implementing common sense

[zinder]

First I dont think make \"leveling\" slow wouldnt stop powerleveler. I have got the impression that a the slower the progression in a game is, the more powergamer you can find. Maybe im wrong, but thats my impression.

Second I think if you dont want the players focus to be on weapons leveling, you must offer a wide spectrum of equally good ways to become \"famous\", important. It seems, for me, PS will mainly use this way.

[SaintNuclear]

Originally posted by zinder
First I dont think make \"leveling\" slow wouldnt stop powerleveler. I have got the impression that a the slower the progression in a game is, the more powergamer you can find. Maybe im wrong, but thats my impression.

It\'ll either discourage powerlevelers, or make people concentrate more on powerleveling because it takes time wich they don\'t want to waste on other things

Originally posted by zinder
It seems, for me, PS will mainly use this way.

You mean have many ways of being famous, right?

You could be the best chef, merchant, you have the most political power, and much more.

[Empanado]

Originally posted by zinder
First I dont think make \"leveling\" slow wouldnt stop powerleveler. I have got the impression that a the slower the progression in a game is, the more powergamer you can find. Maybe im wrong, but thats my impression.

Second I think if you dont want the players focus to be on weapons leveling, you must offer a wide spectrum of equally good ways to become \"famous\", important. It seems, for me, PS will mainly use this way.

Amen. In the end, we only want a bit of love and attention.
Maybe the true way to stop all those lvl100 powergamers and their \"j00 i r0x0rz ph34r m3 im much b3tt3r then u!!!!1111!\" would be to just show them some other ways to waste their life . And if they\'re too much of a l33t, we can just kick them out of the game. After all, PS is supposed to be a roleplaying game with a nice community. If they want slash and hack and l337, that\'s what RoonSkape is for in the first place.

[SaintNuclear]

Kicking everyone that gets to level 100 and bashes monsters? ?(

[Buzz]

dont forget the many different kind of weapons and weaponclasses.there r daggers ,staffs ,whips ,crossbows ,halberds ,sabers and even there r short daggers ,long daggers ,double axes with a hammer head ,ninetails ,morningstars shuriken ,nunchukus ,throwing axes and knives and many many more all with different dammage types and usage.perhaps gloves for fighting or knuckledusters,shields for bashing(with spikes too?).dunno what i missed but its quite more than i can imagine or post here. XD. most of this weapons have more than one way to hurt a monster.so ull be able to get exp in some of the skills but only they way u hurt ur enemy.if u hit an oponent with an armor in his uncovered parts like his genitals for example and can only make some little scrapes ull get slash exp but if u bash him on his armor ull get bash exp.thats what i suggest

[XpYtZ]

I don?t think that was what he meant Saint.
I gathered that he was more referring to players who show an obvious level of disrespect for the RP aspect of the game by ?L337?ing their way through conversations and only hunting monster to become more powerful. One of the things that I suppose will be in PS, that will set it apart, is the fact that you wont need to kill things to become stronger in the skills that you want. So the Bashers and the L337ers could be, shall we say, regulated

Hey look a new guy^ Howdy Buzz!

[SaintNuclear]

Buzz - These things were talked about in the first page of this thread...

XpYtZ - Oh, ok, well it sounds fair to me. But it could be a problem to decide who\'s a role player, and who\'s 1337.
As a warrior, I\'ll probebly start by doing mostly monster bashing for a few days, and only then move to working as a forger. Once I feel I\'m more than a novice in both skill and money, I\'ll go and do quests.
But something like that could be interpreted as 1337ing, atleast atfirst while I\'ll bash alot.
And what about someone that will work alot at the beginning, gain thousands of trias, and then start bashing? He\'ll be able to invest most of his time as a basher without having to worry about monetary problems... Would that be 1337ing too?

And you can\'t really say that a 1337er isn\'t roleplaying either... What if he\'s roleplaying a warrior that devotes his life to fighting monsters so they won\'t harm civillians? I see nothing wrong with that.

Kicking someone for behavior I can understand, but kicking someone for roleplaying in a diffrent way is kinda weird.
Besides, you can\'t not roleplay in a game. Every game, even non-RPGs are actually roleplaying. Think about it.

[XpYtZ]

Uh?
When I said 1337ing I was referring to those who speak that way all the time. As for all games having a level of RP. No I don?t see it. But than I have strict rules about what is and what is not RP. I plan on doing some strict bashing time out of the box as well but that is not what I thought we were talking about. I should have said powerlevelers. They are pretty easy to pick out in my opinion. They kind of have one objective. Level. They work at that objective to the exclusion of all the other gamers and/or plot lines and search for ways to manipulate the game mechanics so they can be all powerful (AKA uber1337). I have nothing against evil characters seeking after power and dominion but lets be serious its very different. {That?s off subject and in another thread}  

Back to the point: I?ve played games that work the learning curve with a zero sum method and it worked pretty well. One of the other aspects that they added was that the more weapons you could use the more fighting styles you could defend against because you understood what the next move should be. Like chess gamut.
While it was all good and fun to learn, or excel, at a single weapon style it was detrimental if all you knew was the sword and the opponent was an expert at heavy/war axes. One thing I did not noticed mentioned was the martial arts in PS. Need it be said that the foot, hand etc. are weapons as well?  

[Samoth]

Zero sum is alright, but always seemed like an artificial restriction to me.

How about if people forgot skills that they did not practice/use.  Since few people would be able practice or use all the skills continuously, the benefits from the less used skills would not apply.

But they should be easily recovered, so you could always buff up on some of the weapon skills before going out hunting, for example.  This approach would have to account for real life non-playing time.  So everybody would have to plan on practicing some if they have not played recently.  Players who played frequently would have an advantage in not needing to practice as long.  But in the end there would have to be some diminishing returns sort of limit to how much high skill levels help combat.

