Decreasing tedious skill grind

Discussion started in http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=12978.15
And few earlier threads. Link if you find those.
This thread is for the non-pool-related elements of skill progression.

To sum up ideas from the last thread and some earlier considered in random threads and discussions:

[ol][li]“Skill training activity” was an idea most people liked. This would be an activity similar to crafting, but not producing any results except skill gain. This would replace throwing rocks at a wall to grind throwing, sewing socks to grind tailoring etc. The higher the skill level, the higher the cost - low skill tailoring would use rags, high level rags, leather, nomex, kevlar and welder charges etc. While we don’t have a complete idea on how it would look, it’s pretty straightforward to design.[/li]
[li]Advantages from taking skills at chargen: increased skill gain after that, better caps etc. This isn’t a complete proposition, more like “idea for an idea”. It’s not something you can point at and say “I like this, implement this”, but something that needs to be designed first.[/li]
[li]Making hard to grind skills easy to grind. This would require identifying all such skills AND levels at which they are hard to grind. And then proposing individual fixes.[/li]
[li]No skill gain for practice. This would be more like a challenge mode than main game. Skill gain would come only from books and NPCs. This would fix tedium of grinding skills by making skills very “fixed”, instead making it all about hunting books and NPCs.[/li]
[li]Skill gain milestones. Your skill advances when you do “achievements”, not from practice . This one would be a big redesign of the skill system, so would need to start out slowly with a lot of work. Example: to increase melee from 3 to 4 you need to do 3 out of “Deal 40 damage in one melee hit”, “Kill 2 critters in one melee strike”, “Deal a total of 3000 damage through melee strikes”, “Kill a full hp shocker brute dealing only damage from melee strikes”, “Have lvl 4 in any other melee skill”. This one is more like just brainstorming, unlikely to actually get in.[/li]
[li]Lowering caps in crafting skills. At the moment you can only gain [1 + 1.25 * recipe_level] level from crafting, and need to have skill level equal to recipe level to get it. This creates a lot of breakpoints. By lowering the requirement by just one point and allowing repeated failures to train the skill, there would be a lot less “level holes” in crafting system. Warning: this would decrease scavenging by making crafting and autolearn stronger.[/li][/ol]

much of the reason hard to grind skills are hard to grind is their non-continuous use [computers] or their general uselessess [speaking] or a lack of recipes [traps, early mechanics, electronics]

I dont think milestones are a good idea. This idea where you have a set task in order to gain a level is going to end in minmaxing, and excludes casual users.

Take a low strength basher. Theres no reason they shouldnt have 9 bashing skill. They just lack to strength to be a high damage outputter.

  1. OR how about random results? Within limits of course. You could accidentally craft an item which recipe you haven’t learned yet. And then you might actually learn the recipe on the spot, assuming one meets the skill requirements. High INT characters should be more likely to produce something, or more likely to produce an item which recipe they haven’t learned, and they should be more likely to learn the recipe as well. Extra: And then, what if we cut out most of the recipes from books (ammo crafting excluded)? This might basically force tinkering. Truly a mechanic for inventors, mad scientists and other types who like to experiment and explore, I would think. But which recipes to remove from books? Let the game decide. Randomize for each world. Cut 50%-80% of the recipes from all books, with some exceptions, but be sure to leave some for each skill level.

  2. How about flat +10% learning speed per initial skill level, up to +50%? Both in reading and actual doing.

I’d rather see tinkering more explicit.
More like research - pick one recipe, waste lots of resources over and over, finally you gain the desired product and recipe for it.

I have possibly the semblance of an idea of potential use.

Reading a skill book allows you to boost your level in a particular skill as normal. You have a chance to memorise relevant recipes close to your skill level as you study this book.

Activating the skill book instead opens the book of recipes in an exclusive list (in its own Crafting Display much like the player has); displaying the components needed, the difficulty of the item being crafted and all relevant information. The player selects the recipe they want to craft (providing they have the materials for it) and attempts to craft it.
Any recipe can be attempted regardless of skill level so long as you have the skill book which has the recipe printed within it.

Skill level instead plays an important part in your success rate as well as the chance to memorise that recipe from that skill book.

