Wise But Weak, Strong Yet Stupid: The Value of Character Limitation and Sacrifice in Role-Playing Games

In Fallout, I always play the silver-tongued charlatan. The person who gets by on wits alone, who talks through problems with a smarmy grin. The person who, on a good day, could soften the hearts of wasteland raiders or convince a mutant-overseer to lay down arms.

Let’s call him Biff.

Biff is naturally a hands-off kind of guy. However, to understand why Biff is this way, it’s just as important to consider what he can’t do. Characters, like people, are defined by their limitations. You don’t see many quantum physicists running marathons. A ninety-pound Olympic gymnast probably shouldn’t take up heavy-weight boxing. Likewise, the fact that my smooth-talker choses words over violence implies that he has no alternative; if he could fight, he might run his mouth a little less. Everyone is good at something, but no one is good at everything. It’s a cliché, but it’s often true. Limitation—what we cannot do—dictates the course we do eventually take. This is the fundamental premise behind character creation, and the basis for compelling role-play.

In-game, this is realised primarily through statistics.

In Dungeons and Dragons (DnD), for example, ability scores are determined via random dice roll, but players are encouraged to assign those scores to complement their chosen class (Player's Handbook). My sweet-talker character would likely be a bard, and to persuade others or pass ability-checks for bardic spells, my highest ability-score must go by necessity into Charisma, to the exclusion of Strength or Constitution. The player chooses who they want to be, and the game encourages them to adhere to their class by limiting available options within the game to be expressive of that class.

While Fallout does away with the tabletop convention of strict classes in the transition to a digital medium, it still follows the tradition of the Generic Universal Role-Playing System (GURPS)—the tabletop-basis of Fallout’s SPECIAL system, created after the Fallout team lost the GURPS license late in development—as both are defined by limitation to an even greater extent than DnD (Campbell). “If you want more abilities,” the GURPS 4^th Edition manual reads, “you can get extra points by accepting below-average strength, appearance, wealth … or by taking disadvantages—specific handicaps such as bad vision or fear of heights” (Jackson 10). Class is not formally assigned, but created through systems which encourage the player to accept weakness. The idea is not to create superhumans, but to make characters distinct from one another in their flaws as well as their strengths.

This philosophy survives in the original Fallout, as its SPECIAL system gives players only thirty-five ability points to assign across the seven categories. As with DnD, if I want to create my smooth-talking charlatan, I need to put as many points as I can into Charisma and Intelligence. However, because all SPECIAL categories are pre-assigned to a baseline average of five, I’m forced not simply to assign the points as I wish, but to actively subtract points from other categories to make up the difference. To raise my Charisma to ten, I need to sacrifice Agility or Endurance, and in doing so reduce my effectiveness in combat. Just as with GURPS, the game makes players conscious of their character’s strengths by making them complicit in their weaknesses. And, as there is no mechanic within the leveling system itself to later increase these ability scores, they become fixed indicators of your character’s fundamental nature.

It's clear that this was part of the Fallout team’s core design philosophy, as the very first screen upon booting up a new game unceremoniously presents the player with a possible character pre-set: “Max Stone,” a hulking man with ten Strength and nine Endurance. Rather than frame these advantages solely in terms of themselves, the in-game biography makes it explicit that Stone’s proficiency comes only at the cost of his mind: “It is unfortunate that his intelligence was affected after birth when the labour bot dropped him on his head.” His low intelligence is not an unfortunate statistic to be improved upon as one progresses through the game, but a reflection of who he is. This is undergirded as well through his Optional Trait, “Bruiser,” which directly recalls the GURPS mechanic of accepting explicit disadvantages to bolster character abilities. “A little slower, but a little bigger … your total action points are lowered, but strength is increased.” My character Biff might take the optional trait “Good Natured”: “You studied less-combative skills as you were growing up … Your combat skills start at a lower lever, but First Aid, Doctor, Speech and Barter are substantially improved.” In the original Fallout, the table-top system survives; nothing is free, and every sacrifice is framed in a way that says something about the experiences of your character.

These limitations further reinforce character by dictating what players can and cannot do in-game. My sweet-talker’s weakness in combat means that I begin most playthroughs by running frantically from the rats that stalk the starting-area of the game. Stone, by contrast, might beat every rat to death, simply because he can. These first actions say something about who those characters are, and act as a primer for the rest of the narrative. Biff might spend the next fourty hours avoiding combat altogether, while his hulking counterpart might spend the majority of his playtime stuck in turn-based combat, his low intelligence rendering conversations a rather pointless affair. Their experiences will be fundamentally different, because the scope of what they can do in gameplay is limited. By working within these restrictions, we as players act how they would act. When confronted with an angry raider, the player no longer thinks, ‘What would I do in this situation?’ They instead ask, ‘What can my character do? What would they do? Through limitation, the player becomes their character. They no longer merely control an avatar, but project the character of that avatar onto themselves, and vice versa, creating what theorist James Gee calls a “projective identity … the middle ground between the real-world identity of the user and the virtual identity of the user,” focalised through the physical avatar itself (Waggoner 15). It’s a relationship that can’t be achieved through any other medium.

