Build 1515 and up has new character creation options

Game Talk The Bunker
21

I’ve read that thread. The whole idea is incredibly grindy, bringing the worst (from gameplay and “fun” perspectives) traits from skills to stats, but with extra layer of things you have to avoid doing in order not to lose stats.
It would involve learning a whole set of things not to do, favor heavily armored characters, make survivors’ diets even blander than they are now and make things inconvenient without making them harder.
It would mean a whole lot of things to do to maintain stats, but all of them easy and tedious, like Nethack’s boulder pushing (to grind strength) rather than something done automatically at a cost to the character such as “spend x extra hours meditating after every sleep to maintain godly powers”.

Grinding penalty (“repetitive motion injury”) wouldn’t help unless it got so restrictive that it would also affect the non-grinding players.
In general, discouraging grinding with grinding penalties doesn’t work, it has to be done by either removing the opportunity to grind or making the grinding less mechanically efficient than other activities (mechanically, so no making it too tedious). Limitations like that just lead to arms race where the best way to progress is finding unpatched grinding methods.[/quote]

Good to know, but those aren’t reasons to dismiss the idea entirely. The idea was to track player progress over time. You could grind it up, but the long period of time between stat recalculations was to keep track of actions you do over time. If it was set up right, grinding would amount to being a waste of time since you could get the same benefit from performing the actions while exploring, raiding, or setting up a base anyway and at higher stat levels, keeping all of your exercise levels maxed out would be near difficult to impossible, even through grinding. And if you want to add activities that would help you maintain your stats without tons of input from the player, you can. But training yourself should require that some effort has been exerted by the character, somewhere. Again, that can come from exploration and facing different obstacles.

Currently, the main penalty for eating raw food and junk food is this “nutritional” penalty that applies to your internal health score over and over again (or it seems to, I could be wrong in that case now). Raw food like meat carries the additional penalty of having parasites, but… Junk food and food that you have allergies too, really can mess with your body, and as for junk food, is somewhat rare over time anyway, unless you crafting waist bread or something. For food allergies, it would add weight to picking those negative traits beyond a moral penalty. Other than all that, you can easily avoid penalties from having a poor diet, by cooking your food and being careful about what categories the food falls into. So a person with a fruit allergy (or dislike I guess?) should avoid food made with fruits, and food that has fruit matter as part of it’s category. That shouldn’t be that hard to deal with. Unless your doing a no cooking challenge or something, that shouldn’t be hard to avoid.

Being suddenly injured somewhat favors characters with armor. I don’t know what you think should be different about that though. Going into combat situations and getting hurt badly will take it’s toll on you. Stepping on a landmine and having several limbs get seriously injured or broken because you wore little more than clothing is going to be worse for you than stepping on a landmine while wearing power armor. Do you think both people should be affected the same somehow?

Also, right now, the penalties for using and abusing drugs are kind of laughable. The only real downside is their mild scarcity. Right now, you can just walk off drug abuse by waiting it out. Now I know that doesn’t solve the whole problem, but hard drugs in this game provide too many benefits for very little penalty, especially your health.

If you don’t want the grinding penalty, then whatever, that’s fine. The repetitive motion injury idea is kind of there to discourage griding the same thing over and over again for skill-gain, but it is based something that would happen to you if you did something for hours and hours and hour on end without a sufficient break in-between. If that isn’t fun, then fine, don’t worry about it.

You kind of sound like you think all these activities just automatically result in stat loss rather than what has been suggested in that thread, which was to take that characters actions as a whole into account, over roughly a 3 day period of time, and assess what good the character has done for their body and mind over the bad. It would also add a cost to maintaining higher starting stats, or at least it would provide a basis from which you could work. It would also allow you to consider scaling back some of the more ridiculous bonuses you can get from stimulant or drug abuse, and penalties you get from pain.

This isn’t an all or nothing idea.

22

Hmm… I think the idea (edit: referring to the system introduced in the new build) has merit, most RPG systems do separate stat points from skill points for a reason (though there are exceptions where they are common-pool, but those usually use large point values and then make stats expensive). I do feel like one point ain’t enough and two is too few, though I guess it depends on what you want to consider a standard point spread. I guess there’s always the debug menu, but using that pretty much makes any system irrelevant.

