sirdilznik wrote:I'm curious about this as well. What exactly do those stats do? Do they augment NPCs reactions to you? Are they completely meaningless except for the stat sheet? Do they control how the character acts if you set him or her into AI-mode when playing single player?
I've actually only seen one game series
really try something like this, and it's an extremely obscure Japanese tactical RPG somewhat similar mechanically to Dragon Age. (It's name is Growlanzer if you want to look it up.)
In that game, though, you had about a half-dozen different player-character-only metrics that are based essentially entirely upon your choices in dialogue in response to either plotline scenes or reactions to players, with a BioWare-like emphasis on talking to and eventually dating your party.
Much of the time, however, choices didn't have gameplay impact, but instead just a character personality score impact. For example, in one scene, you chase a monster out of a cave, and the monster shoots a laser at the boulders over the cave entrance, and you get a dialogue box that pops up and gives you choices of either warning your party members, just screaming "AAAAAH BOULDER AAAAH!" and running for it, or giving the silent treatment and trying to side-step the boulder while assuming your party will just, y'know, deal with it on their own.
Part of what made it work was that you needed to build up a certain number of personality points for some options to actually be possible to choose. For example, when you first meet a major female character, you have an option to deliver a cheesy, "Do those legs go ALL the way up?" line if you've acquired enough "Womanizer" points by that point in the plot.
You got rated on being on a sliding scale of hot-headed versus cold, (basically, do you charge into battle and respond to villain taunts or do you not give a shit and always take your sweet time,) being "stupid" versus "smart" (this related to how the party would find clues as to what to do next, and then ask you what they should do - pick a stupid answer, and the responsible party members will slap you and tell you what to do, while picking the right answer makes them "ooooh!" at your proper guess,) whether you are optimistic or pessimistic, a few others I can't quite remember that depended on which game in the series you were in, and also a "Likes Men" stat that basically measures if you were flirting with the other boys, (and to my eternal regret for not flirting with boys, includes options to do things like talk about how FAAAAABULOUS the leather jackets of enemy assassins sent to kill you are,) and, of course, the "womanizer" stat that you get for being a jackass who kind of wants to slap HIMSELF after hearing what just came out of his mouth.
Another part was that the games usually had some skill that was tied to the personality alignment you had - a hot-headed character gained access to a once-per-battle skill that was basically "Hit them REAAAALLY hard", while the cold character gets a skill that can be used once-per-battle to give themselves another use of some other skill that was already used up.
It was ultimately unfortunately not a central part of the game series - the games generally had a largely linear plot that just breaks off into a dozen or so different endings at the last moment based mostly around who in your party you're dating, but some of the games have personality type requirements before you can date different party members.