Tim, I've been a gamer since I was 6, now I'm 30, and I've been a designer for 9 years in the industry.
Really really appreciate your work and your insights here man. What a massive gift to share it in such detail.

The "Cornerstone of Objectivity" sounds like a sweet perk and I'm taking it the next time that my real life character levels up

Strong recommendation for Josh Sawyer's GDC talk on attribute design/tuning in Pillars. Really great insight about the history of D&D attributes and how they designed Pillars'.

The thing with Amber DRPG, is that the bidding system is there to emulate a narrative theme. In the novels there is this group of princes and princess who mostly all grew up together, and knew each other. They competed against each other all their life. So they knew, in advance, who was the strongest, or the best fighter, and so on. Because they tried to beat that brother or sister dozens and dozens of time before, and they couldn't (they're all immortal, so we're talking as fully formed adults).
That's what the system tried to emulate. Which of course can very easily fall flat, when new characters come in, or if player character didn't grew up together or at least competed for years together as adults. Because that narrative of close knit family works for that generation of protagonists in the novels, but not often in a rpg campaign, and indeed in the novels the second generation doesn't follow this narrative theme.
But to its credit, that system also handled something from the book, is the unknown. Some people could chose to buy attributes but not bid, so they could not be the best, and if tied they would lose to the official bidder, but nobody else knew what they had.
Plus, that point pool to buy things, covered everything. Not only attributes, but also powers and abilities.

But indeed, there are a lot of interesting thing out there. As an old far, one of the less old interesting thing I've seen is the system in FATE Core, where skills and attributes are merged. There is no distinction between them. There is a list set for a campaign, with a default generic list provided as example in the rulebook. And that default list has to be the best one I've ever seen. It's short but not too short, a total of 17 irc. And it cover everything, from shooting or coercing people, but also money (or general resources), or contacts and networks and allies. So in FATE when you're presented with a challenge, you can attack it in many different ways. Sure you can get into combat with the tower guard that's stopping you from entering, and sure you can sneak past, or bluff them. But you can also try to build a contraption to get you to zipline from another tower, or you can bribe them, or you can have a ally give you permission to enter. And every single example there can be handled with a single skill check, each with the same mechanics and difficulties.

But however elegant it is, it does remove one of, imo, the greatest aspect of attributes in most system: they are additive to skills, and broad. In many rpg there is a variation of "well you're very strong, sure it help to bonk people on the head and move things, but it can also help you move someone past traps now roll Strength+Traps, or help your male show off to someone compatible roll Strength+Seduction, and so on. Skills tend to be vertical, they rule over a single specific domain of actions; while attributes are more horizontal and can affect many things.
Bonus design points to rpg who let this additive property freeform (with guidelines of course), to cover edge cases and inventive usage by players: yes maybe this part of the heist could be done by swapping out faster a whole computer rack from two different datacenter buildings, roll Strength+Computers.

Tim just wanna say Fallout came out the year I was born and my introduction to the series was with 3. I recently played through fallout 1 during my final semester in college and it was a blast. I love your work and you are an inspiration ❤

I'm one of those people that really enjoy complexity in character building, and appreciate the fact that you can create hyper specialised characters or generalists but not master of everything, unless you cheat, which is your choice I guess. I also love in dialogue stat choices because it's just one of the ways where you can roleplay your specific character and see the impact of the character you chose to make.

What if you bid against a rival character in the game? So you end up designing your rival by designing your character?

I think the way Attributes are setup in a game is more important than some realize. Since they are typically sort of your 'base layer' of your character build, they tend to effect everything in some capacity. They are a foundation for the rest of your character system. Even simply removing them all together has a profound effect on a system. It's an interesting area to tackle and think about.

I  think one issue regarding your thoughts on the next Fallout, is the expectation now a player should be able to do all the content of the game on one character, mainly because the games are so huge and long. So in the end class or attributes mean nothing because your character can do everything at the end.

I’d much rather have a shorter game where you cant experience everything on one playthrough yet each character you make feels and plays different and the world reacts differently to the character. I’m not sure if you have insider knowledge but it seems the mantra in the industry is that longer equals better.