Success can be measured in the following;
Critical success – You created the item you wanted and memorised the recipe for it.
Success – You created the item you wanted.
Minimal Success – You created the item you wanted but it is of poor quality (it is damaged, for items which cannot be damaged- i.e. chemicals or foodstuffs just regard this as a success.)
Failure – You failed to create the item, but didn’t lose any materials.
Critical Failure – You failed to create the item and lost the materials when making it.

Obviously this is pretty similar to what is in game already, the difference would be that the more difficult the item, the harder it would be to achieve a Success or Critical Success and memorise the recipe from the book. Creating damaged or poorly made items would be a trade-off and probably a more common result, at least until the character gets more proficient with the skill being used or memorises that particular recipe.

This would mean that the player could attempt any recipe with a skillbook on hand, but only if they have it with them as reference and it means that they can start to memorise the recipes they WANT to memorise instead of just randomly gaining knowledge from a book and grinding levels so they can unlock the next “tier” of recipes.
This kinda makes sense from a character’s point of view. They’d not want to learn EVERY recipe from a cookbook, only a recipe they’d enjoy, so they’d practice that recipe until they got it right and memorised it.

It pretty much means that if I see a recipe in a later tier that I want to reach, I’m not spending my time grinding through each progressive level until I reach that recipe, instead I have the option to learn the recipe at my current skill level, just at a lower success rate providing I have the skill book on hand to use as reference.

This is just my own two cents, I’m not the particular type of player who tries to master every skill and learn every recipe in the game until my character becomes a vault of all knowledge, practically a walking search engine.
So I can’t speak for everyone, but in my experience you can’t please everyone either, so I wish you guys luck in fleshing out whatever you have planned.

I believe that a number of recipes could be moved down a level or two. Especially in cooking, since with the way they are right now it looks like the vast majority of people never touched a kitchen stove in their entire lives.

Also, investing one point into a skill during character creation should give 2 (for combat skills) or 3 (for crafting skills) levels, but only for the first point (so spending 1 point on tailoring would start you with level 3, spending 2 points would start you with level 4, spending 4 points would start you at level 5, etc). Since in most cases leveling a skill to 1 is completely trivial, this would help make buying skills feel less like a waste.

I suppose it would be best to identify what is considered tedious to grind. For perspective, I like to try and do wilderness survival, so immediately bug out, or start in the forest. The skill caps I run into are fabrication, survival and tailoring.

Tailoring is only a grind because of thread use and the fact that I run out of clothing to repair or practice on since I destroy it all in the beginning, which is a viscous cycle when zombies drop hard to repair clothing. The suggestion for ‘skill training’ would be really good for tailoring.

Survival is a grind, period. Maybe not annoying, but it’s a grind in that the first 2 levels at least I get by just searching bushes. I never use the materials I find but I search them anyway. I thing this wouldn’t be a grind if at that point I had a shelter but that’s what I need the survival skill for in the first place.

Fabrication, the first level I get by grinding and disassembling fishing hooks.

I like the first suggestion for ‘skill training’, at least for some skills. I can’t see being able to train, say bashing weapons without actually bashing weapons on creatures, at levels much more than 1 or 2. Just wouldn’t make sense to me. Tailoring has good marks as you can set a requirement of ‘Nomex Panels’ to train past 5 skill, or something like that.

Identifying problems with current system:

Skill increase is tedious.
Skill increase has inappropriate risk vs reward.
Skill increase is necessary and arbitrary.
Some skills are pointless to raise anyway.

Combat skills: Dodge + Weapon skills:

  • Not tedious. You naturally and organically increase those through play, combat and exploration. There are opportunities to practise combat everywhere in the apocalypse.
  • Carries risk, or at least perceived risk, in leaving a zombie unpulped outside your bedroom window to practise fighting skills on, and it can result in interesting, immersive, choices by the player as they eventually need to keep a zombie hulk unpulped for the sole purpose of providing their daily workout. This is “appropriately risky”.
  • Not “necessary”. It is good to have high combat skills, but:
  • Mostly not arbitrary. You are not required to have 10 Unarmed Combat skill to punch a Jabberwock. You may improve your skill in combat with extra resources (drugs, weapons, armour, allies). You may achieve combat victories without “playing fair”.

There are a few “arbitrary” and “necessary” parts, like installing gun mods requiring X skill to even attempt, but in comparison these are few and far between.

Combat skills can be pointless, depending on availability of weapons, but this can be assumed to be fundamentally “short term” as time approaches infinite. Better combat skills are always nice to have.

