PlaneShift
Gameplay => Wish list => Topic started by: Suno_Regin on June 25, 2006, 03:48:36 am
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Come on, are stats really only going to effect how much health points and MP you have? These need to be greatly expanded. For example, to stop people from maxing every single skill available, there should be a stat limit on what they can and can't do. If you intelligence is level 100, you can't max more than two magic skills, say Crystal Way and Brown Way. Or, they could balance them, like level 20 Crystal, Brown, Red, etc. But being able to max every single stat makes your character seem like a God. In fact, these Ways shouldn't even be mixed. If you maxed Crystal way, you can't max Dark Way, or even train it. Instead you can only train relating skills, such as Azure and Blue ways to 3/4 of the max. And Red and Brown ways to only 1/2, since they aren't the exact opposite of crystal. Now if you max Blue way, you couldn't max Red way, and the balance would go on from there. But maxed magic levels should only be determined by intelligence. If you're dumb as a brick, say 40 INT, you could only get Crystal way to about level 15 at the most. To train it more, you'd have to train your intelligence first. Once again, this would stop people from maxing every single skill available and becoming Gods.
Here comes capacity. If your INT is maxed, and you max Crystal way and train a few other magic skills as high as they'll go, you'd have capacity problems. You can't learn everything in the world, or else you'd forget. If you have mastered Crystal way, and try to learn all other magic, you'd probably forget your Crystal way training, from trying to learn all those other things, and the skill itself would level down to make room for the skill you're trying to train. After all, we can't have Godly intelligence.
Now for fighting skills. Unless you're some kind of Godly warrior, you can't master all types of weapons. Maybe three at the most, and that's only if they're related to eachother, such as swords and axes, or maces and mauls. The way to fight with them would be similar, like smash the opponent or cut them. But to master using swords, holding the handle and slashing, then trying to learn pole arms, lengthing the pole to your arm and sweeping your enemies, that doesn't work. The weapons need to be related to eachother or else it just won't work.
Once again, the system works. If you master swords, you can master related weapons such as Axes. But you can't train the opposite, which would be maces or mauls. You could however, train polearms to 3/4 the max, and maces and mauls to 1/2 the max, but you can't max either one, since you've already maxed swords. You could however exceed the capacity and level down in swords to train them further (just a note: melee has nothing to do with this).
Now for stat limitations for fighting skills. To majorly stop powerleveling, you need to have endurance take a little more effect. This means if you've powerleveled for such a long time, you'd grow tired. This has already been implimented, with SP going into effect after long fighting or mining, but it takes far too long for the person to grow tired for that system to work. At this point, when your SP reaches 0, Will would come into effect. The will to carry on despite grevious wounds. If your enemy and you are both tired, the person's will would decide who would win. They could deliver a final blow by costing a little of their own HP, and kill their enemy. But after that they wouldn't be able to move, and would have to rest in that spot.
A few short descriptions of what I think skills should be:
Strength - Determines attacking power. Related with Will and Endurance.
Endurance - Determines how long you can do something, such as fight or mine. Related with Strength and Will. (CAPACITY)
Will - Determines what you can do despite being heavily exausted, such as take one more swing with the pickaxe or deliver a final blow. Related with Strength and Endurance.
Intelligence - Determines how strong your magic will hit, along with how much magic you can learn. (CAPACITY)
Agility - Determines your quickness, gives you the ability to run faster, jump higher, and deliver a quicker blow.
Charisma - (not decided)
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I mentioned a simple system to achieve what you seem to want to see ... time decay on skills. A skill that isn't maintained (read: not used actively) will decrease very slowly over time.
People seemed to be against it since it was supposed to encourage powerleveling, where I completely don't see how something like that could encourage powerleveling anymore than it is now. 90% of what people do now is train and powerlevel until they're maxed out with practically everything. Sure if skills can decay you'll have to retrain your skills regularly so you could keep on powerleveling but I doubt it'd make a difference. Either you're the kind of player that likes to grind and train away or you're the kind of player that likes to roleplay and only maintain what skills he or she needs to get by financially. ::)
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The issue is that if you must maintain skills, then that means any RPer will be forced to do one of the following:
1) play less in order to have less ingame time logged to slow down skill decay, therefore obviously RPing less or
2) spend time maintaining skills instead of RPing, thus RPing less, since overall playing time doesn't increase.
