Practice makes perfect

Game Talk The Drawing Board
21

First two general issues.
Rust: I think everyone is in agreement on this one. Completely independent of this proposal, rust will be changing to a penalty to “effective” skill level that accrues with disuse, and rapidly disappears when you start practicing again, e.g. on the order of burning it off in a single fight.
Total time to reach max level / scale of leveling: I said that the 10,000 hours thing was probably out, the breakdown was just throwing some ideas out there. Really all I’m proposing there is X hours/turns/whatever to reach x level as a unifying principle across all the skills, instead of ad-hoc determinations of how much practice any given action does, which is what we have now.
Ad for the actual level, it needs to take into account:
difficulty in acquiring practice actions
need for development of multiple skills

This has nothing to do with “preventing grinding skills”. This is addressing the fact that “grinding” makes sense, it’s how learning actually happens, but we don’t want to make it a PITA for the player.

Mostly this would relegate books relationships with skills to a source of practice actions and recipes, you learn stuff from them, but you don’t get better at a skill by just reading a book about it over and over, you need to practice.

I’m sympathetic to this concept, and have proposed it in the past, but I think we need to get skills settled before we worry about it.

Min/max levels for practice actions is definitely reasonable, promotes more engagement with the system instead of just grinding away at the same thing. Possibly soft caps, where the benefit drops off based on your skill level relative to the practice level?

Wow, I agree 10,000 is a bit much, but hit the skill cap after a little over a week of practice? Doesn’t that seem a bit… fast?

You say that like it’s a problem :stuck_out_tongue:
It SHOULD be hard to practice, and it gives value to the variety of ammunition types.

That’s orthogonal to the proposal, yes various tasks should probably stop being optimal for skilling as you advance “past” them, but that’s easier to do in this system than in what we have now, and frankly basing skill advancement on novelty doesn’t make much sense. You might figure things out from trying new things, which this would represent with acquiring new recipes or practice actions, but you get BETTER at things by practicing.

22

Sorry, didn’t make it clear, but this would be the time required to gain each level. Sorry for that terrible contextual placement. >_<
However, even assuming it WAS total time, it would take a week of constant skill practice plus infinite at-hand materials PLUS all the knowledges of the practices required for each step of the way. Since that just outright isn’t going to happen it’s more like two or three weeks in game to get a single skill to max level by focusing on it and on nothing else, which, yes, I do think is actually fairly reasonable. The way I intended it to be taken it’s about 56 days, which is probably too long considering that the player will need to be doing a variety of other stuff at the same time and probably won’t have the luxury of focusing on the same skill for that long.

Anyways, something really can’t be considered “grinding” if it doesn’t use up player time.

I think hard caps for practicing are much better than soft caps - it makes it clear to the player when they should switch out of practice mode into go-out-and-find-stuff mode, it discourages grinding actions (since the obvious solution to a reduction in effectiveness isn’t to stop doing it - it’s to do it MORE. Not exactly what I want to see gameplay wise)

23
To hone your skills, you again perform the same actions over and over again, you PRACTICE.
This should not replace skill gains from actually doing stuff over and over again. Case in point the grindfest of butchering. That -is- practice. Cooking squirrel meat every day for n days -is- practice, and should damn well count for raising a skill too. I think we agree on this, but I'll clarify this to separate practice and proposed-practice-game-mechanic for what follows:

Practice/grinding butchering for 100000000 hours or whatnot should not be enough to get survival from 0 - 10. Realistically, the transition from office worker to uber-survivalist, (and (most) things labeled as skills in the game) involves a mix of practice and knowledge. That can be from knowledge transfer (books) or experimentation/discovery (the former is more common irl but I imagine that would change in a post-apocalyptic scenario).

Mechanicswise, this would entail adding another pre-requisite (knowledge) for advancing a skill, which would slow down the “omg i can get cooking 10 in a week ;.;” issue and make the player hunt for books/npc mentor/etc. Naturally this only makes sense for some skills (perhaps adding a exercise/knowledge ratio to class Skill).

The proposed condensed-practice-grinding mechanic could (as an alternative) actually help with increasing knowledge via DISCOVERY, in addition to practice; ie, in addition to _exercise it would sometimes increase _knowledge based on intelligence / luck / focus. Not as fast as a book, but if you can’t find one it (slowly) kills two birds with one stone.