FWIW, Todd Howard has explicitly said that they've made an overt decision to make Starfield "more hardcore of a role playing game than we've done", to "go back to some things that we used to do in games long ago that we felt have really let players express the character they want to be."

Which, at least to me, does sound like BGS actually registered the lukewarm reception of Fallout 4's basegame (for, among other things, the dearth of stat checks).

Whenever i start up Fallout 2, I usually stop playing at the stats screen. All I can see are the stats I suck in. I think that's mostly a consequence of some stats mattering way more than others (a low INT for example locks you out of quests and can even prevent you from getting some of the best endings). And an AGI of 10 is a no brainer! The problem with this isn't that it forces you to be flawed, it's that it locks you out of content that might matter a lot to you. I hope this helps, because stats are one of those things i've been chewing on in the back of my brain since I first played Fo2. You definitely did something special there for the time (hue hue hue). Part of it was the mature subject matter. Most RPG's back then were fantasy and I was like early teens so i was excited to have something more relatable to my everyday world. I didn't own any "Spiky Suits" (from Secret of Mana) but i did know what a leather jacket was. Anyway, i hope this helps. I care about stats, but I don't think i've seen them in their perfect form and if anyone can figure that out, it's you!

I remember how fun making different characters in fallout and arcanum was because of how unique attribute distribution made each one. The game changed around who and what your character was for better or for worse. It made the world feel real and your character being a real participant in it instead of your character being some weird power fantasy that’s just plowing through the world as the OP main character

As a hobby, I've been writing a homebrew Fallout campaign/ruleset piggybacking off of 5e's rules [Yes, I know what that sounds like.] for quite a while now, and this insight gives me confidence that I'm doing something awesome for my friends and I. Thank you so much for this channel.

Wow, this came at the perfect time, literally when I was in the middle of figuring out the attributes for my TTRPG!

OMG, Amber. Such great memories of playing it in the late 90s. Another thing about the bidding process in it is that you could overspend, and then you'd get Bad Stuff! And if you underspent, those points would become Good Stuff! Amber was a fun game, full of intrigue and just the craziest sh*t happened. Some of the ideas contained in that book still influence my game design lobe to this day.
On 0-5 attributes... It depends on how your 'dice system' works. A bonus of "1" in V:TM isn't the same as a 4pt bonus in D&D or a 20% bonus in a d100 game.

That bidding concept is awesome.

Hey Tim I’ve been loving your videos! It’s made me replay the original Fallout!

With the new Fallout show on the horizon, I’d be curious to hear what it’s like to see something you created be taken in so many directions and be expanded on by so many different people? I know there are large contingencies of the fallout community who gatekeep what is “true fallout” do you have a feeling similar? Not necessarily the aspect on the quality of newer content, but to see it become so great. Is it comforting seeing a creation worked on by so many different people or does it become something feel completely different than what you were proud of you?

Love the vids keep it up

i just found this channel and its like the fountain of wisdom about fallout i always wanted

Jus throwing an idea out there - have attributes be tied to the god you worship (chosen during creation), but changing gods wipes out all bonuses/drawbacks, and they slowly ramp up again.  This makes it a long term decision instead of choosing whatever is good at the moment.

In video games one of the most common criticisms I see can be summed up with "Show me the numbers." Since an amazing number of modern RPG's and RPG-Likes, have this issue of making it very unclear what anything does, to the point years later still next to no one knows. Monster Hunter with it's Hidden Scaling attacks being one of the biggest ones where it says something like 200 damage, but none of your attacks have 100% scaling so it's really like 150 or less. Attack speed is never shown either. Hidden checks for things also compound onto this, which you will see as well, requirements for stats or unknown ability scaling for a Feat/Perk will also have this issue, even more so if it's class based game where you'd never know the Gunslinger uses Intelligence for his special attack or whatever.

Meanwhile if you just showed all the perks, and let people see all the information, and ideally had like a test arena, ideally an optional one, none of that would've been an issue.