I think I’d probably want to target a stat spread something like one “exceptional”, two “above average”, and one “average”, but that’s probably mostly due to coming from pen & paper games and figuring that your character probably isn’t average because average people are dead. Though since I haven’t dug too deeply into how the stats work I can’t say precisely which numbers would fit those descriptions.

For now I think I’ll stick to stats through skills though. One thing that might be interesting is maybe RNG stats? I suppose most people would probably just re-roll characters until they get the stats they want, but for someone specifically looking for a challenge it might be interesting to roll for stats and then try to build the character around whatever RNGsus blesses them with. Observing how RNG characters turn out might even provide data that can be used to refine the point-buy systems.

23

I can’t think of a good way to “set it up right”, though. It would have to somehow “tick” during regular activity, not require much input and have very low payoff for repeated training to prevent grinding being better than everything else.
All of those mean that it would either have to be really complex or change very little and thus not solve the problem (stats vs. skills).

Main penalty for raw food is not the health penalty, it’s the low nutrition (you can double it by cooking) and the parasite risk.

Junk food making people weak doesn’t make much sense.
It would just mark a whole category of food as “do not eat past first week”, as if everyone was allergic to it. Junk food would become trash not worth picking up.
It isn’t realistic either - junk food is bad because it is mostly just calories, not because it’s poisonous.

Penalizing people for taking damage would mean that high-level gameplay would be sloooooow. Taking risks is more interesting than having to crawl around slowly, avoiding all hits because enough hits will make stats drop for a long time.
Penalizing people for HEALING damage (except by rest/mutant regen) - now that could be a thing.

Long term penalties for drugs could be a thing. It would actually make sense to bring this part of the idea to the game - just the drug penalties. Not stacking too much and not too heavy, but just enough to discourage drug usage. Could scale with the stat they’d be penalizing, so that a skeletal weakling would take 1 strength damage, but a mountain of muscle would lose 3 points for the same and consider not abusing heroin next time.

You kind of sound like you think all these activities just automatically result in stat loss

No, it’s just that I have seen how it works in other games.

In ADoM (at least the older versions, before the revival), it meant spamming herbs until stats increased to the cap, hauling some extra weight when not in danger to stay burdened, paying small sums of gold repeatedly to train a stat and some other boring activities. ADoM has stricter penalties for being slow (in turn number, not character’s speed) than DDA.
I didn’t play Nethack much, but from what I read on the Nethack wiki, grinding stats is a common practice in Nethack at low levels and characters quickly reach their stat caps.
IVAN is the worst offender by the virtue of having uncapped stat grinding. It penalizes for grinding by scaling enemies up with player’s strength, but this doesn’t kill grinding, only makes it much more complex as you need to “grind smart”. It also has some of the most tedious methods of grinding stats, like bashing stuff with cloaks or talking repeatedly to things.

24

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:23, topic:11514”]Junk food making people weak doesn’t make much sense.
It would just mark a whole category of food as “do not eat past first week”, as if everyone was allergic to it. Junk food would become trash not worth picking up.
It isn’t realistic either - junk food is bad because it is mostly just calories, not because it’s poisonous.

Penalizing people for HEALING damage (except by rest/mutant regen) - now that could be a thing.

Long term penalties for drugs could be a thing. It would actually make sense to bring this part of the idea to the game - just the drug penalties. Not stacking too much and not too heavy, but just enough to discourage drug usage. Could scale with the stat they’d be penalizing, so that a skeletal weakling would take 1 strength damage, but a mountain of muscle would lose 3 points for the same and consider not abusing heroin next time.

You kind of sound like you think all these activities just automatically result in stat loss

No, it’s just that I have seen how it works in other games.[/quote]

Doesn’t junk food currently penalize your health stat in game though? Is the internal health stat supposed to measure your bodies level of nutrition or is it based other factors as well? Since I’ve noticed that stuff like flu shots will increase it (over time?) the same way vitamins do, and the white cell generator bionic (I’ve forgotten the name of it…) also increases your internal health score. As long as junk food does that, it pretty much is garbage you don’t eat after the first week, unless you intend to supercharge your moral to ludicrous heights or something.

Also, I do agree with you that I’ve seen exercise done poorly in some games. However, I’ve played nethack, and I’ve found that my stats does rise through natural use at the rate that I need them too. I don’t have to push a boulder in one small area over and over again, for instance, because there is a section called sokoban, that will cause your character to rise up a few levels in strength or more by the time you’ve finished the puzzles since they involve natural boulder pushing. Fighting raises dexterity, as does being hungry but not weak from hunger. Spell casting raises your intellect, ect.