TLDR:
Survival 2-3 would need:

  • _exercise 0-100: granted by:
    ** performing-some-survivalist-action-over-and-over-like-we-do-now
    -or-
    ** proposed-condensed-practice-grinding-mechanic
    AND
  • _knowledge 0-100: granted by:
    ** Wilderness Survival For Dummies
    -or-
    ** proposed-condensed-practice-grinding-mechanic’s rng() dice throwing, limited by intelligence
24

I like the idea about practicing and what not and don’t want to get involved in the general melee about times and what not. I do, however, have my own two cents about skills, books, and practice. I long ago envision my own game (read that MUD as I used to code on them) that I never got around to doing. One of the things that game would have had was skill and knowledge. These would interact to determine how fast your abilities in electronics in general will raise.
Electronics represents practical skills and ability to apply knowledge.
Electronics Knowledge would indicate how well educated you were on the theory behind everything.
Main intend behind this was for crafting skills. Have slightly separate systems for combat and crafting skills wouldn’t be horrible as they aren’t learned in the same manner IRL. Combat skills do have a knowledge component to them too but they are more about repetition of the same action to build muscle memory and reflex. So perhaps for combat skills we’d have a practice value/skill? Building a gym/training room for a certain combat type to increase efficiency of learning that practice/knowledge would increase the main skill gain in actual combat? Sounds like a winner to me. There is my $0.02. Enjoy. No change required. :stuck_out_tongue:

25

Both “train for skill” and “do for skill” can be done badly (repeat something 10k times) or they can be done nicely (enter training mode, skip time simulating timeflow).

Lets assume both systems are done equally good and allows sensible non-boring time skip?

Roguelike approach makes you do stuff before you can safely move to doing more dangerous stuff/crafts. Thats activity.

Training approach makes you train to encounter stuff. So you would kind of turtle, train and then move on.

Lets assume training as it was presented in this thread - without changes to game itself. You’d spend time to setup training and then train - and then you would spend time to erasing mobs with your trained skills. So you would have to be grindy to get rid of the mobs anyway?

Now you erase the mobs as you go and learn by doing it, so you reach goal in one stage. Its doubles as mob removal/skill practice dual purpose.

Just pointing out that you cannot eliminate the grindy part even if you have training system because you still need to get rid of the mobs.

Crafting is bit different. Maybe crafting should be “skill trough diversity” aka different crafts teach you more advanced stuff and “speed trough routine” type of split? If you craft a lot of similiar things you would become more efficient worker and make less mistakes/spend materials but lack “creativity” - if you would only be “creative” then you’d lack efficiency?

26

Put in an intelligence & dexterity & perception check to the time it takes to gain knowledge. You can totally ignore these three stats as it is right now.

27

Ok, yea that amount of time seems more reasonable taking into account intentional game-y time dilation. Though I’d still like to set the cap at 10K and have an explicit scaling factor in an option. that’s kind of an implementation detail though.

Point taken, though I meant soft cap transitioning to hard cap. For the soft cap to be effective you need to communicate relative effectiveness of different actions, so the player knows that new thing is better than old thing, and more importantly that there are better new things out there.

Yes we’re in total agreement, “practice actions” only displace performing actions “for real” in that many skilling actions will come in 6 second chunks, and therefore be impractical ways to progress skills. I’m perhaps over-focusing on the combat skills here, e.g. butchery might not be impacted at all by this, because practicing butchery requires a corpse, and you can’t really re-use them, or can you… (see opening scene of American Mary)

That’s a good point, do we want grinding a single “real”(non-practice) action to indefinitely advance the related skill(s)?
There’s a reason we’re talking about capping advancement for different practice actions, it doesn’t make sense to do just one arbitrary* thing for 10,000hrs to attain mastery, you have to keep updating what you’re practicing to refine further and further. That’s a kind of big can of worms though.

*A possible exception is a very finely tuned practice regimen that encapsulates everything from basics to mastery, many kung fus are built around this principle, though to be honest it normally takes months to learn the form well enough to start practice. Might reflect this by breaking a given form (or kata in the Japanese tradition) into many pieces, or unlocking more refined versions of them as you practice and use them.

