A typical approach to this in RPGs is to make character progression zero-sum, i.e. progression in one direction either prevents progression in another direction, or makes it significantly more expensive.
Skill rust is the closest thing we have to this mechanic, but it has been essentially rejected by both the developers and players (for good reason, it never met this goal, and also has other issues). It operates (in theory if not in practice) by introducing a maintenance cost to each skill that scales with the current level of the skill, at some point there arenât enough hours in the day to maintain each skill, so the player is forced to choose some number of them to maintain. In practice, this also sounds like a nightmare to manage, both from the point of view of communicating it to the player and from the point of view of interacting with it, which requires the player to practice their skills regularly in order to avoid rust and to advance their desired skills.
A common option is making skills require exponential investment to advance as they level, which simply discourages advancement that the player doesnât âneedâ.
Adding advancement cost to skills based on the sum of skill levels rather than the value of each, actively rewards players for neglecting some skills by making the ones they do develop cheaper. A major drawback of this approach is itâs entirely gamified, there is no rationale for skill advancement to work like this.
None of these present a compelling solution, Iâll think about this some more and see if anything comes to me.
Looks like Iâm a minority here but I like rust system. Itâs neatly balanced by mad speed of skill gain. Especially with âQuick learnerâ trait and books.
About alternatives. There is a RPG system that uses aptitudes. Each player have a limited set of aptitudes. Each skill have two aptitudes. If the player have both aptitudes to that skill he can level it fast. If one - at normal speed. And if none - at slowest speed. Aptitudes are basically innate abilities of the player character. Player have to select 7 aptitudes of 18. At the end he is good at some things and really bad at everything else. Or average on most of things and bad at some specific thing.
Honestly, I think this is the exact opposite of what Cataclysm needs. Someone who is good at shooting a Rifle and repairing a car is more likely to survive than someone who is only good at one of those things. I feel it goes against the survival aspect of the game.
Second issue I thought of while writing the above (and far better, IMO) is that this complicates things because characters will skill up naturally, as it becomes harder and harder to avoid having to skill things up to better adapt to their situation. Hereâs an example:
Survivor Jack is looking for food. So he looks through bushes to do some scavenging. He gains some Survival Skill. However, while scavenging he was horribly mauled by a moose, but managed to fight it off with his Machete (Dodging, Melee, Cutting Weapons). The moose ripped his clothes, so he needs to sew them up (Tailoring). He wants better weapons and armor to deal with these threats in the future (Fabrication/Mechanics and Fabrication/Tailoring, along with potentially increasing Marksmanship so he can craft that damned gun).
Being a Jack of All Trades seem likes its a natural endpoint for a long-lived character. Perhaps not grind down the learning speed, but do something like Fallout does and allow you to âTagâ some skills. Have these skills raise up a little faster than normal. Or, make more Traits like the MD trait, but for other skills, and make them general traits you can from Character Creation. Let a character take one of these if they wish, so they can be better at the specific skill they want to be better at.
I certainly agree that being a jack-of-all-trades is typical if not mandatory for a survivor, but having some training in most skills isnât the same as being an expert in most skills.
The issue that @Coolthulhu was highlighting is that a long-lived survivor is going to end up being world-class in every skill simultaneously.
Side issue, we do have a little-known feature to âde-tagâ skills so they donât rob focus. Unfortunately since that feature was added, weâve had so much increase in effective morale that maintaining focus isnât an issue, so thereâs no reason to worry about it.
Speaking of which, tuning down focus would also partially address this issue by decreasing the total amount of xp a survivor can expend in a day. It doesnât fix it per se, but it does make it more manageable.
One is that all skills are not equally vital, nor are they used with the same frequency. Cataclysm naturally encourages learning combat skills over the social ones, for example. Having a master swordsman struggle greatly to learn to swim doesnât make a huge amount of sense in either balance or realism terms. It also means that a character who DOES end up with very high levels in a relatively minor skill could be worse off in survival terms than a character with no skills at all.
Another issue is that there is currently a very large amount of overlap between crafting skills. Many high tier recipes require more than one crafting skill, often in significant amounts. These would likely need to be either made rarer to compensate for the fact that a player is not expected to master several crafting skills at once, or buffed so that they would be potentially worth the investment at the expense of other important skills.
Having a master swordsman struggle greatly to learn to swim doesnât make a huge amount of sense in either balance or realism terms
Who said anything about them âstruggling greatlyâ? They can learn the basics really fast, but should they jump straight to being an Olympic swimmer? Itâs the latter that were concerned about.
Another issue is that there is currently a very large amount of overlap between crafting skills.
You say itâs an issue, but then you immediately fire off two reasonable solutions to it. Doesnât seem like a major problem.
Sorry if I was unclear, I didnât mean to present these as insurmountable problems with the concept of specialization, just possible problems that should be addressed when coming up with a good specialization mechanic.