The main reason I suggested making higher level skills exercise higher end stats was to partially help justify starting with better than 0 skill in a way beyond “You’ll waste points if you don’t.” The rational was that more refined skills would demand more of the person that uses them. That may or may not however be workable and I can understand if that isn’t since it could very easily lead to grindy behavior. However there is an issue with skills taken at character creation not helping with your characters future potential beyond saving your characters time here and now, and in some instances, possibly saving your characters life? (being too situational basically) This means that if a person has to take skills, it will either be something like computer skill, or combat skills. So generally speaking, we go from the optimal build being good stats with no skills, too slightly worse stats, and that same character is combat trained somehow. Like on the level of or better than a trained member of law enforcement.

Also, penalizing people for healing damage through direct medical aid does sound strictly better than punishing them for getting damaged, now that you bring it up (I didn’t think of it like that).

The reason I bring up these criticisms is that I do actually want to see this system work. I am playing with multi point pools, and it just isn’t enough to really address the underlying problem. We need to find a way to balance the stat buffs and nerfs while still allowing characters some way to reach endgame potential. I find that being able to play one character for long periods of time is a lot more fun than playing tons of characters for a short period of time each. But only if there is some level of constant danger, like you could be killed if you get careless or unlucky.

Right now, base stats arn’t so much of a problem because you can basically boost them semi permanently (which is basically permanent if you know how to prevent unfortunate events), and then you can super boost them above that when necessary. And to balance that, we have super nerfs that go along with that, but when you come over prepared, those nerfs don’t matter. Basically, drugs, and moral boosters super buff you, and pain and status ailments nerf you. But if you can get your character off the ground, you can deal with pretty much every nerf you might come across. This is what is leading to broken end game characters and balance issues.

25
As long as junk food does that, it pretty much is garbage you don't eat after the first week

You can negate all the health effect from junk food by just eating vitamins.
Even if it wasn’t possible, the effect itself is tiny and capped.
Junk food mostly sucks due to low nutrition that makes it not worth carrying except for morale stacking.

So generally speaking, we go from the optimal build being good stats with no skills, too slightly worse stats, and that same character is combat trained somehow.

Saving character’s life once at the beginning won’t make it worth permanently having lower stats. Trainable stats wouldn’t prevent that either, unless they were totally fluid. Having each stat cost 5 skill points wouldn’t fix it either.
It would all be easier if DDA was a timed mission (then skills could be better than stats), but in a flexible time scale, temporary can’t compete with permanent.

Right now, base stats arn't so much of a problem because you can basically boost them semi permanently (which is basically permanent if you know how to prevent unfortunate events), and then you can super boost them above that when necessary.

Base stats do limit how high you can boost your stats.
Mutation set roulette is an endgame thing. A lot can happen before that. Plus, it’s a bit out of “balancing area” - it’s one of those things justified by “it sucks for balance, but some people do it and it doesn’t affect the rest”. It’s something you do when riding in a death roller, wielding a rivtech gun, wearing a power armor or rivtech armor and keeping 10k+ bionic power on self, and not one of those things is actually balanced.

26

[spoiler]I don’t like that system, it’s way too rigid. The main problem is that Traits and Stats are in two different categories. Yes, stats always give you many long-term advantages, but don’t forget traits also do. For most part of the game you are not going to mutate and also starting traits can not be purged [as far as I know] and they also predetermine your chain of mutation. Getting new traits is billion times easier than getting better stats, but also is ridiculously costly and the more you go up, the less chance you are going to balance between given negative and positive traits. Still you can use your traits to the full extent since the first day. Doesn’t it remind you of something? Yes, stats essentially do the same thing but they give you an advantage without any losses. Traits, on the other hand, force you to pick some negative trait for better one. It’s an exchange. The fact that there are many “free” negative traits is a balance issue but that’s not something that system can deal with as it’s not its purpose.

What I suggest is connecting traits and stats categories into one, but make stats far more expensive to increase. After all those give you a pure buff. By interconnecting the two we can still make a sorta balanced character and force players to choose whether they want higher all-purpose stats or situational traits. So yeah, traits should take their current amount of points and stats should take more than one from that pool.