The problem, though, is that from a business perspective, forced limitation makes no sense. In the age of digital RPGs, game content is not created on-the-fly by the Dungeon Master, and game systems are not merely theoretical rule-sets; everything seen on screen is instead comprised of complex, costly, and easily breakable code, the result of painstaking work on the part of the developers carried out over a period of years. In the crowed, modern gaming landscape, most players are realistically not going to play your game more than once. If you, as the developer, want it to be popular (and lucrative), it’s nonsensical to cordon off different parts of the experience to subsequent playthroughs. You want players and reviewers to see as much of your game as they can.

This seems to be the thinking informing the recent Fallout 4. Above all, the game prioritises “FREEDOM & LIBERTY … Do whatever you want,” the back cover reads, “Be whoever you want.” While the latter sentiment seems to suggest a role-playing approach, the games modified SPECIAL system emphasises freedom above all, at the cost of roleplay. Unlike previous Fallout games, SPECIAL stats are not pre-set to an average value of five: instead, they each start at one. While players still technically have the same number of points, this change makes the process of assigning them one of addition, not subtraction. The cost of putting more points into one category over another is not telegraphed to the player, and they are not made complicit in their own weaknesses. This is likely because SPECIAL stats are no longer meant to express character, as they are no longer fixed. With every level-up, players are able to increase their ability values. Suddenly Biff’s low Strength of four is no longer a reflection of his cowardice and non-combative past, but a temporary inconvenience which can theoretically be resolved after six level-ups. Within the first few hours of the game, my con-man can become a hulking strongman, at no cost to his other attributes. By design, Fallout 4 renders its characters plastic, mouldable, and without integrity.

This is worsened by the game’s elimination of Skills, dissolved into a “Perk Chart” whose branches are unlockable through one’s SPECIAL stats. These perks seemingly adapt the Skills and Optional Traits of previous Fallout games, but with one crucial difference: not a single one is reductive. There are no downsides, no limitations. The “Basher” perk, for example, parallels the original Fallout’s Bruiser trait in that they both increase strength in combat. However, there’s no trade-off in unlocking it: “Get up close and personal! … Gun bashing now does 75% more damage and has an increased chance to cripple your opponent.” This not framed in the GURPS mode, requiring a sacrifice of action-points to imply ‘slowness’ on the part of the player-character, but as a ‘perk’—a unambiguous net benefit bestowed without any consideration for what it might mean on a narrative level; it reveals nothing other than how much time you, as the player, have put into the game.

This is not a slight against progression, which is a fundamental part of any RPG, but rather the fact that that Fallout 4’s modified progression system does not further deepen character through specialization, but actively discourages it. Every perk has multiple ranks, each increasing your effectiveness in a particular SPECIAL category, but the higher ranks of every perk are gated by level. If I, as Biff, choose to unlock all the base-level Charisma perks by level ten, the level restrictions prevent me from investing more points in the Charisma path for the immediate future. By threatening to stall my progression through the game, Fallout 4 discourages specialization, gently nudging me to seek out progression in other categories. This permits me to experience more varied content, but at the cost of reducing the distinctiveness of my character. By the end of the story, it’s probable that the player will be functional—even exceptional—at everything the game has to offer. I can be the charlatan, the nuclear physicist, and the Olympic gymnast all at once; this is not a character, it’s a superhuman.

The combined effect of all this is to distance ‘player’ from ‘character.’ While I can still choose to imagine myself as Biff and voluntarily limit myself to Charisma-based options, this makes the role-playing aspect of Fallout 4 self-imposed, a function of player imagination rather than something subtly created through hard limitations in gameplay. The reality is that, when allowed to easily exercise an in-game option, players will exercise that option, purely out of curiosity. That was what I did, in my one and only playthrough of Fallout 4. Without limitations, I was encouraged by absence to actively choose new abilities based on what I enjoyed doing in gameplay. I began to ask, ‘What do I want to do right now,’ rather than the GURPS role-playing mandate of, ‘What would my character do in this situation?’ Suddenly I was not playing a character: I was playing myself. The projected identity created in the space between the player, the character they role-play, and the virtual avatar embodied by both is collapsed entirely. Without limitation, the role-play dissolves, leaving only the player. The avatar becomes a empty shell, merely the player’s camera into the world of the game.

This is not inherently bad—Fallout 4 is certain fun, an incredible player-focused power fantasy—but it is no longer a true role-playing game in the vein of DnD, GURPS, or the original Fallout. The experience becomes shallow. Ironically, removing limitations is limiting in itself, as a core part of the role-playing experience is lost. When nothing is outside a character’s grasp, they cease to have any character at all.

References

Campbell, Scott. The Origins of Fallout, No Mutants Allowed,

https://web.archive.org/web/20151004173112/http://www.nma

fallout.com/article.php?id=60786.

Dungeons and Dragons: Player's Handbook. 5th ed., Wizards of the Coast, 2014.

Fallout. Interplay Productions, 1997.

Fallout 4. Bethesda Softworks, 2015.

Jackson, Steve, et al. GURPS: Basic Set Characters. 4th ed., Steve Jackson Games, 2008.

Waggoner, Zach. My Avatar, My Self: Identity in Video Role-Playing Games. McFarland, 2009.