I have an RPG game going, in which the player creates their character by selecting bodyparts. My question is, how wide a range of bodyparts should I be concidering (in your opinion). Should the players beging with a human torso, on which they can stick the legs, arms and head they want to make a humanoid? Should they pick a base torso even and attach arms and a head? (in this cas ethe legs and torso would best be picked to be sure they fitted in the case of centaurs ect.) This would allow players to play non-humanoid creatures. Would it be best if the player just picked a set race and stuck with it? I was thinking that different limbs could provide different attacks and advantages (eg. a dogs head would be able to bite but not wear a normal helmet) I don''t think any of this is very origional, but I can''t find anything about it elsewhere in the forum... How wrong is it to have a hybrid person with components of do, rat and pig, for example? thanks in advance... oh yes... thank YOU, in advance! muhahahaha!

A good prototype for this sort of thing might be Armored Core or Front Mission. Those dealt with robots, but many of the principles are transferrable.

I think you need to decide on a few "classes" off chassis, or in this case torso. A centaur has two torsos--a human torso with human arms and a horse torso with four legs. If you''re going to allow that sort of thing, you''d best be ready to impose some limitations, because a centaur is a force to be reckoned with.

So yeah, start with the torso. A human torso, for instance, has two "arm" slots, two for legs, and one for a head. I guess you could say that the coccyx represents an underutilized "tail" slot, so throw one of those in too. A horse would be looking at four legs, a head and a tail. A mantis will have four legs and two arms, a head and wings, not to mention an exoskeleton. Whoa. Mantises kick butt. And they know kung-fu.

I think that you should not offer a part without offering the rest of that boddy type. If you can get a scorpion''s tail, then you should be able to get a scorpion torso, legs claws and head.

You might also want to look at E.V.O. - The Search for Eden. It had a neat upgrade system where you could jack your dorsal fin, or your horn, or your legs. You had to keep your body type, but that was plot-related.

thanks for your comments.
It is true that more limbs would likely equal more power.
It seems inplauseable that the character should ''earn'' better limbs - it sounds to much like a failed attempt to write an origional game. The way a character begins, a character should stay - or so I believe (although permenant battle wounds involving the loss of limbs could be amusing). Otherwise people would change their character ''race'' so as to powergame (and all in all I am against powerful items chaining appearance. In fallout2 the best armour was no-where near as cool looking as the second best, and you had to wrestle with yourself to decide if you wanted to look coll or not die).

I did think before of classing a horses body (with legs and horse tail) as ''centaur legs'', to be attatched to the bottom of a torso (making it a monopedial quadraped ).

The creature would have to have all it''s legs the same - otherwise it simply would not be plausable. The same would probably apply for arms.

A good way to balance the system might be to have the XP system reflect the complexity of your body. If you have the hindquarters of a lion, the front legs and wings of an eagle, the torso of a human, one lobster claw, one gorilla arm and the head of a frog, with a scorpion''s tail strapped on, you''ll have a hard time getting good at things. On the other hand, if you''re all tiger, you''ll be more coordinated and better able to learn skills and upgrade your stats. Maybe the more parts and the less consistency you have, the more XP will be required to level up.

Good Idea Chef,

Something a little more difficult, but you could imply some half-done physics to determin some stats. Such as balance would be important for coordination, weight would be important for agility, and people too big cannot enter certain places that only the small can. This should balance the game a bit.

The torso part should stop at the midriff. That way you can use the same torso for many more combinations - especially if you intend to have only one type of legs per creature.

Torso (human): 1 head, 1 right arm, 1 left arm, 1 midriff
Legs (human): 1 midriff
.. or Pelvis (human): 1 midriff, 1 right leg, 1 left leg
Left arm (human): 1 torso
Right arm (human) : 1 torso
Left leg (Human) : 1 pelvis
Right leg (human) : 1 pelvis
Head (human) : 1 torso
lef arm (huge slab) 1 torso (this is one huge very muscular arm, not very agile but incredibly strong)
centaur body : 1 midriff connection (all legs + tail included)
"snakefeet" : 1 midriff connection (a single large snakebody as legs like naga? in D&D)

You could make it totally heirarchial, so that you can have pelvis_legs, pelvis \ legs, pelvis \ thigh \ shin \ foot \ toes

One likely problem with all of this is that the resulting character will be made up of many small meshes instead of one large skinned mesh. In closeups there''ll probably be visible "cracks" between parts. If you''ve played Neverwinter Nights you''ll probably know what I mean.
I don''t know if this is possible, but making a system that "merges" each part into a single mesh would be cool. Of course this needs vertex skinning / bones but it looks much better so why not?

I like the idea, but personally I would rather see it be a way of exactly determining the looks of a humanoid character.

ooh... very nice ideas
particularily the one concerning balance ect.

I''m looking at a birds-eye 2D thing here btw (I should have sead that earlier) which makes the correct merging of the bodyparts relativly easy...

Thanks for the midriff related idea to - that has already found its way in there .

I was planning to have the character select a type of arm and then get two of them... but now that seems like a far less fun idea. seperate arms would be nice...

thanks for all the posts - sorry about the odd nature of this reply.