Starting skills generally don’t matter unless you play certain challenges. For two points or slightly more you are definitely not going to get some meaningful amount of skills that you couldn’t get by grinding the skill in reasonable amount of time. I actually have a really complex idea of how to change skills and reading and learning to make it 95% less grindy. I just can’t form the text yet, it’s that big. Should it be implemented and starting skill will start to matter quite a lot.
[/spoiler]

Notice me senpai ;_;

27

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:25, topic:11514”]You can negate all the health effect from junk food by just eating vitamins.
Even if it wasn’t possible, the effect itself is tiny and capped.
Junk food mostly sucks due to low nutrition that makes it not worth carrying except for morale stacking.[/quote]

So they fixed it now? It used to be that eating junk food dropped your health so low that you got constant colds and the flu without a filter mask. I only thought it was vitamin pills that were capped. That actually opens up a whole host of possibilities for me.

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:25, topic:11514”]Saving character’s life once at the beginning won’t make it worth permanently having lower stats. Trainable stats wouldn’t prevent that either, unless they were totally fluid. Having each stat cost 5 skill points wouldn’t fix it either.
It would all be easier if DDA was a timed mission (then skills could be better than stats), but in a flexible time scale, temporary can’t compete with permanent.[/quote]

Yea, that’s why I was against this change initially, and I still am somewhat. I am playing with this change though, I would be quite the hipocrite if I didn’t play with the thing I’m critiquing. This wouldn’t be so bad if we could get some permanent benefit for putting points into skills. I’m not sure how good this suggestion would be but… And I’m just spit balling here, but maybe if half the skill you start with is permanent, and skill rust doesn’t take your “permanent” skills into account or something. Like if you are a Handyman and you put an extra point into construction to get to 6 construction, you don’t drop below 3 construction, and reaching 8 or 9 construction is easier to reach and maintain because it would be like having 5 or 6 construction instead? I could be wrong, but it shouldn’t unbalance combat skills because those would get used most if not all the time anyway, and it would mean something for specialization, rather than just being a vehicle to an easier beginning game. Can anybody think of ways this might unbalance the game?

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:25, topic:11514”]Base stats do limit how high you can boost your stats.
Mutation set roulette is an endgame thing. A lot can happen before that. Plus, it’s a bit out of “balancing area” - it’s one of those things justified by “it sucks for balance, but some people do it and it doesn’t affect the rest”. It’s something you do when riding in a death roller, wielding a rivtech gun, wearing a power armor or rivtech armor and keeping 10k+ bionic power on self, and not one of those things is actually balanced.[/quote]

Not significantly. Stimulants can dramatically increase your intelligence, perception, and dexterity temporarily. Meth also increases your strength, as does adrenaline abuse. And artifacts, while being rather random and having the potential for serious drawbacks, can boost your stats when you need them boosted. Among other things.

28

My only major concern about this system is that I’ve always considered 10 perception to be the absolute minimum for any character, due to it being the minimum to effectively spot landmines.

In the current system, you can choose to have a character with above average strength, dexterity or intelligence, and average everything else, but eventually, in my experience, that character is probably going to step on a mine and die, which isn’t much fun. And there’s no way real way to avoid such a fate OTHER than increasing perception at character creation, so increasing skills etc. won’t help in that regard.

If additional options were available to prevent a sudden, random and extremely unfun death by landmine, I’d have no problem with the current system. Maybe a trait giving a bonus to trap-spotting?

29

I haven’t stepped on a landmine in a loooong time and I usually play with nearly blind characters.
Landmine deaths aren’t random, the only way to get a landmine death that isn’t 99.9% your fault is during night raids, when limited field of vision prevents seeing the signs.

Just pick some trapping at start. It is twice as effective at spotting traps as perception.

30

Wait, trapping actually helps with trap detection now? Ok, well that pretty much solves my concerns right there.

I had noticed that the minefields I came across tended to be nicely marked in more recent versions, but I didn’t realize that was always the case, I just thought it was a specific, less dangerous variant. I guess my concerns are based on outdated experience with the game.

Objection withdrawn.

