Character creation suggestions

[Marduk]

Since some recent updates, spending points at character creation for skills is just such a relatively poor option that outside of challenges and RP it’s useless. Low, 1-2 level skills are extremely easy to get in game, high ones have very high point costs, and spending even the 1 point on traits, professions or stats is so much more beneficial to player, especially in mid to long term.
The profession skills make it even worse of a deal, offering skills cheaper point wise, and with bonus starting equipment.

Something needs to be done about it.

My suggestion is to make a separate starting point pool meant only for buying skills, 10-40 points.
Leave profession as they are, costing the more valuable “normal” points, but boost their benefits (or decrease prices) a bit considering how they are only a short term benefit vs always meaningful benefit of stats and traits.

[system]

You want to include some sort of Diablo-like system? Like, you have a skillpoints and statpoints?
Actually, nice idea.

[Inadequate]

I’ve always thought a way to raise stats over time in game would solve most of the problems of starting point allocation. If there were a way to raise stats, there’d be much less controversy about point costs for anything else, because then any two randomized starting characters could eventually end up with the same loadout, no matter the point cost.

[Marduk]

There is already a way to raise stats through mutations, but it’s so much harder to do than with skills.

If stats just could be trained, that would open a whole other can of worms, making characters much more powerful statwise long term, making the game much easier.

Yeah, a statpoint\skillpoint system is what i’m suggesting.

[Inadequate]

Yeah, but I mean actually training stats up. Honestly, I don’t see a problem with the concept, as long as it’s balanced out over a sufficiently long period of time. I don’t necessarily think it would make the game that much easier either, most of the difficulty at the moment is in the early-game. Anyhow it’s an open-world sandbox game, if people want to hole up and train their character in peace forever I don’t see why they shouldn’t be allowed to do so.

[Birdie]

Maybe a set amount of points for stats and skills.
Maybe you need to take negative traits to get points for the good ones?

[RipRoarinBoogerPenis]

What if the stats were trained at a slow rate? Or an adjustable rate?

Maybe raising skills will increase associated stats?

[zxpr0jk]

Is it out of the question to just eliminate skill allocation on character creation?

There’s already the profession system, which packages skills and starting gear in a fun and fluffy/story way. So the separate, and detrimental, skill screen is redundant and dull.

[Inadequate]

I don’t think it’s redundant at all. Putting points in skills helps a lot with the early-game, and can help a struggling player more than stats initially. If you think it’s redundant you can simply ignore it with a simple button press, no need to cripple the game experience of everyone else.

[system]

[quote=“RipRoarinBoogerPenis, post:7, topic:4170”]What if the stats were trained at a slow rate? Or an adjustable rate?

Maybe raising skills will increase associated stats?[/quote]

This sounds like a good idea to me.
I suppose at least some of you have played TES III Morrowind, right?

For those who don’t:
Basically stats level up with an associated skill. E.g. Axes required strenght so wielding axes over a long time increased your strenght (to put it simple).

Why not do the same for CDDA?
Gun related skills raise PER
bows/archery, swimming and stuff raise STR
tailoring, fabrication etc. for DEX
and computer, electronics and first aid for INT

of course some skills would affect more than one stat.

[Cherry]

If we had a sort of “skills improve our stats” system, how could you count progress to the next skill point?
Would it be based on # of times skill was used, or something like # of skill points gained? The latter would suck, because you could abuse forgetful and int-based cap and stuff.
Either way, swimming around for days would definitely make you stronker.

But but but. How does shooting zombies make you have a better perception? Doesn’t shooting zombies only make you better at shooting zombies (marksmanship, rifles)? Reading cookbooks can make you the best chef in the world, but I don’t think it will make you the smartest. (cooking +, int same).

[Inadequate]

I would assume that you become more attuned to the environment, able to pick out smaller details and process it more quickly. An in-game justification isn’t very difficult, really. Balancing it would be more of an issue, although I like the idea.

[Dominae]

[quote=“zxpr0jk, post:8, topic:4170”]Is it out of the question to just eliminate skill allocation on character creation?

There’s already the profession system, which packages skills and starting gear in a fun and fluffy/story way. So the separate, and detrimental, skill screen is redundant and dull.[/quote]

I was hoping it’d go this route. Skills are, obviously, the least likely thing you’ll spend points on … so why not just remove the page and let people end up with the skills they choose if they pick a profession.

Adding more and more complicated, overlapping point-based systems may sound interesting, but it can clutter things up and even confuse players.

[Inadequate]

If you don’t like the skills page, you can very well ignore it. The skill page is extremely useful for new players who want to front-load early game skills, and for experienced players who want to skip that bit of early-game grinding as well. Crippling a useful mechanic because it’s not to your taste is the very definition of selfish.

And really, this would be solved quite easily by simply having a way to train stats up in game, as earlier mentioned.

[Dominae]

I guess I struck a nerve.

If you don’t like the skills page, you can very well ignore it. The skill page is extremely useful for new players who want to front-load early game skills, and for experienced players who want to skip that bit of early-game grinding as well.

I do ignore it. I assumed a lot of people do, actually, since while it may give a boost to day-one play you’re heading into the apocalypse with an, overall, less optimal character than if you’d spent the points on something else. Dumping the points into Intelligence, or making sure you have “Fast Learner” is a huge boon to skilling speed. Also, with skill books around every corner you’re tripping over free skill points early on. Generally, if a book lights up blue I keep it and read it during normal gameplay downtime.