Separate practical/knowledge values for each skill has been proposed before, but now I’m wondering if we want to enumerate “things you know” instead of condensing it into a number. This would go a long way toward adding greater granularity to skills, because even if two tenuously-related activities are grouped under the same skill, you at least wouldn’t be gaining knowledge about one activity from practicing the other, though ability to perform the two actions would overlap. This is a much more tenuous suggestion than the rest of the proposal.

That’s not a good assumption, without the “practice action”, there’s no “non-grindy” way to practice e.g. combat skills, that’s a major reason for this proposal.

Grinding is performing some activity only to increase skills (or to accumulate drops, but we mostly don’t have valuable monster drops), if you want to clear out an area of zombies to make it safe, that’s a goal-oriented activity, not grinding.

Knowledge yes, higher intelligence and sometimes perception would tend to increase the rate that you would unlock new practice actions and techniques. It wouldn’t have any impact on practice rate though.

A side issue, this kind of system would segue nicely into a system for stat increases that people have been clamoring for :wink:

28

This thread is dense with (good) ideas. As a whole, I think this is the best re-imagining of the skill system that I’ve heard. Let me spend my post on looking at the “aggregate” mechanics we’re talking about.

Note: Keep in mind that the skills we are talking about are very different. If computers is your usual mental model for skill growth, please switch to cooking or dodging to rethink things, and vice versa.

Rust and Exponential Difficulty:
Currently, skill growth from “grinding” is pretty linear. I need to assemble a flashlight like 10 times to get from 2-3 and like 50 to get from 9-10, but honestly, it’s not like the exponential system proposed. Currently, we balance that growth by using rust. It boils down to a rate problem. Since rust takes away more of my gains at higher levels, it makes advancing a skill to a high level a little more exponential. The rust mechanic seems to have the desired effect in skills like cooking. If I cook enough meet to live without ever grinding a stockpile, I usually max out between level 6 and 8. At that point skill rust totally negates any advancement. The current system also has a pretty insane rate of skill rust (which has been critiqued previously in this thread), which I also feel is a weakness, but it needs to be high in the current system to make the overall skill gain more exponential.

The rust mechanic is defeated by grinding a skill in a fast burst, and the current system rewards that behavior. With some skill-specific exceptions, this is generally backwards. Long periods of casual experience make the basics of that skill second nature. Short bursts don’t really establish the long term memory or muscle memory associated with mastery. Rust also rewards keeping a book (or some kind of gear) related to each skill type to practice like once a day. As annoying as it sounds, I’ve heard of other doing that, and the system rewards it. I have caught myself carrying around a sock to practice sewing on or throwing a rock occasionally to keep my skills up. We probably don’t want to really reward players for this kind of OCD behavior. Are we sure we need rust at all? At in-game time scales, skill rust would probably be a minor effect anyway. What behavior are we trying to encourage with rust? If we’re trying to punish players for a “burst of skill practice” that never gets used in the future, is there a different way to accomplish this?

Focus:
Focus is another in-game mechanic designed to indirectly limit skill growth. Morale acts like a thermostat for focus, and focus is a linear scaling factor on how effective practice is, with some added complexity on how fast focus drops. Focus makes intuitive sense when we’re talking about 6 second activities - the “micro” scale, if you will. We’ve all had the experience that we can work better and faster if we’re happy and focused. Currently, if you haven’t practiced anything for an hour or so, your focus will be at the “set point” (depending on morale). After practicing a skill, sometimes for only a few minutes, it will drop and make any activity ineffective, even if it is a change of pace from what you are grinding. Focus is the currency that is spent to improve any and all skills. When looking at the macro-scale of 10,000 hours of practice, focus as it is currently implemented is a little less intuitive and a little too dynamic. At the macro scale, our ability to learn is more a characteristic of who we are and how we learn than it is about momentary mood swings. Those little swings get averaged out.

