Skills would have to be totally reworked in order to compete with stats on the same level.
Traits would have to be totally reworked in order to compete with stats on the same level.
“You should find a way to make it right” is easier said than done.
Basically, as long as skills can be gained during the game and not just at game start, they are necessarily below stats in priority.
The only ways to change that are:
[ul][li]Separating stats and skills[/li]
[li]Making skill leveling strictly limited in some way (say, if you don’t start with 5 electronic, you will never reach 10 electronics, except with debug)[/li]
[li]Disabling skill leveling[/li]
[li]Making stats fluid, thus making all characters quickly become the same character (like it is the case with Stats Through Skills mod, where characters are defined by their traits, equipment and “age”)[/li]
[li]Combining some of the above[/li][/ul]
So far I haven’t seen a suggestion on how to actually achieve what you’re requesting.
There were suggestions like making skills level faster based on their initial level, making leveling slower and harder etc. but not one of them actually did solve the problem of skills evolving in time and thus being cheaper than stats.
Until skills become somehow fixed in time and limited, stats will be better.
Until someone suggests a way of achieving that, I’m going to balance the game using known, sane methods.
That is, unless we do something insane like making stats not matter at all or making them matter only for the first 3 days.
You should encourage people to take some skills, you shouldn't try to force or coerce people into taking them over stats like this because it just feels like your gimping our characters at that point.
Multi-pool mode is for players who want a challenge without having to gimp own character. Many RPGs give you more points on easier difficulties, this is pretty much the same.
And about the patronizing: Any game where harder and easier mode exists can either name them as harder and easier, or pretend to not do so but still do it (say, name it “story mode”).
Multi-pool mode is necessarily harder than single pool mode. There is no plan to add an extra reminder that you’re playing an easy mode, but there is no way to mask the fact that you’re not playing the hard mode without regressing into players having to voluntarily gimp their characters to get a challenging game.
Furthermore, there are other ways to make the game difficult that the player has control over. Basically, they can decrease item spawns, increase monster spawns, set the season times to be longer or shorter, set a permanent season to something unfavorable like winter, deal with NPC's, ect.
Having quantified world difficulty levels would be cool too.[/quote]
It wouldn’t be so bad if we could loosen it up a little bit somehow, or if stats moved a little bit, and fluctuated over time based on your actions. Here is a thread where I have a suggestion on how stats could go up or down based on exercise. http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=12249.0
I’m not a programmer, so I can’t make it happen but maybe it can give you some ideas. The general idea is to make it harder to maintain higher stats without appropriate skills to train them, without diluting every character’s originality, or removing the benefits of having better stats in the first place. Basically to make over-investment into stats a possibility by making it difficult or impossible to keep all 4 stats exercised at their maximum at higher levels, but not at lower levels.
Although;
this would be a good start. Also, allowing some of the points taken from more difficult scenarios to be put into stats and traits (maybe half and half? The left over points from traits would go into skills anyway.) would also help the system feel less rigid.