Pointless Skills: Bartering, Swimming, Speaking, Driving, First Aid

  • Any benefits for training are comparatively low, so risk or tedium of increase is irrelevant.

Generally these skills are not so much tedious as they are pointless, and most of their benefits are acquired at low skill levels anyway or replaced with gear in the rare cases they might ever be used (swimming). It might be an idea to move some of the advantages from high stats into skills. Speaking and Bartering for extra dialogue options, First Aid gives the player the knowledge how to successfully “play dead” etc, or more likely to find medicinal herbs while foraging.

Generally, until NPC and aquatic aspects are major features, these can be safely ignored.

Book Skills: Computers, Trapping.

  • These skills offer few opportunities to increase, actively penalise attempts to train them at low skills, and are valuable to have at a high level (and easier to train). Currently this means ignoring them as much as possible until you find a book, and in Computers’ case, finding the significant gear requirements to make use of it - Tablets and rare hacking tools.

Computers: Permanently locking consoles, losing loot, taking damage, creating extremely dangerous enemies.
Trapping: Triggering traps, taking damage, failing to spot a landmine.

While not so tedious, this still represents a problem worthy of consideration. Early game, low benefit tasks that players can pursue to make them more worthwhile.

Crafting Skills: Fabrication, Construction, Cooking, Electronics, Mechanics, Survival, Tailoring.

  • Highly tedious: Crafting skills are heavily menu based and requires extensive repetition, staring at your character bulk crafting knitting needles for hours at a time without even a skill progress % or periodic updates.
  • No risk - This emphasises boredom early game. There is nothing risky about hammering “-” to make sewing needles one by one, and if you do, very rarely, lose a skewer, who cares? Late game, resources are more plentiful, so even losing pricier components is still effectively “risk free” for the small failure chance that is present.
  • Sometimes necessary - You can frequently bypass skill requirements entirely through scavenging, but in order to create certain rare items it is necessary to
  • Heavily arbitrary - Being able to craft something is a binary state.

Survival is by far the best of these, and does not constitute a problem for me at all.
You can forage to increase it with mild risk (wasting bushes). Finding bushes is not menu based. You want to do it anyway (bushes contain rewards).
You also increase it by butchering with mild risk (wasting CRMs, exposing zombie meat to rot). Finding bodies is not menu based. You want to do it anyway (corpses contain rewards, and don’t get back up).

It’s possibly a grind, but the grind is short and goes down smooth, it will get the player up to a point where they will be able to do most things they want to with survival. It’s a little arbitrary: You need Survival X to craft your survival kit, therefore you must jump through those early hurdles to make their stone f00, but has the least overall issues.

Compare this to fabrication:

Level 0: Grind cudgels from wood. Cut up Cudgels for skewers. (Or nails to hooks)
Level 1: Turn skewers into Knitting Needles. Cut up Knitting Needles. Repeat.
Level 2: Mass produce Steel Knuckles. Disassemble. Repeat.
And so on, level by level.

Unnatural: You are not playing the game, you are playing a text adventure about literal needlepoint.
No Risk: You can easily craft far more than you need.
Necessary: You must progress through every step and raise every level of fabrication in order to make your Diamond Face Puncher.
No Reward: You do not need multiple ANYTHING that is not consumable or in need of constant replacement.

While it gets better later on, since crafting a doom buggy is high reward, high engagement, natural progression, early game Mechanics is even worse, since 0-1 skill points precludes so much as changing a tyre, so early levels of Mechanics are either find a book or craft several thousand Foot Cranks and Mufflers that you can’t install anyway.

Construction is sort of the opposite: Early game it’s great. You will always want to Deconstruct Furniture. At which point you reach a strange point where you need huge amounts of materials to produce things you don’t need, over and over, until you can construct the one thing you wanted to do in the first place.

This is the extent of the problem as I see it. My primary design goal would be to make all these crafting skills share as much in common with the skills that work best, and, where such a thing is impractical or impossible, to use standard gameplay as a crutch to help. One or multiple approaches can be taken.

Problem Solving

To resolve all parts of the problem, I’d prefer:

1: “Skill Training Activity” I’d consider to be a great option to reduce tedium for crafting skills by abstracting the repetition out of it. As many have picked up, adding higher tier resources for higher level skills means this can be a great use of otherwise wasted downtime for the player.