3) Not level at all anymore, thereby being even more prone to being shut out of skill based quests and similar things than they are now.
PLs, OTOH, would not really be impacted by that system since they PL regardless of what are the costs of the levels, so the decay factor would be identical to a slight increase of training cost and barely noticable.
Most levelling RPers do is in order to get their stats and RP in synch, to RP more believably. Making that harder won't reduce PL but further skew the balance of RP and skillset.
Let's face it: the fact that you start low and "lvlup" over time comes from the PnP RPGs, where one needed rules to keep inexperienced players from creating a mess by making irrational chars. It was never intended to better RP by itself. In these environments it worked comparatively well, because there was precious little change in the group of players, hence there was few need to accommodate new players, and if, one can work around that.
When transported to MMORPGs, that system proves to be insufficient. It creates competition among the players, not the chars, for being the one with the highest stats and most expensive items. It also removes the option for an experienced RPer to create the character they envision, and instead forces them to keep levelling until they reach that goal, or to RP without matching stats.
Obviously, in an MMORPG, the need to keep players at bay still exists, though one may think about removing all levelling and instead let players set their stats directly, which has been discussed before and would create a set of different issues.
Anyway, the conclusion I have arrived at is that making it harder to level (which skill decay effectively does, too) does not stop a single PL from levelling, does not make RP any more frequent or better, but instead makes more RPers just think "nevermind the system" and RP without matching stats.
Realistic RP comes from those who are experienced or natively good RPers; levelling restrictions do not prevent unrealistic RP in any way. Just think of all the "My char comes from a different place that doesn't even exist within the settings." players... hardly good RP, regardless of stats.
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The issue is that if you must maintain skills, then that means any RPer will be forced to do one of the following:
1) play less in order to have less ingame time logged to slow down skill decay, therefore obviously RPing less or
2) spend time maintaining skills instead of RPing, thus RPing less, since overall playing time doesn't increase.
3) Not level at all anymore, thereby being even more prone to being shut out of skill based quests and similar things than they are now.
I completely disagree, a good RPer will play out his/her character's life .. in that life they will have a job that depends on skills and those skills will automatically be trained/maintained by RPing like you should. By RPing your character like you want it to you'll use the skills your character needs and depends on so nothing will happen since the skill decay will obviously be a slow process. RPing shouldn't be just chatting in a game like this, it should include using the skills you want your character to develope. A blacksmith working every day and selling his crafted items to others is good RP in my eyes. A fighter suddenly deciding to become a blacksmith and intensively training in crafting to then become a master blacksmith, without his fighting abilities suffering in the least, is rather bad and unrealistic RP in my eyes. The only thing that a system like this will do in my eyes is exclude the allpowerful and make everything a whole lot more realistic.
What disturbs me most of all among the RPers right now is that there are characters with practically everything maxed out and no inherent weaknesses. They're great at everything and will stay that way until a wipe appears ... but what when the game is so far gone that no more wipes need to happen? Roleplaying with or against those people is something I don't find very enjoyable at all. Things become fun when everyone has a specific strength and specific weaknesses .. then teamwork comes into play, everyone stands a chance and everyone becomes useful or useless, depending on the situation. Specialisation is the basis of the entire social and economical network we now know, it has been since the beginning days of our homo sapiens sapiens lives.
So the way I see it my suggestion will not disadvantage RP, it will make it more realistic, more team oriented and remove godlike characters. What it does to power levelers .. irritate them because they can never rest or encourage them because they can keep powerlevelling in all its fun .. who cares ::)
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hhmm agree with Zans point and disagree with it
The point I agree with is that you shouldn't be able to max everything. If not for the sake of reality for that sake the people should need eachother to obtain the big things so to say. To have to work togheter with different styles to get the most of battle or crafting.
