Over the last few months on break from running campaigns, while tinkering with homebrew and pawing through games I have come up with a theory that a TTRPG character can be broken down into four-ish essential components: fiction, statistics, perks, and items.
Fiction is the part of a character which has no connection to the mechanics of the game, but instead interacts solely with the shared fiction at the gaming table. A character’s name, their eye color, their totally epic four-page backstory. All of these are fiction. Ultimately this is in some ways a superset of everything which exists on a character sheet. Stats, perks, and items all exist to represent the characters’ state and abilities in the fiction via interacting with game mechanics.
Statistics are fiction with numbers. Each consists of a number representing some facet of a character, and some label connecting that number to the fiction. Characteristics in any edition of D&D are the classical example. Skills in many systems could also be considered to be characteristics, but are a little more complicated as discussed below. There is a huge advantage to using numbers like this to represent character attributes and abilities in that they are immediately comparable. HP for example exists to answer the question “How much of a beating can this character sustain before being taken out of the fight?”. They can also be used as inputs to mechanical systems which themselves inform the fiction, such as their most common use in increasing the probability of a character succeeding a task.
Perks are exceptions to the norm. Games usually have a lot of unsaid assumptions about what actions a character can take to affect the fiction. Most games do not assume that characters can fly by default, for example. Mechanical systems also provide a baseline set of procedures and rules which apply to all characters. Perks allow characters to follow different rules or procedures, or otherwise take actions which are assumed to be unavailable to characters without the perk. Feats in D&D, advantages and disadvantages in GURPS, and merits in Chronicles of Darkness are all examples of perks. Note that perks don’t need to be positive for the character! Negative perks are interesting as in general they often operate by changing the ways the mechanics or fiction of the game act on the character rather than the other way around. Some perks also require a cost or risk to activate, and there’s an argument for separating these out as “powers”.
Items are unique compared to the other components in that they are external to the character. They can be gained, lost, bought, sold or abandoned whereas in most games players probably can’t sell the color of their eyes or their strength score. However, items themselves are in reality made up of the other components! Wielding a sword which deals 1d6 damage changes the player’s “damage” statistic, holding a wand of fireball allows the player to incinerate goblins in new and exciting ways. Items are bundles of linked components which are added or removed from the character together. One interesting line of inquiry following from this realization might be to generalize the rules for characters to other objects in the game. FATE Core is an example of a game advocating for this approach.
Of course, things are rarely super cut and dry and there are game abstractions which fit into multiple categories. An earlier version of this theory had skills as a distinct category, but on further reflection most games treat them as statistics. Skills which allow new actions to be taken challenge this categorization, such as a smithing skill which allows characters to make swords. As this adds a new action, should the smithing skill then be considered a perk? In the general case I would claim that something which adds a new internal characteristic to a character is a perk due to it changing the interactions between character and mechanics, but this leads to weirdness where not all skills are the same type of component under the model. One component adding another is actually a very common design pattern, with level in D&D being a great example. As a numerical value, it would be classified as a characteristic. However, its role is to gate off what class features (perks) are available to the character. All of which is a great reminder that a character’s characteristics and perks don’t mean much outside of the context of the systems they connect to. The rule which says “A character of this class and this level gets this class feature” exists outside of the character. Resources stats are another example of character components triggering outside mechanics. Mana systems in general, spells per day in D&D, or vitae in Vampire are in effect characteristics which prevent specific perks from being activated when too low.
I’m not yet sure if this will actually prove a useful tool in designing or analyzing TTRPGs. It certainly isn’t a useful one for running or playing them. I also didn’t try to find prior work. But the model does lead to other questions. What does a game look like when you remove one or more components? To what extent do these components apply to player characters in video games as well? Hell, are there any examples of game abstractions which can’t be categorized using this model? (Hint: What the fuck are FATE Aspects?). I may or may not get around to considering these questions myself, but I hope they at least provoke some interesting thoughts.
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