31

I kind of skimmed the 2nd portion of thread, but its sounding like high stats having some minor down-sides might be something… Like very high intelligence could lead to interaction difficulties between people far less intelligent, or a very high perception might make you go temporarily insane (when you view something that’s just unbelievably unreal)… Super-high strength could even lead to all standard clothing becoming too small (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson couldn’t wear one of my shirts…), along with increased need for food, and could even earn you automatic distrust from NPC survivors since your muscle mass is clearly dangerous… Dexterity I’m not coming up with much, heh, but it could technically be reduced in effectiveness by low perception or high strength (dangerous to be swift when you’re not registering where you’re going, and a muscle-giant will never beat a lean runner in a race…)…

Dunno! All I can say with certainty is: I’m glad I don’t have a game to balance, and thanks to Coolthulu (and to all other recurring contributors) for keeping this amazing gem growing :slight_smile: Also, there’s truly no harm done (EVER) so long as the old function still exists in-game, and it does :slight_smile:

32

as long as i can choose whichever option, then i am cool with it - i’ll mostly pick single pool anyway(unless i’ll be in a mood for playing a demi-god, lol).
as for grinding stats through actions - i think there should be some way to gain/lose stats through certain actions but it should be a mod - it changes a lot of mechanics so many people might not be comfortable with it.

33

[quote=“Adventurer, post:3, topic:11514”][quote=“Labtop_215, post:2, topic:11514”]It would be nice if the harder starting scenario’s could increase the stat pool instead of the skills pool.

I don’t mind having points set aside for skills and being told that I really should enter the apocalypse with some skills to aid me. However, I don’t see why I shouldn’t be at least a little better than average for starting with a harder scenario and being able to mitigate it.[/quote]

More skills IS better than average, but I understand what you’re saying. This is the very first implementation so I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point some of the scenarios do reward some stat points.[/quote]

In options -> debug -> you can manually adjust your stat points. A fun start that I like is to jack up zombies in harder start locations, then jack up my starting points. I like the extra action.

34

Finally got back into Cata again and tried out the new multi-pool character creation system. I really like it, though it definitely needs a bit of balancing still. Just having 2 points to spend on stats might be enough, if it wouldn’t suck that much to have low stats. I understand that 8 points in a stat are considered to be the baseline, but in reality, 8 in a stat is pretty bad in actual gameplay. Even using a longbow effectively needs 10 points. I understand that a “normal” person would have trouble to use such a bow to full effect, but 10 points in strength means no points in other stats.

The second problem is that the extra points of scenarios are applied to skills, which makes them basically useless. Scenarios are mostly used to trade a difficult early-game for long-term boosts, but now, all it does is make a hard start slightly easier by providing more skills…

But yes, in the end I’m quite happy with the system, so congratulations to the person who came up with it!

35

You can buff the point numbers in debug for an easier game.
10/8/8/8 stats are totally fine.
Bow penalty for low strength is minimal - it only affects range.

36

You can buff the point numbers in debug for an easier game.
10/8/8/8 stats are totally fine.
Bow penalty for low strength is minimal - it only affects range.[/quote]

Actually, I don’t think that those stats are “totally fine”. While they indeed aren’t that bad, they still give your penalties, for example when it comes to ranged combat. I can see normal people having trouble doing tasks that require some advanced mental and/or physical ability, so I’m totally fine with high-level skills books needing high intelligence to read easily or bows requiring a certain strength to use to their fullest, but in general, I’d say that 8 points in a stat should neither give boni nor penalties.

37

Ranged combat penalties can’t become bonuses. It wouldn’t make sense to compensate for inherent unpredictability of a gun with own dexterity and perception. The ranged penalty doesn’t represent you being bad at using the gun, just not being great.

38

Honestly, I admit I don’t know the exact mechanics behind ranged combat, but that isn’t really the point I’m trying to make. All that I’m saying is that 8 points should be where things are balanced around, which - at the moment - they feel they don’t. Maybe it’s just the way the information is communicated to player, though. All I know is that I always tend to see stuff like “You need X points to do that effectively”, where X is always higher than 8… Maybe it should be more obviously stated that 8 points is what a normal human is capable of. Or maybe I’m just talking out of my ass, dunno.

39

Could be rephrased to “you need x of y to fully utilize z”. For bows, this is actually rather misleading - low strength has a tiny effect here.

40

Things are balanced around having stats near 8 at the start, but its also supposed to be hard in general.
Another way to pur it is that yoy don’t have ant penalties at stat 8 compared to an average person