Fallout is a tremendous game from a design perspective, and the way that it does this so well is by having a really solid foundation layer, which pretty much every character in the game interfaces with in a way that allows for simplicity without stifling complex interactions.

As a game designer, you want to make sure that your rules facilitate the maximum amount of freedom–or, at least, the maximum amount of freedom within the narrative you're going for. Since Fallout is an open-world game, the SPECIAL system is a very important part of this, since the designers want players to be able to have as much freedom as possible without having to either script a lot of individual interactions or have very shallow options that don't mean anything in mechanical terms.

If you haven't read Part 1 of this, I suggest going to do so now, since I'm going to talk about layers and other concepts that I won't fully explain here for space's sake. You can find it right through this link.

In terms of our layers diagram, the SPECIAL layer is the one we will focus on primarily today.

Foundation Layers

I don't have a bazillion categories that I put game design layers in, because I generally feel that doing so is too specific for what most games do and you're going to have a lot of categories that are half-accurate. However, there are a couple types that I like, and the one that is most obvious to me is the foundation layer.

SPECIAL is Fallout's foundation layer. It's a set of attributes that every creature in the game possesses, even if that rating is at 0; this is something you can see in almost every mechanics-driven roleplaying game (pre-Skyrim Elder Scrolls titles, D&D, Avernum, Final Fantasy, and so forth), and it's a very important element of the game.

One of the things that defines a foundation layer is that it really has two roles:

1. It is a lightning-fast source for comparison between multiple entities within the game's systems.
2. It can interact with other layers.

A good foundation layer is simple enough to maintain the first, while complex enough to permit the second.

It's also worth pointing out that it is possible to have either entities or mechanics that interact with just one layer, and having a foundation layer is a good idea for this as it permits a very lazy "cheap" way of doing things (e.g. "this character has 7 strength, so they can lift this much") without having to necessarily flesh out a whole lot of details.

Non-Mechanical Games versus Games Without Foundation Layers

It's worth noting really quick that not every game is mechanics-driven. Some games, like Failbetter Games' Fallen London, don't necessarily rely on mechanics as their primary source of appeal. These tend to be more narrative focused games than otherwise. One of my favorite examples of a game that's not mechanics-driven is The Quiet Year (affiliate link), which is heavily focused on collaborative storytelling as the main exercise with not so much mechanics as conventions. Sometimes video games like this get derided as "walking simulators" because they lack any significant amount of mechanical interactions, though that gets into a philosophical point that is definitely outside the scope of this discussion. I also believe that there are games with mechanics whose primary appeal is not those mechanics, which adds another wrinkle to the question.

Most games, however, are still driven by game mechanics. They are simply not based on a foundation layer. An example of this is something like a modern first-person shooter (e.g. Rainbow Six Siege) where there are not enough distinct elements to serve as a foundation, or something like an RTS where there may even be a foundation layer assigned to characters, but one which plays a secondary role as a driver of the game. On the other hand, you can totally have foundation layers in games of any genre, and also games without them.

What is SPECIAL?

SPECIAL is an acronym for Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck, which are the attributes that govern each character in Fallout. Since many readers are likely already familiar with these, and they're pretty self-evident, I'm not going to go into detail unless a particular example is important to our analysis, but there is a more detailed write-up of SPECIAL on the Fallout Wiki.

How does it work in-game?

SPECIAL is a 1-10 scale with a baseline of 5. For comparison, a character with an IQ of 100 would be represented by an Intelligence rating of 5 in Fallout; this is your average person who would perform better than 50% of the population and worse than 50%.

For a foundation attribute, you typically want a non-zero baseline for your average character; there are a couple simple reasons for this.

1. You are likely going to have entities that engage with your foundation layer that can't do something, and giving them a zero in that is a very nice representation of total ineptitude or incapacity.
2. You want players to have a feel for how much a point is worth intuitively, and setting a baseline is a way to say roughly what the player is like in the same attribute (people differ, but most people are within 20% of baseline).