I would therefor like some mutual exclusive skills where you need to make a choice in how your character develops. At the moment you don't chose what you develop your character like you just chose what you level first.
The point I highly disagree with however is to see the degenarative stats he proposes.
If the minus would be -1 for example per ten hours one plays you are forced to use the gamemechanic to counter that atleast. You are forgetting Zan that something like that RP blacksmithing here counts for absolutely nothing. So you get someone who actually RPs blacksmithing degenerating in blacksmithing.
It would also be unfair seeing RPing is said to be the main focus so I don't think any skill should degenarate while RPing but with your suggestion it would. If for example you have an RPer who uses it now and then and earns lets say 2 points in two hours (just using points as a way to make the example easier) and he loses 1 he only earns 1.
A powerleveler would only be earning points so he gets lets say 30 minus 1 would make 29.
As you can see for the same effort in training the RPer would be punished becuase he doesn't spend all his time training. He gets the minus much more often just becuase he takes longer to train skills in a more realistic way then powerleveling I may add.
Therefor I agree with the underlying problem but I feel this would make it worse instead of solving it.
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Not that you can't talk this all to death again, but... it's been talked to death already. Though, I'm too lazy to find my old threads on it. ;)
I think one of the conclusions was to have a natural buff on things when used recently, but not a large one.
And, by the way, when the game is done there shouldn't be the ability to distinguish between so called RPers and PLers. Everyone will have different skills used/not used, and if you aren't using any you aren't playing the game.
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My idea was more like when you don't swing a sword once in X in-game hours, you lose a sword skill point. When you do swing it at least once, you maintain your skill level for the next X hours. So when you're using a skill decay stops .. it only jumps in when you neglect skills. The X could be very long at first but level dependant to make a skill harder and harder to maintain at very high levels.
Anyways ... no point in discussing something that has already been discussed plenty so I'll let it rest :P
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Come on, are stats really only going to effect how much health points and MP you have?
There are no health points in PS.
(http://www.planeshift.it/guide/en/guide-stats.html)[/url]2.5.3. Hit Points
Hit Points are calculated with a formula that involves strength, agility and endurance - endurance being the greatest factor. A character can increase his or her Hit Points by training in the skill of Body Development.
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Hit points and health points are pretty much the same thing...don't make it more complicated than it is.
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I completely disagree, a good RPer will play out his/her character's life .. in that life they will have a job that depends on skills and those skills will automatically be trained/maintained by RPing like you should. By RPing your character like you want it to you'll use the skills your character needs and depends on so nothing will happen since the skill decay will obviously be a slow process. RPing shouldn't be just chatting in a game like this, it should include using the skills you want your character to develope. A blacksmith working every day and selling his crafted items to others is good RP in my eyes. A fighter suddenly deciding to become a blacksmith and intensively training in crafting to then become a master blacksmith, without his fighting abilities suffering in the least, is rather bad and unrealistic RP in my eyes. The only thing that a system like this will do in my eyes is exclude the allpowerful and make everything a whole lot more realistic.
This doesn't fit a game like this, though. Granted and obviously, an RPer should strive to have their char's skills and stats match as closely what they RP as possible. However, there will not be a way to make this entirely possible within the near or medium future. Furthermore, there is one very important issue: a severe time skew. Ingame days are very short, while the time it takes to RP a given situation, compared to, say, P&P RPGs, takes magnitudes longer if done well. In addition, even IRL skills don't decay as fast as you proposed. The levelling speed essentially doesn't match up with the RP pace of life. It is either too fast, which is the case with PLs, or too slow, which is the case for RPers.
If you RP properly, you will spend quite a while indeed just entering and reading text, moving around occasionally. Actually using your char's skills within a true RP context (as opposed to a context that can be phrased as being IC with reasonable good will) will happen very seldomly. What makes RP is most of the time not the use of skills themselves, but the interaction with others, talking to them, in order to find, analyse and work out possible ways to act for any given problem. Actual use of skills is more or less either present on quests, or when you are not interacting with anyone.
