Bah. Skip for a day and threads go out of control. I did have a great big old post written out here that just kept on growing, and probably would have diluted discussion, so I’ve trimmed out a chunk to bring things back a bit. If someone feels I’ve missed something important, let me know and I’ll answer it.
It will change everything because skills aren't fixed in place and have those soft caps you said you liked earlier.
And honestly, if you somehow manage to survive the late game with low armor, that's pretty impressive.
Thanks, Nomad Gear is my waifu.
As for Dodge, like I said, you’d need to break it for everybody, or it’s just mechanically superior. Again, difference in kind, not difference in scale. Either stop dodge working for everyone, or accept that it’s the way that the game works. Your ability to mitigate damage is directly proportional to your ability to survive, survival is the only important metric.
You cannot die from having 0 in a crafting stat. Not being able to craft is annoying, not fatal.
You die from damage and infection.
Attack skills mitigate damage by removing threats faster before they can deal as much damage to you.
Dodge skill mitigates damage by avoiding incoming damage.
The better you can mitigate damage, the more you can scavenge in towns, the more gear you can acquire, the more books you can collect, and the safer you can be while you read those books. How well you can cope with danger defines how easily you can gain rewards. Late game characters being able to do things like raid labs, take out triffid hearts, kill ant queens and so on is because they can better deal with danger.
If you want to balance around optimal play, then optimal is the method which best mitigates incoming damage. Assuming you fix skills so that the dodge can be reached by anyone same as every other skill, and fix dodge so that a mix of two skills becomes the best way to achieve maximum mitigation, that becomes optimal play, inevitably, because of the problem with multipool which I keep raising over and over again:
There is no reward for sacrificing early game survivability.
Character A focuses on [best damage mitigation]. Damage mitigation gives early game advantages.as described above. Better loot, faster book progression, fewer restarts due to death.
Character B focuses on [anything short of absolute focus on getting the best damage mitigation]. They gain no benefits for doing so.
Generalisation: Anything that is not specialisation is wasted. This typically includes additional survival skills. Low skill levels are worth less. Melee 1 can be attained in one fight. Survival 2 can be achieved in one day. Fabrication 2 can be accomplished by breaking a bed/bench, making cudgels, making skewers from the cudgels, then making needles from the skewers. Throw 1-2 can be achieved by throwing all the spare skewers into a cool pattern around you…
Non-Mitigation Specialisation: Wasted. Character A gets clothing and materials more easily. By the time that character B can reliably get all the items they need to leverage their crafting advantage, Character A has already closed the skill gap with books and ready-made uber gear that they scavenged. Either this reaches a point where characters specialising can craft stuff like survivor gear right out of the gate or crafting remains worthless, at which point game progression has long become nonsensical.
Long vs short term play is fundamental to the way the game system works. The difference between maximum early game survival and maximum long term power is defined by maximum early game survival skill versus
The choice becomes:
A: Put as many points into stats as possible, and the rest into damage mitigation specialisation.
B: Put as many points into damage mitigation as possible and any left over points into stats.
You have either the equivalent of “MAX DODGE” or “MAX DODGE - N” where N is the amount of stats you’re permitted, diminishing returns in dodge would mean that the functional difference is miniscule and A is the only build - Highest long term viability, high short term survivability.
Assuming optimal play in Multipool is no more balanced than Single Pool, it just forces a different playstyle. I’d be fine if we agreed to stop using theoretical optimisation (I generally play somewhere between jcd’s Beta and Average myself, Schizophrenic kung fu tentacle monsters are more interesting to play than 15/15/15/8 combat wombats), but otherwise we need to address this optimisation problem. It doesn’t have to be stats, but it does have to be either some kind of permanent trade, because any short term trade in survivability for a short term advantage in anything else doesn’t work well.
To move away from emotive cataclysm equivalents, let’s try a test scenario:
Pan has a 10% chance to find a job that pays $100,000 a year for the rest of their life.
Failure means Pan gets eaten by zombies.
Pan can take up student loans to get university degrees.
Each student loan costs $10,000 a year for the rest of Pan’s life.
Each student loan increases Pan’s chance of finding a job by 10%.
0 Degrees means a 90% chance of horrible death.
9 Degrees means a 100% chance of earning $10,000 a year and a 0% chance of zombie related death.
1: How many degrees should Pan take?
2: If Pan needs $30,000 to live in comfort, how many degrees should Pan take?
3: If Pan is bad with money and wastes 90% of the extra salary about $50,000 (so if they would earn 60k they earn 51k, it they would earn 100k they would each $55k), how many degrees should Pan get?
4: If Pan can reincarnate after their zombie related death or death of old age and instead keep trying (though being eaten by zombies sucks and reincarnating is pretty time intensive) until they get the job, how many degrees should Pan take?
5: If Pan can take degrees in Liberal Arts, which cost $10,000 a year, but do not increase his chances of finding a job, how many Liberal Arts degrees should Pan take?
Despite being permanent for the lifetime of Pan, there are clear incentives to invest permanent long term gain in order to achieve short term success. So long as any differences are simply a question of Scale (My F00 is bigger than yours!), rather than a fundamental difference in Kind (Your F00 lets you fly!), then it is possible to balance long and short term gain against one another.
Single pool can't be fixed, as evidenced by multiple horribly failed attempts in this thread, all of which have glaring flaws proving they weren't actually considered long enough, only thrown as "but we can do SOMETHING, this must be an improvement".
I truly believe a balanced stat/skill system would help make Cataclysm better, and I truly think that it’s both possible and achievable. I’d like to work in consensus, with discussion, to explore how to achieve that. At absolute worst, anything I post while brainstorming is intended to be a seed for future discussion.
