Once upon a time in a far northern state a new type of game was created. The players of this game would gather around and make up stories about people in an unbelievable fantasy world. It was a wonderful game that was very lose and open. But to tie it all together, the players agreed to use a system of rules to describe how "good" their characters were, in relationship to one another and the "monsters." The rules they settled on measured a character's strength, dexterity, constitution, wisdom, charisma, and Intelligence. Each "statistic" was reduced to a number on a bell curve. When asked what these numbers represented, one was told, "Its just like an IQ test, Intelligence measures how smart a person is!" It sounded great, and the game became popular far and wide. Eventually some smart person came along and decided that basic statistics were not enough, people should also have numerical statistics for the skills they have. When asked what these scores meant, one was told, "Its like the scores you get on test in school, it shows how good you are at something!" Again, this sounded good, and another branch of role playing spread far and wide. Finally one last bright person came along and noticed all the numbers used in the previous games. A lot of these numbers were tied to bell curves but some were not. This person noticed that it is great fun to "spend points" to build armies for miniatures games, so why not use points to build characters? And so he did. Players were allowed to buy their character's statistics and skills. Sounds great ... All of these games agreed that over time, characters could grow and become more powerful. They called this "experience" or "training." Of course, eventually It made old characters god like in comparison to new characters but who cared about those wimps? Oh...it also tended to center players attention and actions towards maximizing their character's growth, as defined by the experience rules. One had to be a fool to give money to the poor unless one's god demanded it! (There was not experience In being a "good" person.) Still the games remained fun and such minor points are easily overlooked. So, what do all these games have in common? Well, many things probably, but one thing very clearly. They all use "statistics" to measure important "traits" that characters have. A few years ago I began to wonder why this was so... Where does this idea of traits come from? It is not a new idea. For thousands of years, various religions have told us that some things are "good" and others are "evil." Simple enough, civilized thought is largely based on such "binary opposites", like male/female, black/white, day/night, pain/pleasure, grow/decay, yin/yang, etc. That is how we get the Idea that the world 15 measurable, and a whole lot of other ideas that you can read Kant to find out (if you are truly deranged). Eventually all these ideas were gathered up and lumped into the science called psychology. Psychologists call their observations about what people are, traits. And they said that traits are enduring characteristics. Huh? What this means is that once a person is classified as being "smart" or "fast" they will remain so. This makes sense to most of us. Its what all those IQ tests are all about. Identify the "smart" people and teach them more. The rest get sent off to trade school. In RPGs it works like this. A weak character dies in his first fight, has not ability that can not be better done by a stronger character, and generally stands around at the back of the party not getting to do anything. Such characters are no fun to play, unless the referee of the game harkens back to the old Idea that RPGs are about the players telling a story about a group of fanciful characters, not a test of manhood. Oh yes, and trait theory lead to such wonderful Ideas as superman, eugenics, and institutional racism. Do you think there might be a few problems with this Idea? For example... I was born with blond hair and blue eye, now my hair is brown and my eyes are green -- so maybe traits are not as enduring afterall. When a smart person is drunk they still do stupid things. Sometimes even more stupid than a "dumb" person might since smart people are more inventive -- so maybe traits axe greatly modified by the situation. Often times dumb alcoholic have a much easier time "recovering" than smart alcoholics do. Since dumb alcoholics seem to have an easier time listening to what they are told and not thinking as much -- so, sometimes virtues can be the same thing that prevent a person from accomplishing something. In school, a dumb child that does his homework generally learns more and goes farther in life than a smart person who never applies himself - - so outcomes are not so much based on raw ability but rather on how much a person Is willing to apply one's self. And finally sometimes a person's survival is based not so much on looking like a greek god, but instead on some little bit of esoteric knowledge like "when is enough, enough?" -- I don't know how this can be adequately broken down Into numbers. In short, I feel that trait theory has problems as the basis of a basically fun genre of game. The theory does not do a good job explaining system shifts. Games based on this theory tend to have this same problem. That is why D+D is not a rule book of hundreds of pages, unlike the little three booklet set I have. There are other theories that RPGs could be based on. Siggy Freud thought that it was more Important to look at how a person structured their internal life (Id, Ego, and Super Ego) rather than find out if a person could put square pegs In round holes. Piaget came up with a trait theory that looked at when we learn certain tasks, rather than is a person capable of learning a certain task. Carl Rogers, and Abraham Maslow stressed looking at a higherarchy of needs that a person has, starting with security and ending up with "self actualization" (what ever that means). And more recently fellows like Jay Haley and Salvador Minuchen say it is most important to look at how a person fits Into their family/job/society than at any one trait they have. I know, this all sound like a bunch of psycho babble, and it is. But, it could also lead to role play games that are very different from the ones we are now dealing with. Of course I have an example of what I mean ... Back to Experimental Games Group # 17 Table of Contents Back to Experimental Games Group List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1991 by Chris Engle This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com