Costs could even be additive so as to require all the resources previous levels needed to keep demand high, even for the more plentiful materials in the late game. High level tailors would always be on the hunt for specific types of zombies (police, firefighter, regular) so they could turn them into more skill exp.

Less necessary, but still a nice addition, would be to have practise have a random chance of producing a random item that uses the practise materials (You make something useable!). Rare minor rewards for the player to heighten interest.

Best of all, this option should mesh well with any other changes to the system. It doesn’t change overall balance if it’s kept in keeping with the gains from actually using the skill, just removes the busywork aspects so it’s as close to “seamless” as we can hope to get.

2: “Advantages from taking skills at chargen”: This came up partly as a way to help balance character creation, honestly it’s mostly an advantage to fixing character creation balance (make skills more useful in general to make it worth giving up stat points in exchange), but there’s one place this could be used, which is in the next approach:

3: Remove restrictions on recipe creation.

Just as the player may attempt to install or remove a CBM with 0 in every skill, as long as the player has access to a recipe, they may attempt to craft that recipe.

How it could be implemented exactly is up for debate, but one example of how success chance might work with this:

[2x Player Skill Level + [(Intelligence + Dexterity)/2] + SKILL RANKS START - 2x Difficulty Level] / 10

Skill Ranks Start, in this case, being the number of skill ranks invested in the crafting skill at character creation (Advantages from taking skills at chargen). More broadly the same type of bonus could be added to Survival’s forage success chance and Computer hacking skills.

So a character with 10 Fabrication, 8 Intelligence and 8 dexterity with 0 starting skill ranks attempts to craft a Difficulty 10 Item.

Skill 10 x 2 = 20.
+8 (Int + Dex)/2
+0 (Skill Ranks Start)
-Difficulty 10 x 2 = 20.

8/10 = 80% chance of success.

A character with 0 Fabrication, 14 Intelligence and Dexterity (they did some meth) and 0 starting skill ranks attempts to craft that item:

0% chance of success. 40% chance of succeeding with a Difficulty 5 item feels a little high, but this involves expenditure of resources (drugs), and still fails more often than not.

Craftsman who starts with 3 Skill Ranks and 8/8 stats tried to make recipes straight away:

Difficulty 3: Automatic success.
Difficulty 5: 70% success chance.
Difficulty 10: 0% success chance (at level 5 they have a 10% success chance).

While it obviously would need more balancing than a formula I whipped up in a minute (and probably the reallocation of difficulty levels on recipes), this system has a lot of potential advantages:

Arbitrary restrictions are replaced with Realistic Consequences - While I do not know the founding principles behind it, I can follow a recipe I have available to the best of my abilities. I will probably fail if the recipe is too difficult, but I can still A: Try, and still B: Possibly succeed. Just like I can try to punch out a jabberwock with 0 Unarmed Skill, disarm a land mine at 0 Trapping, swim or drive a car when I can’t, and remove complex machinery from my nostrils despite being an uneducated rube who took too much Adderall.

Risk Free Tedium becomes Risk Management Choice - While I can act safely and conserve resources, I can, if I am willing, attempt to use resources in order to potentially succeed in a difficult task. Again, this mirrors combat. Higher risk exploration results in loot, but could result in the loss of resources to recover from resultant injuries or damage. Higher risk crafting has a higher failure risk, obviously, but could offer better experience if the result was a “near miss” than working on regular items. Like combat, it becomes good to have as high a skill as possible, but is not necessary.

Skill investment becomes balanced - Finally, putting points into Crafting Skills at character creation has an intrinsic value and defines how the character grows, but at the same time does not provide an insurmountable advantage - Other non-crafters can still create the same gear, but generally take more attempts and make the gear later.

The system would also work for adding and removing car parts along the same metric, as well as construction projects.

Miscellanous Suggestions:

These aren’t system-wide changes so much as more specific tweaks:

Remove Construction: Buildings are straight up inferior to vehicles and harder to make. The construction skill, as it stands, is one of the least valuable. Build menu could be kept as is, but construction of buildings could be exported to other things, primary one being Fabrication.

Deconstruct Furniture grant skill XP based on item deconstructed. Fabrication for basic wooden furniture, Electronics for appliances and other machinery like arcade machines, mechanics for industrial type furniture like conveyer belts and factory machinery.
Dig Holes: Survival.
Spike Pits: Trapping.
Beds: Tailoring (Fabrication minor)
Metal walls and furniture: Mechanics.

