Hidden attributes can be used for all sorts of scripting, and basically work as character-level variables. I for example use hidden attributes in a duel system I made to determine the chance of duels happening, and to transmit information between characters (more on that later).
Hidden attributes work very well if one wants a lot of traits to increase the chance of a single trait or family of traits, as instead of making triggers based on every single trait one can instead make all of them add to one of the hidden attributes, for example Assassination, then script the triggers based on how high the Assassination attribute of the character is.
Hidden attributes can also be used to transmit information between characters in the same region by using the HighestAttAdjacentChar condition. In my duel system I use a series of Magic values to transmit that a character wants to fight, that someone accepts the challenge, and then the results of the fight. The syntax of the condition in this case is "and HighestAttAdjacentChar Magic family = x"
Hidden attributes can be used to transmit any sort of information between characters, only one's imagination and scripting skills put any limits to what can be transmitted.
To sum up, the two most useful areas of use I've found for hidden attributes is to aggregate large amount of traits, and to transmit information between characters in the same region, but they can be used for almost anything with enough imagination and scripting ability. |