tying stats to skills progression

[Aramara Meibi]

swinging a pick and lugging around ore should increase strength yeah?

crafting and designing should boost the intellect.

tie physical stats to physical skills and mental stats to mental skills so that skill progression boosts your stats.

[Eonwind]

this is an interesting idea albeit it poses many challenges from a game balance point of view

[Aramara Meibi]

challenges are meant to be overcome.

[Aramara Meibi]

in terms of combat skills, weapons that require speed and agility, as in melee, knives and daggers, etc. can increase agility, but maybe sacrifice stamina. Heavier weaponry can increase strength but at a loss of agility. balance can be achieved this way.

[Bonifarzia]

I don't know how detailed your reasoning about this is, but I have tried several times to work out such a system for all skills, and it really is a difficult thing to get both at the same time, detailed balance and somewhat intuitive rules. Give me a poke if you like to discuss about this and merge some ideas. Maybe my first notes on the wish list are interesting to read, if you have not already done so.

[tman]

Well the way Morrowind did it (and I'm not saying we should copy it, just noting a way this problem has been addressed in the past) was that every skill had a governing attribute, and how successful an action was depended on some weighted average of the skill level and its governing attribute.  So if I'm making a potion, my chance of success and the potency of the potion depends on both my alchemy skill and its governing attribute, intelligence.

Combat was a little different.  When attacking, the chance to hit the target was some average of the player's weapon skill and agility attribute, and the damage dealt was determined by the player's weapon skill and strength attribute.

[Aramara Meibi]

Well the way Morrowind did it (and I'm not saying we should copy it, just noting a way this problem has been addressed in the past) was that every skill had a governing attribute, and how successful an action was depended on some weighted average of the skill level and its governing attribute.  So if I'm making a potion, my chance of success and the potency of the potion depends on both my alchemy skill and its governing attribute, intelligence.

Combat was a little different.  When attacking, the chance to hit the target was some average of the player's weapon skill and agility attribute, and the damage dealt was determined by the player's weapon skill and strength attribute.

from what i understand, the magic ways are all tied to a mental stat (int, cha, wis) in this way. I agree that this system could be applied to other skills as well.

i hate to always toot DFs horn, but they have such a system, albeit their attribute system is much more complex than 6 stats.

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Attributes#Skills_by_Associated_Attributes

boni, i'm only brainstorming here, kicking around ideas. i haven't given it any thoroughly detailed thought, but if it's a project you might wanna reboot i'd love to take a look at what you have and be involved in whatever capacity i can lend myself.

[Bonifarzia]

We just should be clear about the topic here. The connection between way skills and primary attributes is a very different, rather simple story. I am interested with the way stats are developed, not how they will be used. The motivation should be that we don't have a "meaningful" way to train stats in PlaneShift, but we can benefit from them quite nicely in various ways.

[Aramara Meibi]

yes, the focus here is the development of stats through skills progression. but i think that the stats that a skill develops should be part of the overall formula when using that skill.

if agility were tied to knives and daggers, for instance, every level in that skill would advance your agility stat. When using knives and daggers in combat, the agility stat would be part of the formula to decide how successful a hit you can score. For balancing purposes we can also have associated skills and stats that hinder each other, a knife fighter would sacrifice his endurance or strength stat for the increased agility.

The end result would be the elimination of stat trainers and a system where it's near impossible to max out all stats.

[Caraick]

I've long been a proponent of a combat system that utilizes skill and stat progression independent or semi-independent of a trainer-based system.  I also think that Aramara's point regarding the "stat-sacrificing" has some merit to it.  Some would argue that one of Planeshift's greatest strengths is that characters are entirely unrestricted, as far as training whatever skills they'd like to goes.  However, I could see this concept tying in very effectively with the already-proposed usage of the faction/quest system to prevent users from gaining unreasonably high levels in skills that completely oppose each other.  Dark and Crystal Way, for instance. 

[estaga]

From a new player perspective, getting better at something requires a lot of effort. For example, it took me several days of playing for a few hours at a time to mine enough to go from level 3 to level 4. It feels like I can only focus on one thing for improvement. So, if they were tied together somewhat, imagine that increasing strength so I could carry more ore up to a max limit. In this example, let's say I was mining, and my strength stat was at 70, I'm a Dermorian female, so perhaps I can get up to 100 strength if I mine enough. One strategy might be to add some weighted value of the experience gained mining to the strength stat. I still level up faster by training strength specifically, but I can gain some value in strength by doing other things as well. Once I hit some threshold (100 in this example) I don't get any further value unless I train in Body Development.