Yea those both need to be addressed, though Iâm not sure it matters about relative importance vs difficulty to learn, if a skill is difficult to learn and not that useful, just donât do it
The only question then is if itâs important enough to even bother adding to the game.
For example, should we add support for the player beig an expert surgeon? I doubt it, it seems super-hard with very little payoff. Lot easier example, should we add juggling? Definitely not, itâs basically pointless.
You could make it so that training an skill to the highest level was limited. Letâs say that you set a milestone, and the character can only have a number of skills past that milestone. If he decides to train another one past that limit he starts to lose training on one of his skills that are already past the milestone.
For example. Milestone is level 8:
Character is cutting level 10, dodging level 10. And his character can have 2 skills post milestone.
If he decides to train his level 8 fabrication to level 9 he would start losing skill points, just like the rust system, until his milestone limit is set straight.
I have a question: How do players benefit from this change? Will we just have restrictions placed on our future characters, or will we suddenly have access to new things through the magic of co-operation? For example, superior items and qualities you couldnât get through the current system that you could get in this new potential system.
For example, you and a few scientists co-operate to create a gun with stats far superior to any gun you could create as a single person. And I donât simply mean doing this with pre-existing items, but new items. That way, players simply donât get more limited by this change, which is what I fear might happen: Downsides without any Upsides.
Iâm also not saying the player suddenly can make super-rare items like Superalloy (unless maybe they put in tons of effort; this should be something thatâd require a huge Quest Chain to get access to; think of it as making a Cheeseburger and growing all its components all by yourself, because this is essentially the same concept). Definitely start small, like being able to slowly create Solar Cells or piece together rarer CBMs.
Essentially, if you make hard caps on the playerâs ability to improve skills, give us new features to make up for it. That way, it feels less like youâre taking away something and more like youâre changing it.
One thing that might be useful if we go this route would be the ability to order NPCs to study a book by themselves as opposed to reading it to them. This would help a lot with getting NPCs to cover the areas that youâre not willing/able to specialize in.
There is one huge problem that needs to be addressed before any balanced specialization system can be implemented: skills are simply not equal in general usefulness.
âbarteringâ and" submachine guns" are not competitive to âelectronicsâ and âriflesâ in the game as is
And that means that instead of specialization we will just end up with forcing majority of players to take the âoptimalâ build if any kind of specialization is implemented.
Why? there are huge numbers of skills that we donât even support because theyâre totally worthless, and a number of skills we do support are very situational. Iâd far rather have skills in the game that no one develops ever (to the extent of disabling practice for those skills so they donât waste limited skill resources) than maintain the status quo where thereâs zero limitations on creating a character that is expert in every skill in existence.
Question: What does limiting the amount of skill training a character can do add to the game? I can clearly see what it takes away, but I donât see anything it adds.
My solution would be to add a system of perks to the game for each skill, similar to how First Aid has the MD Trait. You can only have so many of these perks, so choosing them would force you to pick carefully. If you want to get the best out of a skill, you need to specialize and take all the perks in that skill; the opportunity cost of those perks being you canât take perks for other skills and get bonuses for them.
Why? there are huge numbers of skills that we donât even support because theyâre totally worthless, and a number of skills we do support are very situational. Iâd far rather have skills in the game that no one develops ever (to the extent of disabling practice for those skills so they donât waste limited skill resources) than maintain the status quo where thereâs zero limitations on creating a character that is expert in every skill in existence.
As long as we have skills that are clearly better/more versatile, forced specialization will just force most players into âoptimalâ skills.
I.e. if I could only have 1 ranged skill on my char, it makes perfect sense to always pick rifles, because with rifles you can do anything you can do with any other ranged skill, but not vice versa.
So instead of creating actual specialization we will mostly replace jacks-of-all-trades that master multiply skills with jacks-of-all-trades that master the most versatile skills.
I mean, look at what happen with multiply pools: instead of getting many chars with 12+ in all stats we just get many chars with int/per as a dump stat.
Even if that is the outcome, itâs still an improvement.
But I donât think that would be the outcome.
If you read enough player feedback, you see people saying, âx is clearly the best weapon typeâ for literally every weapon type in the game. The thing is, theyâre mostly right, because itâs the best weapon type for their playstyle.
Iâm not against the idea of forced specialization, I just think it will fall pretty flat in a game âas isâ.
Plus Iâm not sure how crafting skills can be handled within this system when you can simply create a new char in the same world and make him/her do the crafting and share the results.
No, what Iâm suggesting is that creating a character with good crafting skills, crafting a bunch of items, and then creating a second character with the intention of taking advantage of the previous oneâs items is an exploit, not expected gameplay. You can do it, but itâs not balanced or supported. The game isnât designed with the expectation of having more than one player character per world.