This removes a lot of redundancy and helps tie in all skills better to the game, while providing the foundation for more specific structures (nuclear powered kitchenette, your own nuclear powered console to store recipes and song tracks, your own pinball machine (no electricity required!), all while concentrating the available exp into a smaller number of skills for more training opportunities.

Trapping: Give minor skill experience for spotting traps - This would be a nice low intensity training regimen that would increase during play. Far better than setting bubble wrap and grinding

Computers: Give skill experience for unlocking Mobile Phones and PDAs to gain access to their functions. Low risk (common, low value items), minor benefit.

[quote=“Someoneman, post:6, topic:12277”]I believe that a number of recipes could be moved down a level or two. Especially in cooking, since with the way they are right now it looks like the vast majority of people never touched a kitchen stove in their entire lives.

Also, investing one point into a skill during character creation should give 2 (for combat skills) or 3 (for crafting skills) levels, but only for the first point[/quote]

I’d need a list of such recipes.

First point giving 2 skill levels was the case earlier, it could be introduced back.

It’s easier to grind it by crafting digging sticks and shovels.

Not first aid. This one gives a significant bonus to healing, has a breakpoint where you can see NPC hp and improves CBM install chance. It only needs more recipes.

3: Remove restrictions on recipe creation.

Just as the player may attempt to install or remove a CBM with 0 in every skill, as long as the player has access to a recipe, they may attempt to craft that recipe.

Sounds dangerous. Depending on when the recipes are unlocked, it could result in book hunt being even better than now (unlock good grind recipe - grind over and over) or even grind being just far more rewarding.
Consider the pilot light recipe. It only takes scrap and copper and uses common tools. It is a fabrication 5 recipe. The results are useless (unless you’re mass-crafting grenades), but it can get you up to lvl 7 in fabrication.
Oxidizer powder is lvl 8 and only takes bleach and water. It produces valuable results, but skill gain is enough.

On failure, CBMs waste expensive resources (or set your HP to ~10 on removal), can cause long term penalties, can wreck existing CBMs. This is expensive.
There is no risk management in most crafting, since the biggest problem here is, most of the time, gaining tools and recipes. Cooking is more about ingredients, but most of the results of cooking are just nutrition advantages, better storage properties and morale bonuses.

Unlocking recipe difficulty would require managing a lot of existing recipes to patch holes first.

Remove Construction: Buildings are straight up inferior to vehicles and harder to make. The construction skill, as it stands, is one of the least valuable. Build menu could be kept as is, but construction of buildings could be exported to other things, primary one being Fabrication.

This could help. Having construction as a separate skill takes away from early Fabrication and makes high-level construction nearly worthless.
I’ll make an issue on github to see if others (some devs only check github) have no objections.

Trapping: Give minor skill experience for spotting traps - This would be a nice low intensity training regimen that would increase during play. Far better than setting bubble wrap and grinding

There aren’t enough natural traps to make it matter, except on swamps.
Honestly I’d rather remove the skill like construction. A separate skill just for traps not only devalues perception, but also serves to make a set of craft items (traps) hard to acquire and thus not useful at the time they should be useful. Not to mention that only like 3 trapping recipes are good (nailboard, caltrops and blade trap - because those are reusable).

Computers: Give skill experience for unlocking Mobile Phones and PDAs to gain access to their functions. Low risk (common, low value items), minor benefit.

Sounds tedious, unless it was automatic. And automatic variant sounds trivial.
The best way would be to merge it into electronics and intelligence. Because honestly I don’t see a natural progression for this skill - it’s all books and explicit grind.

Not first aid. This one gives a significant bonus to healing, has a breakpoint where you can see NPC hp and improves CBM install chance. It only needs more recipes.

You’re right that it’s not “useless”, but at the moment I barely pay attention to it. In-combat healing is rarely ever a good idea (which is a good thing), and treating deep wounds is automatic, so it’s generally just saving time and resources (when by mid game I’m rolling in more bandages, first aid kits and disinfectant than I could ever use). Some higher tier crafting could definitely help flesh it out a little. The Injector stimulant and healing packs?

Sounds dangerous. Depending on when the recipes are unlocked, it could result in book hunt being even better than now (unlock good grind recipe - grind over and over) or even grind being just far more rewarding. Consider the pilot light recipe. It only takes scrap and copper and uses common tools. It is a fabrication 5 recipe. The results are useless (unless you're mass-crafting grenades), but it can get you up to lvl 7 in fabrication. Oxidizer powder is lvl 8 and only takes bleach and water. It produces valuable results, but skill gain is enough.

