Update log
Full Historia Realis: Rome update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Extracted changes
- UI and audio
- Gameplay
- Balance
Dev Diary – Character Personalities
Hi, Lucas here!
This will be a focused diary on a very specific thing: personality.
People seem to like personality theory, considering the popularity of the MBTI personality test and such. Are you an INTP?
In Historia Realis, there are 64 personalities that characters can have, and today we’ll look at how I got to those, and their differences.
Personalities are not traits. They’re very different things. There are hundreds of traits in the game, and they’re separate from personality.
Characters are born with a specific personality, while traits can be gained. You can have hundreds of traits, but you only have one personality. Let’s see some comparisons:
| Traits | Personality |
|---|---|
| Can have many, even hundreds | You have only 1, which is composed of a few aspects. |
| Changeable: gain new ones, lose old ones | Hard to change |
| Have levels (for example, from Terrible Orator to Great Orator) | Doesn’t have levels, but does have variations and intensity (see below) |
| Unlock new actions for player and NPCs, give attribute bonuses and maluses | Mechanics still to be determined — I’ll talk more about this at the end! |
A character profile, displaying their personality.
Aspects of Personality
A personality is composed of 4 pairs of aspects, as seen in the image above:
Imaginative Practical
Focused Spontaneous
Sociable Reserved
Amiable Assertive
Each pair is mutually exclusive. That is, you are either on the Imaginative camp or in the Practical camp. That’s because the pair Imaginative/Practical is a single value between -100 and 100. Any positive value means Imaginative, while any negative means Practical. And values closer to 0 mean that a character is more towards the middle of the road between the two.
One peculiar choice I’ve made is for values never to be between -40 and 40, only either lower or higher than that. The reason for this is to avoid boring characters that are neither this nor that, and thus have no personality. Also, it avoids the visual problem of the bar in the UI showing up too small to see, or so small that it looks like a thin, ugly line.
Anyway, from those values are derived our archetypes.
Archetypes
With 4 pairs of aspects, that makes for 16 possible archetypes. For example:
The Executor archetype is Practical, Focused, Reserved and Assertive.
The Dreamer archetype is Imaginative, Spontaneous, Reserved and Amiable.
And so on, to a total of 16 combinations.
You’ll notice that 16 personalities is exactly the number of core MBTI personalities: ESTP, INFP, ESFJ, etc. Indeed, the personalities in Historia Realis do correlate to those somewhat, but not exactly.
My inspiration for the pairs of aspects was actually the Big Five, which are generally regarded as more scientific. I only changed them slightly:
Openness to being Imaginative
Conscientiousness to being Focused
Extraversion to being Sociable
Agreeableness to being Amiable
Neuroticism was not included.
The reason for not including Neuroticism is that, in my opinion, it is more a description of one’s mental health and well-being than an aspect of personality. That is, the presence of Neuroticism indicates mental unwellness. When one becomes depressed or anxious, there’s no personality change, just a passing state, in my view. That’s of course all debatable, and if you have the Debater personality you might want to debate me, but that’s how I personally see it. Regardless, that kind of state is simulated elsewhere in the game, in the Vice and Tranquility system.
There is some correlation between the MBTI and the Big Five, and that’s clearer with
Source