Several alternatives to limit skill growth have been mentioned: knowledge level / inspiration in a skill area, acquiring items required for practicing a certain skill, diminishing returns on a repetitive type of practice, and others. That is not to mention reshaping skill levels to an exponential system grounded at the macro-scale; that limits skill growth directly. The advantage to what is being proposed is that it is granular to the individual skill and can be tuned independently. Any of these ideas are probably better than focus, and I’d vote to remove focus completely. Morale can stay and be repurposed a little. Just food for thought. What is focus accomplishing that can’t be accomplished by a more realistic, macro-scale mechanism? Also, I have the experience all the time that when I’m tired of one activity, a change of pace lets me keep learning. That’s why school classes are broken up into small chunks. The current focus system says that after your 8 AM history class, you can’t benefit from Math or Phys. Ed. for the rest of the day.

Practice activities:
The details of this are the sticking point. The underlying mechanic needs to be simple enough for players to understand. The application of this mechanic to specific skills needs the flexibility to capture growth in that area meaningfully. Let me try to distill down the system described in this thread:

[ol][li]practice will be a separate menu like crafting. You specify a skill to practice and an amount of time to practice. I would vote only having 1 entry per skill, but I could see it working to have sub-components within a skill like martial arts to improve different components of that skill (like Kevin’s example of dodging).[/li]
[li]the amount of practice points needed to reach the next level will increase exponentially and (probably) be the same for all skills.[/li]
[li]the effectiveness of the practice needs to be scaled up or down depending on some parameter… let’s call it quality here. I like Miloch’s idea of quality (“skill knowledge” in his post) being a scaling factor of how well you learn. I can think of a couple of nice implementations of this. For example, by default, practice quality could be level 1 or 2. This represents my natural ability to know what I should practice. Reading the right book, gaining some insight from real-world experience, or having good training equipment could increase your practice quality. A book could be a permenant bonus up to a specific quality number (like 3 for a beginner’s guide, 6 for a manual, etc.). Inspiration might be a temporary relative increase of 1 level. Equipment, if it is furniture, could be a location-dependent bonus. If you needed 100 hours to level up from 4 to 5, having a quality of 4 would mean you actually need the full 100 hours. A quality of 5 (from reading a book) might mean that each hour counts as 5/4 hours of practice, meaning we need just over 83 hours to level up. An additional +1 from equipment might give us a 6/4 multiplier for 66.6 hours.[/li]
[li]the practice menu could have the equivalent of crafting “ingredients” that give bonuses or penalties to practice. For example, a butter knife might work for knife training, but not as well as a combat knife. This dovetails with the quality mechanic and can be simply shown on a single menu.[/li]
[li]real world practice needs to be scaled as well. Skill increase from practice could be scaled based on the difficulty of the skill used. If I’m at level 4, crafting a lvl 1 flashlight would not be as good as crafting a lvl 4 item. Skill from killing enemies could be scaled based on their level, or some parameter calculated from their damage, HP, and speed. Reading some books could directly give skills while independently increasing knowledge. The important point is that all we need is an activity specific coefficient to balance real-world skill gain. Killing a zombie at lvl 1 could be as good as an hour of practice, but only 10 minutes at skill level 5.[/li]
[li]Morale can also influence skill gain (or even block out practicing when low). I see no need for focus anymore.[/li]
[li]Skill rust will be removed from base skill level. It could be either moved to its own modifier or removed all together.[/li][/ol]

Final Thoughts:
I’m most concerned about how a new mechanic rewards gameplay behavior. For example, if automated practice is less effective than grinding flashlights, the system would still encourage players to cut and paste “(fY-1” over and over again. I’m also hoping this change will bring new life to books. Right now they aren’t worth reading; it’s faster to grind for almost all skills. Reading books (only once or twice) as a way to permanently increase practice quality is suddenly awesome if it reduces my practice time by more than the time it takes to read everything. If done well, CataDDA will not only have a better skill system, but it can also ditch some of the legacy ideas that have resulted in annoying playstyles.

29

I’ve always liked the idea of having players pick “core” skills at character creation, and having skill performance more closely tied to specific stats. You could play a brainy character by tagging science/computers/electronics, a brawler by choosing unarmed/bashing/survival, etc.

The problem is it’s too easy to make an omni-competent survivor, there’s no trade-off. Change that you remove a lot of the incentive for grinding.

1 Like
30

To clarify, what you’re proposing is similar to the system used in Fallout? Tagged skills are higher at the start, and they develop more rapidly?

