Profession affects stat maximums on chargen/lowering chargen max stats

Game Talk The Drawing Board
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A conversation that ended up happening in this thread So, how does the new archery system work? got me thinking a little bit.
It was mentioned how any character on chargen can have 20 strength while being a nerd, which doesn’t really make that much sense. Now, if your profession was something like a cyborg soldier, then sure, maybe.
This kind of thing can happen a lot very easily, but it can be somewhat reduced by making it so that every profession also has an associated stat limit. As mentioned, this only affects chargen, it can still go higher otherwise.
It might make sense to slightly lower the maximum on start in the first place, namely for realism, really. Maybe something like 18 max instead, to still allow lots of freedom and power.

Now, in regards to how much this would limit you, it should not be too much, but still give a kind of general idea/feeling for that profession. Your character would still be given a good amount of room to have stats in different areas, but a Teacher can’t punch someone’s skull in and a Basketball Player can’t build his own robot over night. Now, if you happen to be a Bionic Soldier, then you might be able to get up there.

It (theoretically) wouldn’t be all that difficult to make this completely compatible with all current professions by simply making a default amount, which probably should just be set as the maximum allowed.

If someone adds this function to the game, I would gladly update the existing professions myself.

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best of both
best of both800×343 30 KB

Nice stereotyping.

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Gonna agree on this one, is like saying the class nerd has to be an anti/unskilled social person, or like a jock cant have good grade.

Now iirc, the balance comes from the negative traits you have to take to have that many points to put into stats (unless you choose freeform pool)

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Exactly this.
If you play multi pool it’s even worse because to get 20 in one stat you have to tank every other stat to 4.

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The maximum starting value for all stats has now been capped at 14 (World Class).

Unless that teacher likes to spend his/her free time in the gym lifting weights or the basketball player majored in robotics in college.

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Hm, why… why take away / limit the freedom of a player to decide how to play his character?

No, just no. I couldn’t disagree more. Limiting attributes “because of (assumed) realism” is just stupid and wrong. Then we could also remove a lot of professions, because “they wouldn’t survive a apocalypse”, reduce the maximum strength of women and the maximum intelligence of men… Let’s not go that way. As most other’s already said; let’s not do stereotypes.

If we would go along your line of “teacher not strong enough, basketball player not smart enough” (to put it blantly), I assume you also think that all and any underwear model never be able to program and a pultry farmer never become a spy…

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Because the switch for max stat cap isn’t separate for freeform and the other point pools, and code to separate that couldn’t go through in the feature freeze we’re now in.

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But that’s not realistic at all.

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Because lore-wise stats above 14 are not something a human should have.
In free-form you can take all of the positives for free, but you still abide by what a human can or cannot be in the first place.

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That’s… that’s the point. Or was that meant sarcastically?

Yes, as I said, why do it in the first place?

Well, I guess that makes sense (at least a bit). And I guess one could install/use mods which influence that later on (StatsThroughSkills/-Kills) or change it with the debugger, if one really wants to. It’s just… it still needs some more balance.

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Because it makes sense in every other context outside of freeform.

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Basically, it was both ridiculous and an enormous balance issue to have players able to start out as superheroes. This slightly encourages more versatile characters, and adds a more clear demarcation of early to late game characters by making superhuman strength and all the perks that go with it something to work towards.

Eventually I assume we might relax it around freeform a bit and it would be reasonable for the “start in midgame” professions like cyborg and experiment to have access to ways to boost stats from the start.

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