As a theoretical, what if skill gain wasn’t improved while attempting harder recipes? Any actual grinding could be covered more simply by reading books or expending a great deal of resources using the Skill Training activity.

If we don’t have a cap on attempting recipes, and there was no particular benefit to attempting harder recipes in terms of skill, then players can try and expend effort towards goals [I need pilot lights to mass-craft grenades] rather than the skill itself being the goal [I need Fabrication 7 in order to make exploding arrows], which I’d love, both from a simulationist and balance perspective.

On failure, CBMs waste expensive resources (or set your HP to ~10 on removal), can cause long term penalties, can wreck existing CBMs. This is expensive. There is no risk management in most crafting, since the biggest problem here is, most of the time, gaining tools and recipes. Cooking is more about ingredients, but most of the results of cooking are just nutrition advantages, better storage properties and morale bonuses.

I remember we discussed this in the other thread, that “critical failure” would be a lot of work. It’s unfortunate since I could see this as being the most effective way of dealing with this:

“You failed so badly you destroyed all the materials and hurt yourself!” - I’d like this just for the lulz when my character burns herself making salad.
“You failed so badly you damaged your equipment.” - Damage all tools involved - This would be potentially very expensive if the creation was using something like an atomic coffee maker.
“You failed and breathed in a lot of smoke.” - Coughing fit.
“Whoops.” - Small fire next to your location.
“You fail and cut yourself. Badly.” Bleeding in random body part.

There’s not much that can be done about book importance, unfortunately. There’s already an extremely high number of recipes in the books in the game, and those books are already important based on needing to raise the appropriate skills anyway. They would lose some value with the Skill Training activity, but I doubt that would change much since they would still be the cheapest, easiest way to improve.

I suppose the only real thing that could be done would be to spread recipes out more, perhaps have more books that don’t train skill but have each of those books contain maybe one or two high level recipes along with a lot of overlap on old ones. If the player could actually record recipes they found (in their own book, or on the E-Ink) then they would at least not be carrying a small library with them everywhere they went

The removal of construction, trapping and computers sounds like a good idea.

Construction would work well by splitting construction requirements between mechanics and fabrication.

Trapping, with so few crafting recipes might as well just be fabrication and perception & dex can tie into the detecting and disarming of traps.

Computers…just merge it with electronics. I never touch computers unless I have found all of the books and just read them to the high skill and even then I never do much with the computers I find.

I’m opposed to removing or merging any skills. Instead, the less-used skills should have more applications. I just think there isn’t enough other content around some of the skills. That content could be in the future. If skills are removed now, that could prevent future content development potential.

Construction could be part of the refugee center activity: Build as much defenses in 30 days as you can against an impending zombie horde. Build barracks for 10 people (beds, roofing, walls, sink, toilet… you name it).

Computers skill is quite exceptional, I think, and firstly should be allowed only for highly intelligent characters. And even a highly intelligent character with no computer skills should take a loooong time to become a decent hacker if he starts from 0. I think studying computers should only happen passively, over time. Firstly you’d have to carry a laptop or a tablet, and reading material at all times. A person with 18 INT could go from 0 to 10 computers in 112 days, 2 default years. And there just should be more things to hack. I think some cash cards could be locked. Add more smartphones, that at least include the owner’s home/work address (a single random building somewhere). Or other small amount of map data. We can already hack consoles, gas pumps, vending machines… Some advanced cars could and should be made hackable. Building alarms could be an existing component, and be subject to hacking before or after they are triggered. Most lab mutagen formulas could reside in lab computers, and only rarely be seen in printed form. Maybe we could even include various programming languages the same way unarmed styles exist. Any hacking attempt could be a 2-layer thing - Firstly you’d have to be familiar with the device’s language itself, and secondly you’d have to be good at it. Weather stations could have links to weather satellites. Hack weather station consoles for regional weather data and locations of other weather stations. Do similar for military installations. Or police stations. Many of the institutions are networked. And hackers could have access to that network structure information - locations mostly. Well, I mean some of the location info is even public. Police station computers could include sites of suspected or known “illegal” narcotics or weapon basements.