Also, the fewer time you can spend per day on PS, the more time you will wish to spend on interaction, and that means that over the same ingame time total being logged, someone with fewer RL time will interact to a higher percentage than someone who has more RL time to spend on PS (and thus reasonably more easy may find time to squeeze in some levelling).
What disturbs me most of all among the RPers right now is that there are characters with practically everything maxed out and no inherent weaknesses. They're great at everything and will stay that way until a wipe appears ... but what when the game is so far gone that no more wipes need to happen? Roleplaying with or against those people is something I don't find very enjoyable at all. Things become fun when everyone has a specific strength and specific weaknesses .. then teamwork comes into play, everyone stands a chance and everyone becomes useful or useless, depending on the situation. Specialisation is the basis of the entire social and economical network we now know, it has been since the beginning days of our homo sapiens sapiens lives.
Indeed, but that is not even dependant on ingame skills at all. People can very well "RP" invincible chars without maxed stats. What you are probably referring to are all the "reformed" PLs, i.e. those who PL'd until they were maxed, and then started to "RP" for lack of options. The PL mindset still pervails. It's obvious that I try to completely avoid these people if at all possible. It's usually quite easy to spot them by simply checking registration date against relative char strength. An additional look at their description, if it exists at all, usually confirms that. Watching out for certain problematic guilds and races also helps.
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Yes, but you can't roleplay a duel and someone dying. If you roleplay an invincible character with crap stats and try to duel someone, you're going to be killed. And I tried this countless times with Xidus, until I just decided I had it and trained him as hard and fast as I could so that would stop and people would take the RP seriously. It just doesn't work, and I have experience with it.
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That's why I think that the duelling system is particularly unsuited for RP, because it depends on RL issues like there's no tomorrow. The really exciting and interesting fights have never happened using the duelling system, at least not for me.
Furthermore, someone dying is the exception, not the rule, it must be, if you are to treat death at all seriously in your RP and not having to start over with a new char every second day.
A good RPer will, by themselves, not RP an invincible char. A system that makes stats decay will not make good RPers out of crap ones. In fact, no system will, so sacrificing freedom of chosing when and how much to level will not at all improve RP quality nor quantity. It may force more interaction, but that would be just as un-RP as not having it.
Also, if someone insists on being an army of one, they will use alts. As many alts as it takes to have every skill maxed.
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Hit points and health points are pretty much the same thing...don't make it more complicated than it is.
... Yet something pretty much else. In fact the most similiarity is in acronyms of each. While health points show your state of health and how well you are feeling, hit points indicate the amount of hits which could possible happen before you loose the fight and die. This is pretty much a reason why some people complain that the fight should end after 1-2 hits. While it is true to health points, it is very rare situation for hit points.
Maybe this is not exactly on your topic, but it is in the first sentence of your first post. And it is important to distinct health points from hit points.
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Is it really necessary? Some games use hit points, some use health points, no big deal.
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Probably correct definition-wise. However, these two things are always munged into one thing, at least I haven't come accross separate systems for each yet. After all, when you take a hit, you stop feeling as well as before, and many will say that your health also isn't as good as before anymore. Likewise, if your health drops due to, say, poison, you'll also be stricken down easier, so your hit points will need to lower, too. Thus, I think they really are interchangeable.
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It doesn't matter what other games use. We play PS. Besides, if somebody don't want to distinguish two different things, then Asia may be the same thing as Africa, or RPer same as PLer. And claim, there is no difference, why would we need it, no big deal ;)
oooo, new post..
Seytra, your health drop, when you are hit directly. Health in this way drops in 1-2 steps, because if you are hit directly in vital body part, you will be most likely unable to fight anymore.
Hit ponts drop while fightng and before the direct hit happens, and in case of hit points the direct hit is always the last, deadly. Hit points decrease because of all kinds of hits. They are to alter more feelings which one would feel during a real life fight.
Do you remember all the complaints about fight not being right, as you wasn't killed after 1, 2 max hits? Such complaints are valid for system with health points, but invalid for system with hit points, because health points may decrease only by hits directly in body and hit points decrease because of all kinds of hits.
