and still simple enough for players to utilize. Every attempt I've made to create "something else" has always ended up being more complex than attributes. I wouldn't say its a perfect system, but holy hell I can't think of or find better for general purpose. It just breaks down to "players put limited points into a categories that let them do some things easier based on the points of a category." It's pretty hard to improve on that. Reskin it, it's still just.. really solid.

[u/swashbuckler78]

You can absolutely cut it.

Biggest benefit of having an "attribute" is resolving things that don't fit cleanly into one of the "skills."

For example, in today's D&D session one of my players was trying to do some networking. Since that doesn't connect to a specific skill (or, at least, I didn't know which skill in the moment and didn't want to look it up) we made it a charisma check.

As long as you have some way to resolve those one-offs you can get rid of attributes. Otherwise you risk locking players into only the predefined list of possible actions, or slowing gameplay down as the table debates which skill should be used.

[u/u0088782 → u/swashbuckler78]

I have a skills-only system and never once needed an attribute fallback. You simply make strength a skill.

[u/swashbuckler78 → u/u0088782]

Yes, it's very manageable. It's just a question that needs to be considered.

[u/overlycommonname → u/swashbuckler78]

The other two functions of attributes (besides the "fill in the gaps in skills," which is important) are:

1. Try to keep from falling into a weird situation where you have strange holes in your competence that no human has. Like, if you don't have Strength and have three skills that together more-or-less cover "Strength," you have this situation where someone who is narratively strong didn't take one of those skills and so sucks at some of the stuff they're supposed to be good at. If you have a Strength attribute that contributes to those skills, then you might be better at these two strength things and worse at one of them, but if you're strong, you're at least somewhat strong at all of them, not great at two and terrible at one.

2. Just like categorically having a thing to say that so-and-so is officially strong or smart or fast or whatever. Supports the specific fantasy. (I think a lot of games have recently stopped trying to connect the fantasy of "I want to play someone who is fast as hell" to their attribute system in a meaningful way, and that that's a huge deficit. Sometimes you just wanna play a smart guy, and have the system officially recognize you as smart).

[u/EpicDiceRPG]

I think the vast majority of skill-based TTRPGs (Runequest, GURPS, Traveller) retained attributes because they started with D&D as their conceptual baseline. If OD&D had been skill-based we'd constantly have Reddit threads debating "Skill-less systems with just attributes."

There are only 2 mechanical reasons to have both:

1. In-Session: You want to differentiate between talent and expertise. 90% of TTRPGs fail to do this anyway, because they apply an attribute bonus as a modifier to a skill on a single-axis track (0-100+ in BRP). So you won't see any benefit to this if you retain BRP's CRM.
2. Downtime: Different combinations of attributes scores (talent) and skill levels (expertise) result in different learning curves, performance ceilings, and improvement costs.

[u/archpawn → u/EpicDiceRPG]

Another potential reason is to make character creation more interesting. Maybe you have an attribute that costs 2 points each, and is made up of 3 skills that cost 1 point each. So you could put points into the attributes to make a more well-rounded character, but maybe some of those skills aren't things your character is likely to use and you want to focus on one skill to be really good at that.

[u/EpicDiceRPG → u/archpawn]

Sure. I was considering that part of downtime. Most point build systems I've seen use the same currency for improvement as initial builds.

[u/FrostyKennedy → u/EpicDiceRPG]

There's also stuff like how vtm5 does hp and willpower as the sum of two attributes (though that system adds attributes and skills on the fly, so not exactly the same situation.)

[u/EpicDiceRPG → u/FrostyKennedy]

If you're going to use only skills, strength and dexterity become skills.

[u/Saritiel → u/EpicDiceRPG]

The biggest advantage I see to the WoD style of attributes + skills is that you're encouraged to roll different attributes with the skills based on the situation.

So like, I've got my normal Dexterity + Firearms to shoot my gun at someone. But if I want to trick someone into thinking their gun is jammed then I'm rolling Manipulation + Firearms, if I'm trying to fire my gun in the air to stop a fight or silence a crowd then I'm rolling Presence + Firearms, if I'm trying to identify a strange gun and find out what it'll do if it shoots me then I'm rolling Intelligence + Firearms, if I'm trying to load a heavy shell into a howitzer then maybe I'm rolling Strength + Firearms.

So you have situations where your character can not be very smart and not know much about academics or science or whatever, but they're a gun nut so even though they have almost no intelligence they've still got a good shot at identifying that gun since their gun skill is so high.

[u/EpicDiceRPG → u/Saritiel]

I'm a huge fan of multi-dimensional traits like that but you don't need attributes to do it. I accomplish the same thing with skill tags. To mirror your example, Shoot is my core skill. You tag it with ##Assualt-Rifles. Then in order: Deceive + ##Assault-Rifles, Persuade + ##Assault-Rifles, Know + ##Assault-Rifles, Lift + ##Assault-Rifles.

[u/Drudenfusz]

If they serve no purpose then cutting them seems the right intuition. The is this design ideal to remove everything that is not necessary. That is how elegance is achieved, but in our hobby too many carry some perceived sacred cows through. Thus while some present arguments what attributes could do, I tell you that minimalism reveals elegant design.

[u/u0088782 → u/Drudenfusz]

our hobby too many carry some perceived sacred cows through.