[quote=“BeerBeer, post:12, topic:12277”]I’m opposed to removing or merging any skills. Instead, the less-used skills should have more applications. I just think there isn’t enough other content around some of the skills. That content could be in the future. If skills are removed now, that could prevent future content development potential.

Construction could be part of the refugee center activity: Build as much defenses in 30 days as you can against an impending zombie horde. Build barracks for 10 people (beds, roofing, walls, sink, toilet… you name it).

Computers skill is quite exceptional, I think, and firstly should be allowed only for highly intelligent characters. And even a highly intelligent character with no computer skills should take a loooong time to become a decent hacker if he starts from 0. I think studying computers should only happen passively, over time. Firstly you’d have to carry a laptop or a tablet, and reading material at all times. A person with 18 INT could go from 0 to 10 computers in 112 days, 2 default years. And there just should be more things to hack. I think some cash cards could be locked. Add more smartphones, that at least include the owner’s home/work address (a single random building somewhere). Or other small amount of map data. We can already hack consoles, gas pumps, vending machines… Some advanced cars could and should be made hackable. Building alarms could be an existing component, and be subject to hacking before or after they are triggered. Most lab mutagen formulas could reside in lab computers, and only rarely be seen in printed form. Maybe we could even include various programming languages the same way unarmed styles exist. Any hacking attempt could be a 2-layer thing - Firstly you’d have to be familiar with the device’s language itself, and secondly you’d have to be good at it. Weather stations could have links to weather satellites. Hack weather station consoles for regional weather data and locations of other weather stations. Do similar for military installations. Or police stations. Many of the institutions are networked. And hackers could have access to that network structure information - locations mostly. Well, I mean some of the location info is even public. Police station computers could include sites of suspected or known “illegal” narcotics or weapon basements.[/quote]

It’s silly that making a nailboard trap uses Trapping skill to construct while making a nailboard weapon takes fabrication, and pretty silly that making a bed or seat for a car uses fabrication, and making a metal roof takes mechanics while… Doing those exact same things takes construction?

Removing construction would not remove the ability to construct things. You could still create stuff, you would just use other skills.

This shouldn’t stop things from being added to the game. Sinks, toilet and plumbing? Awesome. Kitchen units have plumbing, and they use: Mechanical.

I’m less decided on Computers being removed, since there’s a clear distinction between being able to code a computer and build a computer, and I do like quite a few of the activities you’ve proposed. Computer controlled cars makes sense, lab computers containing recipes and potentially even computers containing non-book reading opportunities would be neat.

That said, while I’m down with computers gaining passive skill over time, taking two years to increase at maximum intelligence is nonsensical in a setting where Joe Lab Tech can become Chuck Norris by fighting enough zombies.

Perhaps E-Inks could just have an activated option where you just toggle it “active”. It would take up your wield slot, produces a small amount of light, reduces your visual range, and train computers for every step. Battery intensive, which is fine, I don’t think I’ve ever had to reload an E-Ink, and hands-off training even while the player walked, drove, looted or did other crafting things.

I'm opposed to removing or merging any skills. Instead, the less-used skills should have more applications.

That’s the camp I’m in, too.

Computers being trained passively by using an electronic device is a GREAT idea. Let’s add cellphones to the list, too.

Maybe have an advanced alarm clock that has some more functions and trains computers, too.

http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=5865.3255

Also, can we keep the option of a single pool for points? I hate being forced to play ways that I do not like. Especially when there is no difficulty in maintaining single pool, multi pool options.

Lockpicking could be moved to traps.

mechanics might sound fine on paper, but given its use in building a car its a disconnect.

plus, traps allows player to utilize traps and crack safes. They lend a pleasing aesthetic to one another.

[quote=“pisskop, post:16, topic:12277”]Lockpicking could be moved to traps.

mechanics might sound fine on paper, but given its use in building a car its a disconnect.

plus, traps allows player to utilize traps and crack safes. They lend a pleasing aesthetic to one another.[/quote]I like the sound of this. They’re both roughly dexterous applications, too, so they fit.

what should the new traps/lockpicking be called?

[quote=“Litppunk, post:18, topic:12277”]what should the new traps/lockpicking be called?[/quote]Probably just Traps, still, in the sense that a “lock” could be abstractly called a Trap, much like it could’ve been called a Mechanism previously.

I’d name it Disable Device if the name were available, but there’s a license conflict.