I think i have repeated myself 3 times now ;P
In system with hit points you have fight, which may last longer than 5 seconds (this is unrealistic) and people can't complain about 1-2 hits in body not being deadly, because such hits are deadly.
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Sounds much like stamina to me, then. So having stamina not drop more or less at a constant rate while fighting, but also depending on how hard the hit you have parried / blocked was to parry /block would have the same effect without adding yet another stat?
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Sounds like a good point. The current hit points function could be merged with stamina and hit points bar altered with health bar.
Before we are able to damage health, we must first reduce stamina of the opponent to zero, while the damage to stamina should be probably calculated in the same way as damage to health, but 1/2-1/4 of it, to make he fights last longer for the sake of realism.
Small problems appear what if your stamina is near zero? you can't ran away? I think currently you can't move at all if you have too low stamina.
A) Maybe make the stamina bar two in one? eg. you start fight with stamina 70%, as you was running and the stamina for running stays 70% for duration of the battle (or drops a bit too, as swinging with the weapon, and moving around is tiring too) but as you are inflicted damage, another bar is decreasing (visible as intense green... hmmm. In the middle of fight, the bar, from left to right, is intense green, then weak green, (complete end of stamina) and empty bar, its lack till the 100%. The intense green bar can't be longer than weak green bar as it is inside of the weak green bar (as another clue for the understanding).
All this bars play in order to allow desperate run away, in case of you realising, that you are gonna die, if you won't try to run away ;P As long as the weak green bar is still visible, you can run, but if the fight will last too long, you may be too tired for that. But if the weak green bar is long and the intense green has just dropped to zero, this means that you have strenghts to ran away, but not enough of them to sucessfully defend yourself against health drop due to undefended enemy hits.
B) Maybe, no matter in what condition is your stamina, you should be always able to run ??
Furher, What about poisons and potions stuff? (Of course, they should increase or decrease, in the few points every 1 sec, for some time fashion.) I suppose some of them which was planed, should increase/decrease the stamina, instead of hit points, which are now part of stamina. Some would still decrease health, but probably in reduced number. Stamina potions make much more sense in such system and health potions could be much more rare, as i believe that healing with a potion isn't that extremaly easy and should take longer time.
And with all this, there is the future body development skill. As the hit points aren't anymore. What should that skill increase. I believe that stamina and maybe in the same time 10% health.
Really, i can't image any skill, which would make somebody 2 or 4 times more healthy than somebody else. What we can train is our form, toughtness on extreme strain and pains.
I had to write about it, because the explanation in guide is kind of bad.
And so we have another theory, hopefully good and worth enough so that rules devs will try to modify current game system.
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I must say, I like the initial post, but I am somewhat disappointed with the rest of this thread.
Why is there an immediate connection between the suggestions of "not allowing players to obtain maximum skill level in all skills" and "skills decay over time"?
As I see it, there is no need for such a connection. If each player got a certain number of skill points, which may be distributed over various skills, then this would allow players to design a particular player, e.g. a fighter, or a magician, or a miner. The choices made about which skills to train would create the character. Now, if a player has used all the skill points, then in order to train something, e.g. become a better in Crystal Way, you would have to surrender some of your other skills. Which skills to surrender could be optional, and would allow the character to grow in a preferred way.
Sure, decaying skills would be one way to keep players from having max skills in everything, but it would be a poor implementation. However, distributing a given numver of skill points *would* advocate a society with diverse skills, and with cooperation/RP.
As an example: the new release supposedly has decaying weapons (I have not played it yet, as the OSX client is not ready...). This means that the weapons must be repaired. So: most people would naturally train weapons repair, and go by playing the same character as before -- without much impact of weapons repair on the society. However, decaying weapons would add a whole new dimenstion if only some people trained that way. Others, perhaps more interested in healing than repairing swords, would have to go to a player with the correct skills when the sword got damaged. It would create a market for skilled labour.
Now, please keep posting, but first I encourage you to re-read the initial post, and try to see how this could work *without* skills that decay over time!
