A better alternative to game alignment systems

I’ve been playing Persona 4 during my exercise routines (and after).  I really love that game, although it is a bit hard for my tastes.  Might be because I’m new to the series, but it’s taken some dying to really start to master the rules and I’m still no good at judging what level I need to be to take on bosses.

Tonight though, I’ve come to praise the way it handles personal attributes: eloquence, courage, diligence, knowledge, and understanding in this case.  Various dialogue choices and ways of spending your time will boost one of these attributes.  With time, the trade-offs are obvious, study in the library to increase your knowledge or do a part time job to increase your diligence.  With dialog the choices can be less obvious although I suspect there are times where one option might boost courage and another eloquence or the like.  There are also times where you’ll be told about jobs or dialog choices or the like that are unavailable at your current level.  This does a good job of showing the benefits of various approaches even if you don’t take them.

I don’t think the five attributes chosen here are particular important, but I do think the number, matters.  Games with good-evil (or synonym) alignment systems or even games like Mass Effect with intimidate and charm don’t really pull off interesting choices.  I suspect three is the minimum number of personality aspects to actually allow for more than an incentive to go goody-goody or jerk.  In persona’s case the various attributes aren’t actually tied to combat stats, I think you do want some level of disconnect, otherwise the temptation is too strong to pick a character’s personality based on combat optimization, but I don’t think a complete disconnect is necessary either.

I am told that you can maximize everything in at least some of the Persona games.  That’s can work in some settings although I think in many cases forcing some trade-offs is the way to go.  That said, designers do tend to like rewarding people going to extremes, in this case I think you’d normally want to encourage some strength in half of the traits offered.  That said, total specialists could work, so long as prioritizing two or three aspects of a character was just as viable.

Comments

[Zeiram]

Persona 3 only had three: Academics, Charm, and Courage. I can't speak for Persona 4, but I expect that your attribute position on these are pre-reqs for some of the Social Links.