This assumes that your characters in your games are like people, but this is true in so many cases that it's only really meaningful to look at exceptions when they occur, rather than avoid the generalization for sake of perfect accuracy.

There are seven SPECIAL attributes, and they usually tie directly to something that is immediately measurable in people; Strength, for instance, can be pretty easily recognized in others: I have a Strength of 4, while my friend who is a weightlifter has a strength of at least 7. On the other hand, I may have an Endurance of 6. I can't carry much, but I can run better than average.

For a game designer, being able to do this with characters is helpful for simplicity's sake, and it'll also mean that your writing team can make their own characters without having to bother you to do it for them because it's so simple.

SPECIAL points are distributed using points when players make their characters (40 points across 7 attributes, if my memory serves), each of which increases the rating by 1. This makes the player character slightly above average (average rating of 5.7 per attribute, where 5 is baseline), but also means that it's not necessary to always sacrifice to have a strength in a given area.

Generally, a SPECIAL rating gives a character bonuses to derived attributes and skills, but it can be used directly in many contexts.

Whether or not you want to have a single layer stand on its own or have layers add together is an important game design decision, and in Fallout the general idea was "Let's just do both!"

This is a good approach when it doesn't result in player overload. However, there are times when it may be better to limit to one approach or the other for the sake of your players.

It's also worth noting that more layers can lead to problems in the same way that one really complex layer does. If I make a game where players have to add eight numbers to figure out what a character's good at, I may lose an audience because of over-complexity (to say nothing of the nightmare of trying to balance such a system).

Common Pitfalls of Foundation Layers

I think Fallout is really competently executed, or else I would have found another game to profile, but the biggest thing that I see as an issue with foundation layers is when you have things that don't match the game universe in your mechanics.

A good example of this would be if you had a Magic stat in a game with no magic. It doesn't make sense from a mechanical perspective, and unless there's some hidden use it's just a way to mess things up.

Another common pitfall is to have too many foundation layer elements (e.g. 20 attributes), which confuses players, or too few (2). This isn't a hard-and-fast rule; Numenera (affiliate link), a very well received tabletop roleplaying game that also has a video game in the vein of Fallout. It has three attributes in its foundation layer, and it's fantastic! The problem comes when players are overwhelmed by the information provided, or when there are extreme balance issues between the attributes.

What does SPECIAL do well?

SPECIAL is really well-balanced. This isn't just an accident; the game itself is built to permit players to explore a large world and the whole design team made sure that there were things for every sort of character to do. There are a lot of places where they clearly asked themselves "What would a strong character do here?" or "What would a smart character do here?" and then wrote those into the script of the game.

It also has other layers that interact with SPECIAL, and these layers are also tuned so that characters benefit from their SPECIAL attributes.

For instance, a Perk that makes a character better at ranged combat might be locked behind Perception; it would apply to various weapon skills, but a character who is highly trained but not naturally apt sacrifices access to those Perks.

Another thing that comes down to a design team decision is that things like Intelligence can impact the narrative of the game; a character with an extremely low Intelligence has different dialogue options, to the point that they have very different outcomes for some parts of the story-line. This wouldn't be impossible using other systems, but it is something that is very convenient to use a foundation layer for.

SPECIAL is also really intuitive. People know what these things do in real life, and they know what they do in Fallout.

What does SPECIAL struggle with?

The answer to this is not a whole lot, if you ask me.

There are a few points of contention here, however, and as a game designer I feel the need to point them out:

• SPECIAL is made most useful by the design team's careful efforts.

In D&D, people refer to Charisma as a "dump stat" because not every character needs it. This is an unintended consequence of design, which Fallout mitigates by having a lot of Charisma-based challenges. Although it's not really a layer-based game (it only has a few character attributes determined by the player), the classic video game Deus Ex has a swimming skill, which is a notorious waste of points because only a few swimming sections require it.