31

From a player who rarely grinds in this game, I cant say I’d want this to outright replace the current system. I want to say more but can’t think of how to word it right now.

Anyway, do you think the ability to spar with a npc would be possible or a good idea? What I thought was that it would turn the npc temporarily “hostile” (if you had the proper equipment for both you and the npc), but with no significant risk of injury.

32

Greetings.

I thought I’d add my 2 batteries to this.

I really like the idea of giving each skill a Skill Level and Knowledge Level.

1st. I’d suggest that if we want to unclutter the skill list we could add something like the following:

Fabrication: ####===—

Symbolizes a point in Skill

= Symbolizes a point in Knowledge

  • Symbolizes that there is no skill or knowledge (which also makes it easier for new players to see what the maximum is)

So according to above in Fabrication we have 4 Skill and 7 Knowledge.

2nd. About Knowledge and gain.

Knowledge could give recipes, training methods and increase the speed which you gain skill up to Knowledge Level. (No need to reinvent the wheel)
Knowledge could also increase while you train and practice even without any help, but only slowly since it takes time to figure out and “reinvent” everything. (So you can max the skill even if you do not find any books or any other sources of Knowledge, but very very slowly)

Using a Juice and a Cup example:

Skill = Juice
Knowledge = Cup

So if we want a lot of Juice we need a bigger Cup.

Skill books kinda fit in nicely since like other have said they could easily be changed to provide knowledge in certain skill instead of raw skill.

Npc’s could also be retrofit to give either “Training” or “Instruction”

“Training” would increase your skill.
“Instruction” would increase your knowledge.
(also “Training” would some increase in knowledge and “Instruction” would give some increase in skill)

In addition since many people have talked about “tag/core” skills of sorts.
I propose this:

Trait: Genius (Insert Skill)

Genius would let you “figure out and invent” everything in the chosen skill naturally so you would never need to look for books or instructors. (mechanically it would just treat your knowledge to be 10 for skill gain speed and gives you recipes and training methods based on skill level instead)

That’s all for now.

33

I like this idea.

34

Regarding a knowledge stat, there are “things you know”, but that’s more a big list rather than a score. You might end up with funny holes in your knowledge due to various circumstances, and a numeric scale destroys that. Also, what would you use a knowledge stat for? If it’s determining whether you know a recipe, it’s just better to handle recipes individually, either you know it or you don’t.

Sparring should be a thing, yes.

35

Ive been thinking it would be pretty awesome to have some “research” practices that not only slowly increase your skills but have a chance of side effects like granting you recipes based on the recipes you already know. Could esp. be useful for the cooking skill, since I think for mechanics we want recipes to come from reverse engineering but thats not really possible with cooking.

36

I personally would like to see the new style system (independent of weapons) be expanded upon further. Any variety to melee combat, almost always a boring but staple option in a roguelike, is a good thing. When combat insights and fighting techniques (or even just practice techniques) were discussed, the idea did hook into my mind, but I didn’t catch this thread until just now.

This is probably a distant idea but shouldn’t it be possible for your character to assemble his own unique style? Over time, learning to fight something not entirely human, with little prior experience (for most people) in combat, wouldn’t most people develop their own method of combat? Unfortunately, the way for the game to develop a style based around your actions as a player would probably be difficult to code in, and involve a lot of analysis over time. Maybe, however, between melee (or weapon-specific skills) skill of 6 - 10, assuming the previously discussed exp curves and caps, your character should have breakthroughs on methods that work well.

The style, generated upon your character’s fighting style until then, might then be only applicable to either a favored weapon that you use almost exclusively, or a group of weapons within the skill that’s in those levels if you switch it up. It probably wouldn’t be as sophisticated or effective as martial arts styles, and I hope more are introduced that primarily affect weapons, but it would be, do a degree, tailored towards your own style as a player.

And of course, I think the practice thing is great. There are a few skills that are hell to train to any decent level without hiding in your cave for almost a month with books stacked to to the ceiling. Computers and Electronics I am looking at you. First Aid I wish had books that took it past level 3, but it’s not terribly important that it does. Mechanics I can train to 10 in a day with a hacksaw and a wrench and a few dead cars, and that’s kind of a problem. I can get it to 40 and well beyond just making my own vehicle.

