Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
Can and Should Psychology be Statted?
Should characters in roleplaying games have stats which are used to determine what choice of action they take?

The most basic psychological stat I can think of would be something like Bravery, representing the ability to overcome fear. A successful Bravery roll would be needed to do something seriously dangerous, like risk death, or something that is not physicaly dangerous but involves a lot of pain, like undergoing torture.

Many gamers I've talked to about this say that this is part of the roleplaying and players should be left to roleplay this for themselves. This works fine if you're roleplaying a coward, because you just run away instead of risking death every time. But what happens if you choose to play a courageous character? It means that to roleplay your character as you've chosen to play him, you should face the danger every time. But every real person has a breaking point at which courage fails. How does a player know when his character would lose his bottle and run? A player who plays his character as always being brave might well be accused of bad roleplaying, but in truth he may simply be playing his character as heroic.

The simple answer to this problem is to give the character a Bravery stat. As far as I can see, this is completely within the spirit of roleplaying. To me, the point of having a rules system is this. The player decides what his character is going to do. Then, if this is something which has a possiblility of failure, a stat roll is called for to see if the attempt succeeds. This can apply just as well to an attempt to be brave as an attempt to climb a wall or pick a lock.

Other psychological stats could deal with other situations, such as resisting temptation when offered some pleasure, or overcoming revulsion at having to do something disgusting.

So I tend to come down on the side of the psychological stat. But the devil is in the detail, as always. In trying to write games with psychological stats, I've found that the problems lie in defining what is difficult for characters to do. This is because individual psychology varies so much between people. When you bring non-humans into it as well, it gets even worse.

Suppose you have single psychological stat called Willpower, and all tests to avoid taking the easy path are made on this stat. Now, I can think of many situations which would be hard for some people (requiring a stat test) but not for others:

Temptation with pleasure - Characters might be tempted with the offer of booze and attractive members of their sexually preferred gender. One can easily imagine a puritanical character who would never be tempted by this because the emotion that it rouses in him is righteous indignation. Whether or not he is strong-willed, this is a not an occasion for a Willpower test because he's not inclined to such pleasures. On the other hand, a more loose-living character would be tempted and a Willpower test might be called for.

Revulsion - Characters have to crawl along a smelly sewer pipe to get to where they want to go. One character is prim and proper, bathes twice a day and believes in personal hygeine. Such a character would have to overcome revulsion in order to go into the sewer. Another charcter is a filthy bastard who has never washed in his life and smells like shit. He would not be bothered by getting dirty to the same degree, if at all. If he had to make a Willpower test to go in, it would be much less difficult than that required from the clean character.

One approach to overcoming this is to divide the psychological stat into many different fields. Instead of just Willpower, we might have Virtue to resist the temptations of the flesh, and other stats for other aspects of psychological fortitude. Unfortunately, this has limited benefit. A character might be a lifelong abstainer from alcohol but be fond of chasing women. He would not be tempted by the offer of a drink, but would by the offer of a shag. A single Virtue stat would not cope with both these situations realistically. One could theoretically go on subdividing the psychological stats into finer and finer shades forever, but there is only space for a certain number of stats on a character sheet, and we can only foresee a certain number of situations during game design. This will never be comprehensive.

Of course, a good GM with a good understanding of a character's mind will be able to decide on stat modifiers appropriate to any situation. So even with just the single Willpower stat, a GM could decide on two different difficulty levels for two different characters in the same situation. But this relies on the GM having good judgement and understanding a player character's psychology well. These conditions will not always prevail.

FEAR OF THE UNDEAD

Imagine a game where the player characters are normal humans attacked by zombies. What is the psychological effect of seeing rotting human corpses shambling toward you? I imagine that it would be very different for different people. Some might completely go into hysterics, while others might not be that bothered and the adrenaline rush of the physical threat would overcome any surprise and horror that they would feel at seeing a walking corpse. It's probably hard to predict which individuals would have what reaction.

Imagine a fantasy RPG. There are two stats of importance here. A character has a Bravery value representing his ability to overcome fear, and a Dread value representing how scary he looks to an opponent. When two obviously hostile groups meet, and battle looks likely, characters on both sides have to make Bravery tests to avoid browntrousering and running away. The difficulty of the bravey test depends on the Dread of the opposition, with some modifiers for the numbers of combatants on each side.

Dread would normally be based on how much of a physical threat a character seems to be. Thus a heavily built and well-armed warrior would look threatening to an average human, and have high Dread. But zombies have a disproportionately high Dread value compared to the threat they pose, because of the psychological effect of seeing the walking dead on humans. Other things with a horrific appearance have a similar bonus to Dread.

Some fantasy adventurers have an encounter with some zombies for the first time. They have to make Bravery tests to avoid running, and they are subject to the full effect of the zombies' horrific appearance. But it seems sense to me that people can learn over time to overcome something based only on unpleasant appearance. Novice adventurers might be struck by horror at their first sight of a zombie, but more seasoned adventurers should get hardened to it. Then the zombies should lose their bonus for horrific appearance, and their Dread should be reduced only to that which represents the physical threat they pose.

The reason I'm writing this is to show that once you start writing rules for psychological stats, things get so complicated that it becomes impossible to write rules that really reflect what the reality would be.