I honestly have never grinded (ground?) a skill in all my Cata days. They come insanely fast as it is just through normal play. I actually hardly ever even look at my skill page. When I do, I’m shocked/amazed at how high many of them are.

I suppose if I wanted to play a character that doesn’t go into town, I’d want survival skills to live in the forest from day 1. But then, why wouldn’t I just pick a profession that gives me those skills PLUS useful equipment and a fluffy character description?

Crippling a useful mechanic because it's not to your taste is the very definition of selfish.

Seemingly personal attack aside, I don’t think that is “the very definition of selfish”.

Removing functions that aren’t worth using, or replacing them with better functions is a good thing. This is a suggestion & comments section, where people make suggestions and others comment on them.

I could very easily say … requesting the people working on coding the game institute complex systems that only a few people think are a good idea, that clutter up the interface and/or coding, confuse people (wait, I have points for stats … and points for skills … and what do professions do? Oh, they give skills too? Hmm, so is it cheaper to take a profession or to buy the skills separately … argh, forget this game its too unwieldy!), and make the game more bloated is “selfish”.

Along those lines … I’m sure some people would like a page where you have points to spend on initial starting gear. It should list every single item in game, give it a point value, and the player should get a set number of points to purchase things one by one off the list. That way, we can each make our character wear what we want, when we want, right from the start. Some people would cheer at that … others think its a waste of time to implement because, hey, part of the game itself is to go out and scavenge for your gear. … plus … as was my comment regarding skills in the post you quoted … “thats what professions are for” (though in this case, giving you different starting gear).

And really, this would be solved quite easily by simply having a way to train stats up in game, as earlier mentioned.

It could, yeah, if smoothed out the right way. It could be difficult to do, and any new layer of complexity like that you add brings severe balance issues. The game becomes too hard for some, and way too easy for others.

If you think people grind skills now (which I’m still a little amazed people seriously bother to do), how exponentially worse will grinding stats be?

I usually modded the Morrowind (and other TES game) stat increasing system. Frankly, having to babysit my skill screen to make sure I grinded/ground the proper skills to get the stat increase I needed was a massive annoyance to me. I couldn’t just play the game and have fun doing what I wanted my character to do without knowing in the back of my mind that I was wrecking the maths behind him/her, by not diligently grinding the right things.

“Man, I wish I could use this new mace I found … but I need 2 more strength to do it … guess I’ll go over-encumber my character and jump for the next 3 in game days to boost my strength up!” saddens me

[Cherry]

Points for Stats

Points for starting gear - or - Pick a buncha junk from your profession that you want to start with. Pick as much or as little as you want because everyone -even grandma- ends up either dead or driving a deathmobile.

Points for traits aka “natural human mutations”. You aren’t born a super viable human, but you can damn well mutate into a super stronk woof-man. Or a bird-man. Or a etc etc bla bla bla

Points for skills. I assume not everyone in the apocalypse has ZERO life experience and NOT be “professed” in their line of work. A professional street brawler definitely has more melee skill than 1. It only takes like 10 swings with a pipe to get 1 melee skill FFS.

I’m implying that there are 4 different pools of points. This is the vibe I’m getting from the thread so far!

edit:forgot the skills

[Inadequate]

Perhaps I overreacted, but I stand by my ideals nonetheless. Sub-optimal playstyle isn’t really that much of an issue in a long-term survival game, and it looks like you’re projecting your own desires and playstyle onto the general audience. And frankly, if people are going to grind skills, why not let them? The people like you who don’t grind for anything can play one way, and the grindier types can play another way, and neither is hurt by the others’ experience.

[VampyreLord]

Raising stats is ridiculous, how do you feel about a 99 STR character?

[Inadequate]

Well, obviously you’d need to have limitations in stat raising, similar to the soft-cap on skill raising. That’s more of a issue with balance than with the actual concept, I think. And on another note, I think skill point distribution adds a bit more depth to characterization. Who’s to say a washed-out hobo wasn’t a master tailor in the distant past?

[Cherry]

There are only 2 things that I can think of that I intentionally “grind”.
Tailoring skill, and archery.
My new characters running around with 0 all skills tend to have a hard time finding clothes that fit. They also have a hard time finding ranged weapons.
In order to find some decent clothes, I need a skill of like 4, and for the awesome survivor stuff, I need 7. Said character runs around killing zombies and knitting up their clothes and disassembling sheets with a glowstick until I got a trenchcoat, boots, gloves etc etc.
Rivet actually proposed an idea to prevent this behavior by making zombies clothes unusable due to lore reasons. He wants you to clean them with bleach or detergent before you get any rags, leather, or clothes.
In order to kill zombehs at a distance. Craft a slingshot, pick up a million rocks and make some cocoa pebbles. Fire at zombehs and animals over the course of a few days until skill level is 7ish. Craft recurve bow and arrows -> New main survivor weapon. The sling is still kinda useful near the beginning, especially when you get headshots, but I usually have a kung fu guy beating up squirrels anyways. 10 pebbles is not equal in stronk to 10 arrows.

Everything else, like someone said just climbs up naturally or by reading books that take skills to lvl 6.
12 skill points at the start doesn’t make that much of a difference thanks to all the glamopolitans.