While I’m happy to abandon ideas that turn out unworkable or impractical, there is no benefit to dismissing ideas out of hand because they have flaws. Good design does not come from having one, perfect, idea, it comes from recognising issues and advantages and refining accordingly.
0: What are you trying to achieve with the system? What’s the goal?
1: What are the flaws and advantages of the current model in achieving that?
2: What are the flaws and advantages of the proposed model in achieving that?
3: Can anything be taken from the proposed model to improve the current model?
4: Are there any flaws of the proposed model that could be improved on to make it more worthwhile than the current model?
If this is impossible, let me know and I’ll just move on from the discussion onto better things, but I actually feel we’ve made a lot of progress and got some things that could be worked on out of this.
With that in mind, let’s review those horribly failed suggestions.
My suggestions:
A: Raise the value of skills and jobs + D: Increase the cost of stats.
A: Make skill or job point investment in different areas have permanent value.
The profession skill progression thing would kinda work for combat skills (would actually make them better than stats in many cases), but would completely fuck up crafting leveling. It also fucks up scenario balance - you'd want to pick the one that grants the most points, tank the early penalties, then quickly become godlike. Thus it wouldn't be restrictive just to players but also to designers (not that much more than single pool, but still).
Break it down:
“Completely fuck up crafting levelling”: How? If investing 10 points into a skill at character creation is a permanent 100% bonus to the amount of experience gained from each task, 10% per point, how and what would this fuck, can you expand on this?
“It also fucks up scenario balance”: Scenarios are not balanced anyway. Harder scenarios produce stronger characters regardless of pool type. As shown above, short term advantage with no long term advantage is simply superior to no short term advantage and no long term advantage. Scenarios are effectively Anti-Professions, things that quickly become irrelevant but greatly transform your very early game in exchange for points.
“Restrictive to players”: The only thing that is restrictive for players is a restriction. The player is not a computer logically required to make the most optimal choice, and again, optimal choices already exist.
“Restrictive to developers”: The only restriction relating to scenario balance is to make the cost equivalent to the penalty, which should have already been the case.
I’m happy to brainstorm improving scenarios (Permanent Scenario Features come to mind like a Bad Luck trait for VBD characters increasing the chance of terrible things happening for the rest of the game), but I think this would need to be considered along with professions on their own, certainly not as an inherent problem with making skill points and traits have long term impacts.
D: Increase stat cost and stat scaling.
So an advantage over single pool, but still much worse than current multi pool.
You’ve agreed that this would help improve the problem with no real downsides, so I’d disagree that this one was a horrible failure so much as a good foundation to work on.
As an aside: Are character creation costs for stats hardcoded, or are they in a JSON that could be tweaked and retweaked without having to recompile every time?
I’d say that this could even help multipool, if implemented, by making characters that put stat points into skills more viable (4/2/2 multipool where Stats cost 2 each means you could put 2 extra points into traits, or 2 extra points into skills, and be closer to 10/8/8/8 than currently). There’s no real downside and it decreases the cost of sub-optimal play.
If we’re to approach a solution to improve Single Pool further, however, we need to understand the extent of the problem. 1 Strength for a Wand of Fireballs is, to you, an insurmountable balance problem, but at the same time you’ve said that lower stats are perfectly viable.
Take your 8 in all skills, 12 in all stats (8+4) versus 16 (12+4), that’s a good metric. Of the advantages from higher stats, ignoring martial arts and mutations, what’s causing insurmountable balance issues and isn’t made irrelevant with late game Gear, Skills, or changes in circumstance? What makes it IMPOSSIBLE to fix the stat/skill system? (I did have them all typed out above, but maximum post length’d).
If you think this is the way to go, expand on it in http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=13007.0
It may actually get in, if others agree.
Cool, I’ll try and post up tomorrow when I get the chance.
The stat pool could get a buff.
With the trait and stat pools being split, the multi pool characters can't "traitscum", so even a 6 point allowance would probably be fine.
This would allow great archers and other specialized characters, without compromising much.
Despite mentioning my concerns above that it would still need progress in other areas, this is at least a start to expanding potential archetypes. Having looked at all those things that stats can do I note that 13 is a point where interesting things start cropping up consistently - Playing dead to riot bots, conversation options, slipping out of hand cuffs and so on. If the game is to be balanced around multipool, perhaps these extras could be lowered down to the 9-12 range? If I spend half my total available points into a stat I’d consider that to be at specialised (aka twice the investment compared to generalised).
Also, Mongolian Horse Archer is totally viable, so long as you’re willing to ride a bicycle at least. It even uses Mongolian tactics.
Concerning mutations, I actually consider Alpha to have “sort of” the right idea. Prime mutation doesn’t get it perfect this way, and the bands definitely need reworking to make them right, but the idea of banding itself makes a lot of sense to me. If I have a Strong Human, and I turn them into a bear, I want a Strong Bear. If I have a weak human, I want them to be a Weak Bear.
So “Bear Strength” threshold mutation would increase the player’s strength by, say, three stages, and Slime Brain would increase intelligence by three stages while something like Elf-a could boost Perception, Intelligence and Dexterity by two stages each.
Without additive numbers the maximum could be controlled a lot better while you could much more easily control how high the end result got to ( for example 3 stages of Intelligence might increase 10-11 Intelligence to 16, 12-13 intelligence to 18, for example, with maximum multipool point investment of 14 giving a full 20).
Anyways, it’s deep into the a.ms, so I’ll cut off there.