• There are still sub-optimal ways to make a character.

There are characters you can make in Fallout who will be lousy. Whether or not this is a huge problem is a question for another day, but doing things like choosing a very low Intelligence or a very low Strength can make certain things very difficult. It's harder to make money with your 10 Charisma if you can't carry anything to sell to vendors.

• In many cases, SPECIAL is abstracted out by other layers.

I don't think this is actually a problem. A lot of people like when games clearly show cross-layer interactions, but in Fallout almost everything that is derived from SPECIAL can be further altered.

Perks or skill points spent at character creation or gained later in the game make some SPECIAL choices less important than others (e.g. getting Perception to shoot guns better can be undone by taking a perk or spending skill points to boost shooting guns), but this is also something that allows for a high degree of customization.

Personally, I like it, but I've heard the limited impact of SPECIAL, especially in later games like Fallout 4, as a complaint against the system.

• The SPECIAL scale is relatively small and doesn't allow a lot of granularity.

Each SPECIAL attribute goes from 1 to 10, which means that you only have a very small set of options to choose from when defining characters using it.

Again, I don't think this is a giant issue, but it's worth talking about with game designers.

You want your scale to be something that is coherent to players and works with your game mechanics. Fallout is driven by a random number generator, and if your random numbers go in the right way you succeed. Those numbers are determined by your character's statistics.

Fallout has a very rigorous 1-10 scale. It might be possible to go beyond in some of the games, but even then it's not something that comes with a lot of support in the system.

Typically, the addition of other layers makes this better, but if you only have one or two layers you might think about making the scale of your game larger.

An Aside: Random Numbers and Cross-Layer Mechanics

Another thing that's worth considering especially for tabletop roleplaying (but if you're making any randomness-based game it's worth considering as well) is that you might want to have your scale reflect numbers significant in your random number generation method.

Fallout's random number system takes numbers from 1-100. SPECIAL isn't typically used with this mechanic, since most SPECIAL uses are pass/fail or contributions to skills, but it's worth noting that at least if you had to you could still align it to this system (each point giving a one-in-ten chance, potentially with modifiers).

You might also want to think about how numbers interact across layers. In Fallout, it's not necessarily intuitive how skills are shaped by SPECIAL or how derived attributes are shaped by SPECIAL.

In a tabletop roleplaying game where players do math by hand, you might want to have numbers that have coherent logic between layers, at least if you are going to have players do addition. Fantasy Flight Game's Dark Heresy (affiliate link) is a game that does this really well by having all numbers in its foundation be based on a 1-100 scale, which is used with a random number system based on dice that goes from 1-100 like Fallout's. They also use ten-sided dice for things like calculating damage, and they can take the tens-place of an attribute to interact like this: if I have a die roll to see how much damage I do between 6-15 (1 ten-sided die plus 5), I can also add the tens place of an attribute without getting a weird number.

Having interactions between layers where one layer is overwhelming important may have a place in some game universes, but it also leads to questions about why you bother with multiple layers in the first place. Likewise, you want to make sure that combining layers doesn't give you things that don't make mechanical sense; D&D had editions where characters could roll on a twenty-sided die, trying to get at least a certain number, but then add a massive number like 35: the randomness of the die became secondary to the influence of the various game layers and things got weird.

Editor's note: I am one of something like four people who seemed to care about this tremendous imbalance between randomness and the layered mechanics of D&D, though I was vindicated in its most recent edition which generally has much more sensible inputs on dice rolls.

Wrapping Up

A good foundation layer in a game is intended to provide a common means for comparison that can also influence other layers in ways that leaves them capable to do their own thing without feeling totally detached from the foundation.

Each layer plays a pivotal role in how a game feels and plays, but the foundation layer–SPECIAL in Fallout's case–is a key element, and Fallout makes its gameplay compelling and simple by having characters whose foundation layer feeds into other layers very well, but which still has distinctive effects of its own.