By playing with the values you might be able to split hairs and allow a player to practice either slashing or stabbing (or practicing with a bastard sword or practicing berserker attacks), for example.  Players might then have to practice the specific skills that are needed for the next campaign, something that must have been familiar to the common pre-modern foot soldier.

As far as players sitting on spawn spots killing monsters.  SWG would spawn different types of monsters each time.  This would work with this approach since special specific attack type bonuses from skills might apply to the monsters just killed, but not to the next type of monsters that spawn.  Also spawning different levels of monsters would keep people from spawn sitting.

[Shariom]

I like the zero-sum idea for skills.... sounds great. And you should lose exp slowly for quite a few skills.... say for weapon skills 10 - 20 mins every 10 hours online should stop that.

For power leveling and so on, there is a simple solution. No levels. Think morrowind style (where each skill has levels) but without any main character levels. Especially the part where you can only level up a skill by using it or getting a trainer. With this system there is no way a character can spend three hours crosbowing bunny rabbits and learn how to cast a fireball.

I think for weapon skills you should have not just bash / slash / stab general skills, but a variation on these for EACH weapon. So you have sword stab / bash / slash, slash and stab woul be pretty powerful for most swords but bash (hitting someone with the flat of your blade or pommel) would be pretty cruddy), for a club bash / poke / swipe, with poke doing nothing much (maybe with a chance to wind unarmoured characters you poke in the stomach though). In battle you would be able to select which strike to use, and be able to qeue up sequences - say slash, slash stab. Improving your stab skill for the sword would increase your slash and bash slightly - after all you\'re handling the same weapon, with the same balence etc. Also if you use a certain combo / sequence a fair bit you could get a \'skill\' level in it and get a bonus when you use that combo.

A bit more on the sequence bit.... say you have the interface window looking a bit like
. __ .. __...___...___.. ______
| B | | S | | T |  |  L  | | S  S  T    |
----..----..----..----..----------

You have your Bash, Slash an sTab buttons, then a Lock button i\'ll explain in a sec, and then a box which fills up with the next 5 or so moves you select. In this case its Slash, slash, stab qeued up. Now as it is this isn\'t a combo, just the next three attacks you will make. But if you press the lock button, it will lock those three moves into a combo, where each action will execute faster, but doing less damage. However once you practice up that combo, it will take as much time as two single moves and do almost as much damage as three moves.... Or something like that.... tweak as you like.

[SaintNuclear]

I don\'t think that your skill in stabbing with a sword, and stabbing with a pike should be diffrent. It\'s the same skill, only that it\'s a bit less damaging to stab with a sword (/me waits for countless of swords know-it-all\'s to counter him).


I do like the custom combos idea though

[Shariom]

My reasoning on having a differnt stab skill etc for each weapon is this:

Ok, the basic stabbing itself isnt too hard to get the concept of - you get the sharp pointy end, and poke your enemy with it. Even orcs and goblins don\'t have too much trouble with this part .
The difficult part is getting your aim right (and to a degree the right amount of power, so you dont actually impale them and have to kick them off your sword). To get your aim right you have to have the right feel of your weapon, get your balance right and so on. Now the balance for a sword is going to be COMPLETELY differnt from that of a pike. And the skill differers from sword to sword as well. Stabbing with a longsword is differnt to stabbing with a Katana, because the katana is curved, and to penetrate farther with a katana you would have to put a curve similar to that of your swords blade into the stroke.

[XpYtZ]

I?m more than willing to oblige with the sword vs. pike or any other weapon debate.
A short sword is easy to stab with ?timing the stab so you don?t lose your arm is the hard part.
A long sword, if it uses two hands, is only slightly different until you take into account that a long sword is a slower weapon ?again the arm chopping idea.
A pike has a far greater range and head weight, while stabbing is stabbing; the exact technique is quite different from that of a sword. The same as an axes slice and a swords slice are different.
Mastering the technique of each weapon does come from practice but you learn things that can be applied to each kind. If you are looking for absolute realism from the attacks than you need to allow the character to use their sword like they would an axe (though very different weapons and styles) they would naturally get slaughtered if they used it that way all the time but, hey, just because they know it is a sword doesn?t mean they know how to use it. That comes with time (or in RPG lingo, experience) and they will stop needing to attack in that sloppy way. For even more realism you could have the character be able to injure himself or others with his poorly aimed shots?you all see where I am going with this. You can go in depth as far as you like and there will always be more to do until it is so deep that you cant even use the thing. While I like multi attacks and the like. Simplicity (at the early stages) is key. That is why ?after all that- I think it is more strategic to keep the techniques (stabbing, slicing, etc.) out of the learned skills arena. Sure the attacks can suffer at lower levels and become stronger at higher ones, but training each skill separately. PITA (Pain In The A.)
[hmmmm. Yummy pita ) ]

Oh and up with custom combos (can we add blocks in their as well, the best offence is a good defence )

[Cirque]

\"the best offence is a good defence\" - paradox.

[SaintNuclear]

Originally posted by Cirque
\"the best offence is a good defence\" - paradox.

It\'s not only a paradox, it\'s wrong too.
The best offence is the best offence.

I agree with XpYtZ, it does seem like there\'ll be too many things to learn that way.

And in the custom combos, I think it would be cool if the diffrent combinations of them should trigger diffrent animations, and cause diffrent amounts of damage.

E.g. having 3 Slices in the combo box will trigger a diffrent animation that is also smoother, faster (less waiting between attacks) and a bit stronger than simply using a Slice attack 3 times