Character Start

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Been playing C:DDA for some time and had some thoughts on the character creation - didn’t want to necro it, but here’s a previous thread: http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=3313.30 . I have differing ideas than that post, but felt I should put it here for reference.

Like the above thread, I think the character generation is too generalized - you get X points and put them into a 4 categories.

I would suggest the following:

Characters have Stat points (Str/Int/Per/Dex), Traits, Backgrounds, Starting Gear, and Skills.
Characters have 6 points to distribute between Stats and only stats.
Characters can take up to 6 points of positive traits or 12 with 6 negative trait points - these points do NOT transfer outside of traits, however.
Characters can take up to 4 points of Backgrounds (e.g. Hobo + Backpacker + Etc) - again, points do not transfer to other categories
Characters can take up to 20 points of starting gear (e.g. Backpack, Bow, Etc)
Characters can take up to 12 points of skills - some skills have default levels from Backgrounds.

Backgrounds are slightly different from Professions, though similar. For one, they can stack. It might be weird to have a karate prositute, but nothing is stopping you. Likewise a backpacking, ex-military shower victim.

The major difference I propose is that you let all these be freeform and have a Difficulty Rating in the character creation screen. It starts at “Difficult Challenge”. Increasing Stats, taking Positive Traits, Useful Backgrounds, and any skills decreases the challenge rating. Negative traits and harmful backgrounds increase challenge rating up to Insane Challenge (or something).

One nice addition is that you could add various gameplay-options to the character selection screen: Black Road (or whatever starts zombies around the shelter), Double Zombies (i.e. zombie count = 2), and so on. Enabling them increases the difficulty.

The difficulty has no actual effect post game-start (aside from the gameplay-options of course).

The difficulty display would be disabled by default, but have an option to show it, I think. It should also be viewable after game start for bragging rights of course. Nothing like a naked start to mutated, bionic god on Insane Difficulty.

============ Reasoning

There are a few reasons I suggest this change.

  1. It feels more natural and intuitive to progress in phases that are mostly independent.
  2. Keeping the character selection options independent removes the drawback from selecting options outside stat points
    (The “Increase stat that is very difficult to raise in game” or “Add skill that makes early game a bit easier” choice)
  3. It gives some amount of additional replay value by allowing players to voluntarily increase the difficulty (and telling them that it’s doing so, which is important, I think)
  4. The difficulty rating allows those that min-max to still try and min-max vs the difficulty and also gives newbies some idea of how hard things will be
  5. Allowing multiple Backgrounds gives more options for roleplay
  6. Starting Gear purchases allows players to mitigate specific early game deficiencies they want to mitigate without having to take a package of stuff they don’t want or doesn’t make sense
    (To be honest, starting gear is inspired by DF’s embark-setup - don’t want to have to luck into a welder? That’s 5 of your 20 starting gear points! Welding goggles? 3 points. Hacksaw? 2 points. Etc. Instead of taking a Welder Background that also forces you into points in Fabrication and whatever else the modder in question came up with.)

As an aside, I would mostly want Backgrounds to be minimalistic changes to the character, maybe affecting starting clothes and the starting city or something while mostly used for NPC interaction and roleplay once that exists as opposed to packages of pre-set gear+skill combos. I’d love it if the game had “knowledge skills” that represent. Instead, I’d like the game to ship with some pre-built character setups, e.g. “Survivalist”, “Gun-Guy”, and so on.

Thoughts?

I could probably program it myself, but I wouldn’t want to do something that isn’t wanted by the community.

2

The general outline of points spent changing a difficulty description is something I’ve wanted to do for a while. I agree that giving the player feedback on the difficulty encourages them to trry and push their limits instead of simply making the most powerful character possible.

I feel like splitting character points into 5 pools is going overboard. The main complaint (and your main point that relates to pools) is that temporary (acquirable in game) benefits are overshadowed by the permanent benefits you derive from stats and traits. I don’t have an issue with treating permanent traits specially, but no case has been made for splitting them up further. (sorry, “more intuitive” doesn’t cut it, it’s an opinion).

A nit, I’d prefer to keep the player ability (survivability?) score seperate from the world hostility score instead of merging them before the player sees them. In fact, it might be valid to break out seperate early and late-game scores for the player, so that a player can have recognition for a really tough start, and likewise for taking long-term disadvantages.

Merging backgrounds is an interesting concept, but it’s not at all obvious how that would work, also see a la carte. I’d love to hear your ideas on this if you do have interesting ways to make them merge.

I don’t see any reason to make display of difficulty optional, it’s mostly advisory, so the player can simply ignore it if they want, and though advisory, it’s intended to be a core part of character creation, there’s nothing to gain from disabling it.

The main sticking point is the push to make everything a la carte, chosing individual traits, individual items, and even trimming down professions to a single-aspect version of themselves. Having professions provide a bundle of good and bad things for example was a very concious design decision, because while you can evaluate a bundle of clothing and skills for early-game survivability (which is mostly what professions affect), it’s nearly impossible to assign a valid point value to individual items, because they tend to synergise quite heavily. That “you have to take the good with the bad” feeling with professions is them working as intended. An example of them not working is only one profession being chosen for one reason or another, or them being ignored altogether. Hopefully this would be somewhat mitigated by professions drawing from a pool of short-term points.

In particular I see very little opportunity for making starting gear a remotely balanced option, unless perhaps the number of items you could take was very strictly limited. An even small selection of hand-picked items at game start can give a huge boost to the player, whereas just one or two things would leave gaps. The other problem is this is at its worst when paired with an existing suite of items, if the background provides almost everything the player needs at the start, and then they can cheaply fill that gap, it becomes the “obviously best choice” to take certain combinations of items and backgrounds.

