Dev Diary: Character Personalities

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:

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 the shared concept of Extraversion. But they are slightly different. In addition, I created counter-aspects to those “Big Four”, so that there was a contrast or “other side”. I named them Practical, Spontaneous, Reserved and Assertive. I didn’t want the lack of an aspect to be a negative, or merely a void. Instead, it’s also something that could be useful or desirable — it’s just different. I didn’t want any personality to sound negative, but some of them do sound funny.

This is, of course, not in the original Big Five theory, and therefore it’s just something I made up. Which is fine, because I’m making up a game afterall.

A personality variation: The Harmonizer.

Personality Variations

For some reason that I can’t remember — perhaps I just thought 16 personalities wasn’t cool enough — I decided to make four variations of each archetype. What if an Executor was particularly Practical? Then they’re a Realist. Or particularly Reserved? They’re an Individualist. And so on.

The variation is determined by your most predominant aspect. If you’re more Sociable than anything else, then you’ll get the Sociable variation of your archetype.

With 16 archetypes and 4 variations each, that makes for 64 personalities in the game (16 * 4). I gave each of these 64 personalities a name and a flavor text to bring them to life. Let’s look at some!

The variations make it less likely that any two characters will share the same personality, but sometimes they still do. Even then, there are 3 intensities to distinguish further. We'll get into that next.

Some personalities.

Intensity

How much does a character embody their personality? Is it Subtle, Moderate or Extreme? Those are the 3 intensities.

Intensity is just a description of what’s already there, in plain sight. In the bars, you can see how much a character has of each aspect. The bigger the bar, the higher the intensity. If you’re really Practical, really Focused, really Reserved, and really Amiable, you are an Intense Traditionalist. If you are only a bit of those things, you are a Subtle Traditionalist. And if you’re around the middle, you’re Moderate Traditionalist. It’s pretty simple, though there’s some weird calculations that go into deciding it. The important thing is that you see more people with personalities of Moderate intensity, and less so Subtle and Intense.

Intensity helps you quickly know how seriously a character takes their personality. It also helps distinguish between characters who share the same personality. Maybe they are both Loners, but one is Subtle while the other is Intense. There is a difference.

That makes for 192 possibilities (64 * 3). But both the Subtle Dreamer and the Intense Dreamer are Dreamers, and they share the same flavor text too. So 64 personalities, each with 3 intensities.

Other Distinctions

There are other things that make characters unique.

In addition to personality and traits, characters also have aptitudes, attributes, and (soon) skills. They have different relationships, families, life stories and so on.

However, I’ll leave those for later diaries. Just rest assured that personalities are not the only things that distinguish characters.

Ancient Theory of “Humors”

Unusually for me, I did not research too deeply into how the Romans viewed personality. That’s because, frankly, they had some whacky views that are hard to get into today. They had the theory of Humors, with “fluids” like Phlegm, Black Bile, Yellow Bile and Blood — and their imbalances — influencing how one acted. They also talked about the elements: Fire, Water, Air and Earth.

These things might show up in the game as flavor text somewhere, and, interestingly, they can be mapped to my 8 aspects quite well:

That said, I went with psychology and my own personal experience more than with history for this one.

The Free-Spirit.

On the Conflict With Traits

Since personality and traits are separate systems, it’s possible that a character with the Loner personality might end up with the “Life of the Party” trait, or similar. Oh no! This might sound like a terrible contradiction, but I’m very happy with it. Life is made of these irrationalities, and to me that sounds way more interesting — and way better for generating cool stories — than only expected, boring things happening.

In other words: it’s a feature, not a bug. We will see “Life of the Party” Loners, and much more.

How does personality affect the game, exactly?

This remains to be seen. I only now just implemented them, and they will permeate throughout the other systems in time. Some possibilities:

• Relationships can be harder or easier to form, depending on personality match.

• Some personalities are more likely to take some actions, or to avoid them.

• When selecting your staff for a governorship, it’s probably a good idea to cover all personality aspects: have someone who is Imaginative, but also another who is Practical, etc. In other words, personality could be a part of determining your success in war or administration.

• Many other things. Let me know if you have ideas! You can comment here or join our Discord.

Historical Personalities

Historical characters will have to be given personalities that at least somewhat match them. This is hard, because people are complex! But something has to be given. Here are some of my ideas:

More historical figures:

Of course, there will be many more.

Thanks!

As an aside, I took the MBTI yesterday and I got INFJ. Years ago, it always gave me INTJ. I guess I’ve mellowed out. As for the Big Five, my last result was something like:

• Highest on Conscientiousness (checks out, I double-checked the spelling of the word).

• High on Openness

• Medium on Agreeableness

• Low on Extraversion

• Zero on Neuroticism

I particularly strive for this last one; I was depressed and anxious before and I know how much that sucks. In fact, I made a game about it:

View game pageAnd since I’m self-promoting, let’s go all the way! Writing the flavor text for each personality was a fun way to exercise my creative writing skills, which I did more extensively in my last narrative game:

View game pageIf you do check out those games, thank you! They also have free demos so you can try before you buy.

And remember to wishlist Historia Realis, if you haven’t yet!

View game pageThanks!

— Lucas