Unique Character Skills and Traits for Players

There is a fascinating concept that has popping up in the myriad of Japanese & Korean light novels, manga, manhwa, and anime that are based on virtual worlds. You can find it in a series such as ソードアート・オンライン (Sword Art Online or SAO), or the Korean 열렙전사 (Hardcore Leveling Warrior: Lucid Adventure or HCLW). There is this idea of sometimes all, or only some, players being given skills, abilities, or powers that no other player is given (or able to acquire in any way).

Were this idea to be translated to MUDs or MMORPGs, it would provide staggering opportunities on an unprecedented scale for a highly evolved form of metagaming to manifest itself. The possibilities are so very exciting to think about.

I remember vividly my time in The Secret World. An MMORPG game that had more meta than any other MMO (or even non-MMO for that matter) game. There were players that would spend months, years even, honing and developing incredibly different means of tanking, healing, or DPSing for incredibly specific types of gameplay, events, game mechanics, raids, bosses. I remember one of my guildmates fondly who had upwards of a hundred or possibly even hundreds of different builds.



This was largely due to the revolutionary skill wheel, and the myriad of interesting skill combinations that, combined with unique gear, and other special attributes, could dramatically transmogrify a character so as to be nearly unrecognizable from a previous configuration, and able to meet special challenges in very effective ways.

Characters had a staggering 575 different base skills to choose from, that were categorized as either Ranged, Melee, or Magic.

There were even a further three sub-categorization sets of groups as well.

It was no uncommon thing for a character to change their “deck” of skills from one moment to the next and become vastly more suited, and subsequently vastly more powerful, to the current situation. Whether it was for an entire dungeon, raid, area, or even a specific type of enemy or situation. Some builds were better for certain types of terrain or traps. There were even specific builds that were created for best completing challenges in the game or finding secrets (e.g. lore).

Now Imagine, if you will, if characters were given unique capabilities or skills, especially in a meta-rich environment such as the one in The Secret World. I could not even begin to quantify the ramifications what such a radical variable like that being introduced, would have on the metagame and player interactions.

Fortunately, there are some mediums where such ideas have been explored, moreso in HCLW than SAO, but we will cover both briefly.

Sword Art Online

In SAO, for example, the main character Kirito is given the unique skill 二刀流 Nitōryū, translated as Two Sword Style or more commonly in MUDs and other RPG games as Dual Wielding [Swords]. In this case the skill is actually made up of a family of 20 techniques that take advantage of using two swords.



Now in SAO, there were only a handful of characters that were bestowed unique skills, and they seemed to fit the style or personality of the characters that won them. Unlike in HCLW, the characters were not assigned these skills at character creation. It is hinted that they were either unlocked by the characters as a consequence of outperforming other players in their respective areas, but also hinted that this was not done by the world itself, but rather by the creator or god of the virtual world.

Despite being skills that were unique and powerful, this did not translate to making the character OP. After all, he still had to work his way leveling up as did the other players in the virtual world, and while it certainly did give him a huge advantage, it also came with its disadvantages as well.

There is the social component to consider, no-one in the virtual world was powerful enough to be completely independent and the sociological ramifications of players achieving advantages over others has to be considered. In fact, the character of Kirito had already, earlier in the story, been given a lot of grief for having been a beta tester, earning himself the derogatory term beater, a portmanteau of beta-tester and cheater.

When it was discovered later on that he had been given a powerful and unique ability, it was certainly cause for some jealousy. While it helped that he used the ability in order to save lives, had the news been released under other less noble circumstances or earlier, it could certainly have made things very difficult for Kirito, possibly even fatal.

Hardcore Leveling Warrior: Lucid Adventure

The series is still being fleshed out and due to various translations it is difficult to truly pin down exactly how the rare skills and trait systems work in the universe of Lucid Adventure. However, there appear to be various types of unique and sometimes secret traits and skills, which can seemingly fall into one of three categories: Class, Race, and Personal. For example, the main hero has a rare personal trait referred to as Absolute Luck. He and other characters throughout the series also appear to have “secret” skills. One such character is a player killer the protagonists have to hunt down and capture in an early mission, and seems to have a Size Manipulation ability.

In HCLW, while all secret and special abilities, traits, and skills must be unlocked, there is the Personal Trait that is supposed to unlock after you have fulfilled a “Super Secret Personal Condition”, and the character must have at least reached level 40. Unlocking the trait, however, is no small feat depending on which condition you have been given.



Many of the secret and special skills themselves have their own rarity levels, ranging from extremely rare to common, and some possibly even unique. They are also not necessarily even useful for combat, such as one that allows players to stream what they see such as to other players within the game, enabling them to act like reporters. One character in a later chapter abuses this ability using it to spy and relay information on enemy forces to other teams during a tournament.



There is no way to know what one’s Personal Trait is until it is unlocked or without the use of an uncommon/rare item for a special NPC. The exception being if one’s Personal Trait is a skill or “Stat”, where the player can see that they will be given access to a specific skill or boost to a specific attribute stat (e.g. Strength). In such a case, the player should select their class (possibly even their race) dependent on what skill or stats they will unlock.

It is often a running theme that characters are loath to reveal their personal trait, or other unique skills, as it provides their enemies with an advantage against them. So the smarter ones usually hold back on using (and thus revealing) the extent of their powers in battle, especially when others are or may be watching.



Some skills may not even be combat abilities, as is the case with various characters in HCLW. Other skills at their lowest levels may be completely non-combat oriented, but at later levels may have some ability to be combined with special gear or other high-level skills to produce very powerful and unexpected results (that may have considerable utility in combat), such as in the case of the streamer from the tournament.

Conclusion

While there are many possible variants, the primary concept behind unique player abilities is that there shall be skills or traits given to players that other players simply cannot achieve. The goal of such a system would be to introduce what I have termed as emergent meta into the virtual world.

To achieve that goal, there would need to be several factors at play:

• No matter how utterly rare these skills would be, they would, whether explicitly or implicitly by design, have to become something that the majority of the player-base would become aware of eventually (or at least enough to hit a saturation point that would eventually lead to most players knowing).
• Some, if not most or all of these traits, should exhibit or provide a sufficient level of differentiation that would make other players in the game curious about them.
• The skills should be of sufficient variety and in sufficient quantity that the loss of players (and thus the loss of that ability from the game), would not render the entire system pointless.
• Players should be unable to unlock or even determine this trait until at least mid-game, if not near end-game.
• There should be an unknown (and possibly randomly generated) challenge associated with unlocking the ability.

So long as these foundational principles are followed, I believe many variants could be explored successfully.

The ethnographic implications are exciting to consider, but no matter how many thought experiments are executed, such as through story-telling, we cannot really know just how far our virtual cultures will be or can be affected through implementation of the unique skill system.

I look forward to the day when a virtual world such as the The Secret World, with over half a thousand unique passive and active abilities, hundreds of different combinations of items, and dozens of augmented abilities that can be leveled up, implements something like these Unique Traits for its players.

  Belisarius Smith