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*shrugs*
Why is there a connection to not allowing someone to max out all skills and a permanent restriction and separation of players in classes? Personally I just think a skill decay over time is a lot less restricting than a permanent "You know skill so and so, so you cannot learn any other skills."
Everyone seems to be deathly afraid of losing a wee bit of their skills though so I guess that won't happen but I still don't wish to see any absolute restrictions. Then another suggestion is to use the system Star Wars Galaxies used to handle ... a system where you only have X number of skill points to divide as you wish. You can max out in a few skills or learn the basics of them all, but you can't spend more than a certain number of skill points. What you can do is max out in one skill and when you're thinking of heading in another direction just remove the skill points to use them somewhere else. So this basically means you'll lose skill points in one area when you gain them in another.
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My point was simply that there are multiple ways of implementing this. Time-decaying skills is just one of them. As to what system Starwars Galaxies uses, I would not know.
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hm, i can't remember any time where some player wanted to change the primary-goal/profession/class (whatever you call it) in a characters lifetime. but i do agree that restrictions are necessary... because noone wants to see the ultimate-sewingmaster-tank-death-mage ;) at least me not!
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i am more about the 'max number of skill points' as compared to the 'skill degeneration'. i do see both making sense though. would it be too complex or hokey to try to meld the two? they do seem to be the 2 main systems that people keep bringing up.
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I find that an interesting thread although this topic was discussed already in other threads.
I see skill decay related with aging.
I was in favor of a continous aging for a long while, but the two major problems coming with it are not satisfyingly solvable:
What time is aging linked to? RL time or ingame time?
People only "live" a little window of their characters lives. One cannot play from birth to death with all details. It is also impossible to fix a reasonable "deadline" satisfying everyone.
Skill decay over time has the same problems. But the initial post indeed has some points on that.
My thoughts on that (also on how to implement it):
The main idea is to forget skills that aren't as trained as much as other skills so you can max out one or two things, but not everything.
The idea I came up with is to sort all level-up events in a last-in-last-out (LILO) queue. Once an item (a lvl-up event for a certain skill) comes out of the queue, it removes a point from that skill, as long as there are no other items of the same skill in the loop (meaning that the skill was trained further in the meantime).
[possible implementation: all level-ups get a counter and are being sorted on one side in a LILO queue Q1 and on the other in a open hashing table HT, linked to each other]
With that you could train a certain number of different skills without penalty, but no more. Once you try to expand further, the skill that was trained the longest ago ceases.
It also would provide a stable skill niveau, once reached, without the must to keep training.
Because it is unrealistic that a mage who wants to learn how to craft after mastering crystal way forgets everything about crystal way, I like to make it possible to keep basic knowledge once reached.
This can be done by introducing border levels. As long as the level is under the border, the training event isn't sorted in the loop. Once the border is overstepped, the sorting into the loop starts and with that the possibility that the skill decreases again.
The problem in that system lies in the condition that the training event gets out of the queue and only has effect as long as there are no other events of the same sort (skill training in that case) are in the loop. If the item just falls out of the queue and if the condition doesn't apply, the item just gets lost, one could max out a skill and only get one point minus in the end (and the penalty for not training doesn't apply anymore).
I think one could solve this by putting the items coming out of the queue into another LILO Q2 and when a item comes out of the Q1 , check the first inserted item in Q2 whether there is an item of the same sort in HT. If there isn't, remove the item from the Q2 and with that lower the skill. If there is another item of the same sort in the HT, check the next item in Q2 and so forth.
The advantage of this system is that it is independant of time, it makes it possible to max a few skills but not by far as many as it is possible today. If you concentrate on one side, you forget the other.
With the border lvls it's very easy to tweak the balance while it is possible to modify the treatment of skills depending on the level you have in by adding a condition like "if the skill is over 100, ignore 10 entries in the HT for this skill" so the skill gets more sensitive on forgetting if you didn't level for a shorter time.
Sorry for the lengthy post. Hope I made myself clear enough without a lot of pseudocode despite the late hour :)