More ambiguous stats

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

This suggestion is for a more immersive gameplay experience by changing the visual, static values of items into a more interpretive value.

This blurs the lines of Good/better/best and leaves room for a more immersive experience through trial and error and a sense of vision through a character.

Examples:

This scenario a character is faced with using either a bat, a crowbar or a pipe. With the current system no matter the skill level or the situation we can look at each individual weapon and chose its inherent bonuses and any penalties we may incur with using each weapon. Such as a bash of 13 for the pipe with a +3 hit modifier or the bat with a 24 or 28 depending on the material with another +3. and the crowbar is different again with a 16 bash and a 3 cut with a +2 to hit. Clearly the bat will win out every time because it’s better in every way except weight, and even then that’s negligible when confronted with killing enemies as quickly as possible.

Blurring these traits would remove the obvious values like a bash of 13 or 28 or 16 and introduce an ambiguous value (not precise, open for interpretation) that is based more on the user’s skill. We’ll assume an individual with no intrinsic knowledge of bashing weapons at all. His or her view on what weapon would be better is subject to opinion more than anything. instead of a value of 13 for the pipe it would instead be something like ‘Harmful’ or ‘Serviceable’ or even as far as ‘Okay’, something that doesn’t tell you that this is an amazing weapon, but you feel it could work. The crowbar instead would use a word that describes that the weapon could deal more damage without explicitly telling you so like ‘Good’ or ‘Sturdy’ or something. Even assigning these in a range so anything from 14-18 bash would be considered ‘Good’. The baseball bat could be categorized as ‘Excellent’ for its bash or ‘Dangerous’

Of course this would be subject to skill. The better you are with the skill involved (Here its bash) the more accurate you can determine the worth of a particular item. Someone with 0 skill might not really see the difference between the pipe and crowbar, giving them both ‘Okay’ values. But someone with +4 skill would know that the crowbar is just a bit better, a bit heftier than the pipe and assign them ‘Poor’ and ‘okay’ respectively.

This would translate across the entire game, cutting your need on looking at these static values and more about cultivating your character and relying on skills instead.

Ideas? thoughts?

2

This may work for melee weapons, but what about guns? How would the average person be able to tell apart the damage and accuracy of a USP .45 and a Five-Seven?

3

Ehh I rather not. I think the only thing this would achieve is for people to go directly at the wiki/jsons and memorize which weapons are better than the rest.

I don’t know, I like being given direct stats, it has been like that since the very start, it would feel odd to change it right now.

4

Good point…Would the average person know any more than that one bullet looks bigger than another? or how many rounds fits in the magazine? nope…

After you gain some skill you’d know that each bullet type is different and what they were used for and also what kind of gun deals with.

So 0 skill = shooty shooty

+4 or more = good, bad, high recoil, low recoil, fast fire rate etc etc

And as always I’d like to see this as an option instead, although I don’t know how hard this would be to implement even if it was a good idea

5

It’s neat in concept, but:

6

Yeah, this was brought up by Ferodactyl before, and the general consensus was no, for reasons already discussed.

7

I could see this being a negative trait at Char-gen. Something like “Absent minded” or “Carefree”.

8

It would still be easily circumvented by people looking at the game files.

9

The main way to do it would be to only identify e.g. items in general terms unless you have enough knowledge to identify them, for example only identify as a “rifle” or “pistol” at lvl 0.
It’d be surprisingly easy to do, since we already run everything through a “generate a description” method.

10

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:9, topic:4845”]The main way to do it would be to only identify e.g. items in general terms unless you have enough knowledge to identify them, for example only identify as a “rifle” or “pistol” at lvl 0.
It’d be surprisingly easy to do, since we already run everything through a “generate a description” method.[/quote]
Oooh, I like that idea. Maybe you can recognize iconic guns at lower skill levels (like a 1911, or an AK), then the higher your guns skills the more obscure guns you can identify, all the way up to the energy weapons.

11

Might be worth eventually adding a “recognizability” stat or something similar to items in the jsons, which would allow you to edit what skill level is required in a stat to properly recognize an item (maybe elaborate on the multiple levels of recognition there as well). That would allow for a default game where player skill determines what you can recognize, while if someone really wanted to be able to edit it there could easily be a mod that changed all the recognition level requirements to zero.