37

I think this is a pretty good idea; the grind involved in getting a new characters throwing skill up to a decent level is much more annoying and seems more mechanical than I would like. I also got a thought wherein certain nearby features could affect the speed at which the skill is increased, like those tackle dummies that they use in football could be used to train up the unarmed skill slightly faster, same would go for being near a punching bag. This could also add in a gym that would have a bunch of these features to be used and various broken down electronic exercise things. Also sets of dumbbells to be used as a weapon. Another idea I read from another such thread is the use of straw dummies to train up the melee skill, which could work for training with a weapon.
Also, I figure that there is a certain difference between air boxing to train up the unarmed skill, to punching an actual undead in the face. I figure that may either factor in as a skill cap at like 5 to be further improved by punching the undead in the face. This would also apply to stuff like archery or firearms, as aiming for a wall and slowly getting better at aiming would be much different from hitting an undead in the head.

38

I’m gonna take on this:

lvl 0: no practice time lvl 1: 12 minutes lvl 2: 1 hour lvl 3: 2 hours lvl 4: 10 hours lvl 5: 20 hours lvl 6: 100 hours lvl 7: 200 hours lvl 8: 1,000 hours lvl 9: 2,000 hours lvl 10: 10,000 hours ___

lvl 0: none
lvl 1: 2 hrs
lvl 2: 6 hrs
lvl 3: 15 hrs
lvl 4: 40 hrs
lvl 5: 100 hrs
lvl 6: 250 hrs
lvl 7: 600 hrs
lvl 8: 1500 hrs
lvl 9: 4000 hrs
lvl 10: 10000 hrs

In both increment systems there is a questionable article - your lvl 5 or 6 takes some 16 or 20 days (12-hour per day labor), but your highest skill level asks for a 3-year ingame experience. Sure, there’s a sense to it when you think of melee and dodge, for ex.
Now, let’s just look at Rifles and Firearms skills, which are not the same. The jewel in that crown could be hitting a bullseye through a low-end scope on an average sniping rifle at a 500 yards distance. Your respectable skill in both could be, for yet another example, lvl 6 in general and lvl 5 with that hunting rifle you’ve found. Your attempt at a master shot would yield a 2% or less probability, assuming you’ve got a single chance with the abovementioned set. This is highly discouraging, yet realistic. What’s even more probable is that you’ll never become anything but merely proficient with the weapon type if – a) you don’t obtain a far better tool of war, or b) you’re not some kind of a wunderkid with extremely high adaptability due to massive stat scores. We’re not even discussing ammo, which is hard to find, even through parts.
Note: Practice is the way to encourage more effort from players, but the theme here really should be that you should learn from mistakes, too. If the player willingly chooses to extend his base knowledge of firearms with more and more types of those, and goes great lengths only to claim a powerful weapon, he should get some sort of focus due to the nature of the item. The only real problem here, however, would be that of the type of skill - your attempt to hack a lvl 10 password with only some skill should deprave you of doing so in the near future, but should you accomplish a task that’s stuck with a notably less difficult notch on the same scale, and obtain a state-of-the-art hacking device in the way - you’d be rushing to try and claim the prize. I believe there’s a common understanding of this being a bonus to success.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Now, I just don’t want to forget will power in the progress. It is said that anyone with enough love for the craft and sufficient ingredients base could become really, really good at cooking. That’s like, to my senses, lvl 8 in my book. Besides the hours that are needed for just perfecting the most complex and unusual of recipees out there, the better part of the mastery is well, plain luck. :wink:

39

I don’t see how this “solution” is supposed to solve anything.

Problem: Certain simple tasks can be repeated ad infinitum until your skill level is maxed.

Solution: Nerf the old learning mechanics to the point that nothing short of constant grinding can actually increase your skill level. The only way to gain skill levels is to either find an NPC, read a book, or perform training (which, from what I understand, is functionally the same as reading a book).

Result: Grinding is now mandatory.

A better solution would be to just make doing the same action over and over again yield diminishing returns. The easiest way I can think of is to just make focus decrease a lot faster when doing repetitive tasks like crafting; craft/uncraft spam is, after all, just as boring for the character as it is for the player.

40

Reading a book or practicing is not grinding IMHO.