3

While I agree entirely with everything you said, this paragraph prompted a response from the devil’s advocate in me.
The easy solution is to have each profession control the pool of items that they can draw from in the item selection step.
Sort of like -
“If you had to survive a Zombie Apocalypse and you could only take with you items from what you can reach at this exact moment, plus the clothes on your back, what would you take?”
So now, they don’t even get everything that the profession listed.

I honestly would not like to see that implemented, and it would take a lot of work from everybody anyway since every single profession would have to be rewritten basically from the ground up, and any such change to the character system defeats the purpose of most of the professions unless someone gets really creative with the item lists.

On the actual topic though, wouldn’t it be possible to just split Stats into one pool and everything else into another?
I’m guessing that the Stats pool would be rather disproportionately sized since you wouldn’t be able to boost it with bad traits anymore. In exchange, you’d almost have to take bad traits to get more than a very few good traits, boost starting skills, or pick a ‘good’ profession.
That could be balanced, I think. Not entirely sure (haven’t been playing long enough yet).

4

My suggestion would be:

  1. shared pool for Stats and Traits points
  2. separate pool for skill points
  3. all professions cost 0 points, you can pick only one, each profession has attached difficulty level (Black Belt - Very Easy; Tweaker - Very hard, etc.)
5

It seems like it may make sense to split up personality traits from genetic items, (not sure where injuries might fit) if not point wise just logically. This could work well if food preferences or the like were added.
I would love to see a way to set up a character personality that stays separate from genetics, a background that can affect personality traits, injuries, and skills, and your most recent background choice(s?) could affect items
the background thing would be way more difficult to implement I think though.

6

[quote=“Deadman, post:3, topic:5783”]While I agree entirely with everything you said, this paragraph prompted a response from the devil’s advocate in me.
The easy solution is to have each profession control the pool of items that they can draw from in the item selection step.
Sort of like -
"If you had to survive a Zombie Apocalypse and you could only take with you [X] items from what you can reach at this exact moment, plus the clothes on your back, what would you take?"
So now, they don’t even get everything that the profession listed.

I honestly would not like to see that implemented, and it would take a lot of work from everybody anyway since every single profession would have to be rewritten basically from the ground up, and any such change to the character system defeats the purpose of most of the professions unless someone gets really creative with the item lists.[/quote]

To double-Devil’s Advocate here …

If we ever get to the point where your character starts inside the area you’d expect them to be (like, at work) the items you’d get would literally be ‘whatever you could grab before you had to escape’.

Example … pick firefighter as profession and you start as a firefighter inside a fire station. You’re wearing normal clothes and zombies are banging on the door. Grab what you can, and do what you gotta’ do because here they come. Readysetgo.

Not sure if Cata was going that route though, I thought it was for a while but I saw some push-back from people saying it would make it “too hard” if you started in a dangerous area, etc. I’d personally love to choose a med-student start then ‘wake up’ in a zombie filled hospital though, that’d be awesome IMHO.

7

Nah, I like how char creation is now. Balance between stats/skills/traits.

8

I think the discussion about those starting 6 points that could’ve been 8 is also in place, but that would be just pasting over the author’s proposition; altough the recurring point is simple (want more? punch in more in the opts menu).

I’m curious if we could (simply) improve the 4-step character generation system that’s already in place. I see two distinct weights on a single bar: 1) stats and traits and 2) skills and professions. Upon distributing the chosen ammount of points on the first weight, you’re allowed to flag some skills (“one”, “two”… “five”) and decide on the profession. The last piece of the right weight (profession) adds a few points to some skills (to consist of the flagged type majority). Of course, chosen traits may cost more skill “slots” and can make some professions unavailable - and that’s even more replayability, energy bars, mawtinn-dew and sleepless nights for the player. :smiley:
Thinking about all this coolness made me remember another one cool RPG characteristic - a positive trait called “Deft Hands”. Since the character is unusually swift with the simplest of manual tasks, every attempt to achieve or create something manually gets a considerable bonus (1.25-1.5) to both quality and time consumption, that is if the task is indeed more focused on agility than on strength, or intelligence for that matter.

9

Stats and traits being one pool makes sense as they’re unchanging except for mutagens etc.

Skills and equipment being a separate pool makes sense as they’re things that generally start at their lowest and increase over time.

If I’m playing for power, I can never justify spending points on something I can gain in game for something I can’t.

10

I think the best thing would be adding a seperate pool for skills, cause outside electronics (Maybe) it is useless unless you are doing a gimicky char at start, and have time to train.

11

[quote=“Dominae, post:6, topic:5783”]To double-Devil’s Advocate here …

If we ever get to the point where your character starts inside the area you’d expect them to be (like, at work) the items you’d get would literally be ‘whatever you could grab before you had to escape’.

Example … pick firefighter as profession and you start as a firefighter inside a fire station. You’re wearing normal clothes and zombies are banging on the door. Grab what you can, and do what you gotta’ do because here they come. Readysetgo.

Not sure if Cata was going that route though, I thought it was for a while but I saw some push-back from people saying it would make it “too hard” if you started in a dangerous area, etc. I’d personally love to choose a med-student start then ‘wake up’ in a zombie filled hospital though, that’d be awesome IMHO.[/quote]
I very much want this to happen as an option. I don’t expect to ever get rid of the build a character option, but I also want to be able to pick a fully fleshed-out scenario and play through it.