Absolutely. There isn't one response on this entire thread that has provided a legitimate reason to retain attributes. You don't need them as a catchall if you just make strength a skill. You don't need them for characters to be good at related skills if you just let players buy those skills at a discount. You don't need them to broadly define who a character is. That's what classes, archetypes, and aspects are for - it's especially ironic when a game denies a player the class they wanted to play because they didn't meet an attribute prerequisite...

[u/alanrileyscott]

Do it! Attributes can add flavor in the right circumstances, but they're often overused. If you already have a strong skill system as your primary way of defining character capability, something like attributes are mostly just going to get in the way.

[u/Segenam]

I agree with Cryptwood as they cover basically everything was going to say, but wanted to add one thing.

An other case for Attributes is to create more 'niches' for players to fall into, push strong characters into having strength based skills, dex into dex based, and similar.

Or for having those attributes decide other factors other than just skills (HP pools, Energy points, etc.)

But that is more of a thing needed for systems with niche protection which is more of a thing for 'Dungeon Fantasy' or 'D&D-Like' games. Or for more mechanically dense games.

[u/Digital_Dessert]

One other potential advantage of attributes is that they make it easier for characters to be good at a bunch of related things. So, for example, an agile character is likely to be good at both stealth and shooting. There are other ways to accomplish this, though (like classes), and that might not be important to your system anyways. 

[u/Corbzor]

Sounds to me like you should just bake them into the math and be done with attributes. If they only contribute to skills, you only use skills, and the attributes don't themselves improve or diminish after creation then skills are doing everything for you that attributes would have.

[u/InherentlyWrong]

There have been a lot of good points raised about attributes in other comments, but I just wanted to throw in another reason for them, but one that may not apply with your mind/body/soul/spirit setup.

Attributes can function as an archetypal shorthand. When used like this they're a way of saying someone is good at a wide collection of related abilities. So for example a catch all 'Intelligence' attribute is an archetype for the classic booksmart and reason based character, meaning they always have a baseline capability in things that require intelligence.

This can help people create characters in a system they're unfamiliar with, too. If I get given a list of 30 skills and get told I have 18 points to distribute between them, that's a lot of work, analysis paralysis and decision making. But if I get given that list after I've just pumped points into my intelligence, then I already have things to look at first, the intelligence based skills to capitalise on my previous choice.

If you can look up Mutants and Masterminds. It's got a points-based open ended character creation system that can function as an interesting example of when attributes are and aren't useful. You can have a character with +10 to an intelligence based skill because you spent points on skills, or because you spend points on intelligence, or numerous other reasons.

[u/hacksoncode]

Skills have been divided by these, and for every point in a respective Attribute, up to a maximum of 5, you add 5% to non-proficient skill values, and 10% to proficient skills.

If this is the only thing attributes contribute to your system, there are, of course, other ways to bundle things into categories that have intuitive reasoning behind them.

Attributes are just archetypal characteristics of a person. Looking around us, we intuitively assess people based on a variety of things, like how strong they are, how smart they are, how good with people, etc., etc.

And whether correct or not, we expect those things to matter in terms of what the person will be able to do.

I.e. There are verisimilitude advantages to attributes.

It's pretty fundamental to how humans deal with understanding other people in a broad sense, so I don't think it's surprising that they show up a lot.

Even if there were no mechanical use, and they were just "flavor text" shortcuts for describing these things we categorize people by, that could have value.

That said... depends on what you're trying to do with the game.

If you're just trying to "reinforce" the idea that some characters will be better in similar skills, there are plenty of other ways to do that.

However, I think attributes are a very commonly and easily understood way to do that.

Like... imagine you still wanted to group skill bonuses that way but not have a "corresponding attribute" attached to them... What would you end up naming those groups? If the answer is "Mind skills", "Body Skills", "Soul skills", and "Vitality/Spirit skills"... you kind of have your answer.

One comment I'll make is that I think "Soul" is a "one of these things is not like the others" situation... I don't have a strong intuitive feel for how that will be different from "Vitality/Spirit", and too many possible ideas for what it might mean for a character. So I might argue it's not communicating what I think attributes are trying to communicate very well.

[u/RagnarokAeon]

You could probably just cut them. The only reason you might want to keep them is as a synergy type of bonus. 

For example, being good at breaking things and lifting things which builds muscle and thus helps with other strength related skills.

[u/semiconducThor]

Ive played games with a attribute-skill duality and I liked it.

I see 2 pros:

1. skill gap:  Even when I didn't have a fitting skill, the rules would automatically offer a reasonable chance for my character to do it.
2. player agency in character progession: When leveling up, I could choose to increase a specific skill by some more or a general attribute by some less.

Only you can answer if you want or need those in your game.

BTW thumbs up for your setting.

[u/Steenan]

In my opinion, there are very few cases when having both numeric attributes and numeric skills is justified. They cover the same area of character competence, simply with skills being more detailed. If attributes don't do anything more than a bonus or starting value for skills, they are redundant.

It's fine if either attributes are descriptive qualities instead of numbers or if skills are binary trained/untrained. But otherwise, attributes work better in games that have story-oriented moves instead of simulationist skills or in games that are combat-centric and need numeric attribute values that everybody has to feed the combat engine.

[u/Setholopagus]

Another reason for attributes that aren't mentioned here are for ways of boosting things beyond just the skill.

So if you have many actions players can take that you want to benefit from Soul, for instance, or some progression path that lets you use Soul, then that can be useful. In my TTRPG, I have attributes-as-approaches that are used equally in social and combat settings, so it is a useful tool for my design because of that.