For Magic, any spell I cast, the experience gained gets some weighted value applied to the appropriate stat up to a certain initial value. For example, once I've progressed to a new realm in magic, I don't get any better at Will without specifically training that stat.

For combat, I gain agility in much the same way until I reach some threshold of agility, maybe 100 for Dermorian females.

To throw an extra twist, males and females of different races might ought to have different weighted values. Kran are bigger and probably stronger than the human/elf species as an example.

This would help newer players gain enough stats to be successful more often sooner and be less frustrated at the slow pace of their progression. I have to kill rats for more than an hour to generate enough PP to level up on strength currently, but this way it would happen a bit more naturally until I reached some threshold.

I hope that is a clear, if not, ask and I'll try to explain it again.

Estaga

[tman]

I like estaga's idea.  Maybe it could be taken a bit further even.  Right now the problem that everyone seems to have with stat training is that there is no practice component to it.  If you have the money and the PPs you can go from 50 to 400 strength in minutes.

What if, every time you raised a skill level, you get that level numbers worth of PPs toward its governing stat.  So if I raise my mining from level 19 to level 20, I get 20 PPs toward strength that I now don't have to pay for.  This way, someone who uses strength-related skills a lot can see a gradual increase in their strength over time, or at the very least get a discount next time they go to train it.  You could still pay a trainer to rank up a few levels, but you could save PPs and money by actually using the stat within the game.

[Bonifarzia]

The end result would be the elimination of stat trainers and a system where it's near impossible to max out all stats.

Yes, that was my intention, and I think the formalism described in the above link works nice in the sense that the mathematics are simple, there are no ugly thresholds and discontinuities, and reaching high stats is arbitrarily challenging. It leaves room for specialization, progression is much faster at the beginning than later on, and there would be no need for a wipe, as the stats are a function of the current skills (and the race), not a dynamic result of the full training history.

The real difficulty is to be very specific with the connections between all stats and skills. Should mining have an affinity for strength? Sure. And for endurance? Ermm, yes. And what about will? Oh, well...
How do you want to balance it with other job skills, for example fishing? Can you design a graph such that each of the six stats has a symmetric, fair set of skills associated? Are the affinities balanced for certain important subsets of skills, for instance all combat skills and magic ways? That's what I mean with "difficult" here.

[estaga]

Here is another possible approach: what if each stat were assigned some skills, then if you wanted to train that stat, you would pay for it, but instead of getting that level you would then go perform that skill. For example, if I wanted to train strength, I could buy some strength training. I could also buy some mining training. Then for practice, when I was mining, I would get experience in both strength an mining. If I neglected to buy the strength training, then I would only get experience in mining. This seems like a reasonable enough compromise.

Now for the difficult part... that graph of relatively evenly distributed skills which affect a particular stat. I would suggest at first pass (maybe the only pass?) that a skill may only affect a single stat. So casting spells for magic might only ever affect one of the stats that belong with that way. Combat only affects agility. Mining focuses on strength, cooking on intelligence, leatherwork on endurance... and so on. Not that I got those right, but just for example.

What I'm hoping is that "difficult" is not a reason for not doing it. If it doesn't get done, hopefully there is another better reason (not sure exactly, but technical reasons, speed considerations, space considerations for the extra memory needed or db, too many db hits, I don't know.... maybe it just doesn't make sense). :-)

Estaga

[tman]

The real difficulty is to be very specific with the connections between all stats and skills. Should mining have an affinity for strength? Sure. And for endurance? Ermm, yes. And what about will? Oh, well...

I think most skills would have an agreed upon "primary" attribute.  But if you choose to use the system I proposed earlier and you really feel that a skill fits into two stats equally well (ie you think mining skill is equally affected by strength and endurance) then when you rank up mining you can simply split the PPs equally between the two skills.

As far as balance, I don't think this system would affect balance in too much of a negative way, since every skill would grant the same amount of PPs when ranked up.  The only difference between them is which stat gets the benefit.  And, sure, it's possible that strength and endurance might have 10 skills each while charisma has like 3 or 4, but if you think about it, most of the strength/endurance skills will be different kinds of weapons/armor, and in my experience people don't usually bother training a bunch of different weapon types, so they'll really only benefit from 3 or 4 out of the 10 anyway.