Starting Stat Pool

Game Talk The Bunker
21

I didn’t think I’d start a contentious discussion… if possible, I’d like to steer it in a slightly other direction.

My unfamiliarity of how much stats affect everything I do, as far as success. I know things like range penalty in Perception is a -60, but it isn’t as transparent to me as to what that actually means. When I approach the stats pool, I deal with the really simple hard numbers (ones that I have read, but could very well be incorrect), such as needing 12 STR to use a Reflex Recurve Bow to it’s full effect. To get 12 STR, I would need to be at something like 12/7/7/8, which isn’t all that great considering I need DEX and PER to use a bow very well.

Do the penalties associated with not having enough stat points actually constrain the character, or just reduce the effectiveness. If it’s the latter, then multi-pool would be fine by me it’s just a matter of learning what my stat/trait/skill choices will mean.

I had a thought as I write this that is a smidge off-topic:
D&D doesn’t allow skill points -> stat points, however every 4 levels, you can put points into stats and you get additional skill points. As it stands, the character never increases stats during a game, so to me, starting stats are way more important than skills. Either StatsThroughSkills would be more mainstream, or stats would have to be less important than high level skills. I suppose the latter would be better. If you are unskilled, you can only rely on your innate talents (stats) to succeed, but as you gain experience (skills) poor stats do not hinder you as much. Perhaps it already works this way, I do not know.

22
You keep using that one minor problem as if it was the end of all arguments. It isn't - fixing dodge progression will get rid of that trick, while unfucking single pool is as far from being done as full z-level support.

Do what you like to dodge, it will not change the fundamental problems I’ve covered with skills, and it will take some fundamental changes to change the fact that dodge is the riskiest/hardest to increase, most useful to have increased, skill. It’s not equipment dependent so it’s immediately useful, it’s useful for the whole game, and every character needs it - just like stats.

Optimal play with multipool involves heavy specialisation and grinding on boring to increase, low value skills like Fabrication and Tailoring. This heavy specialisation improves the long term prospects of the character in exchange for short term tedium (can’t say risk, since damage mitigation reduces risk far more than stats ever could).

They are presented as viable choices. In multi pool they often are. In single pool, it is deceptive to keep them around at all, because [b]the time it takes to replicate all the skills and equipment a 4 point background gets is shorter than the time it takes for a single character who doesn't consume any food at all to starve to death. And 4 points is a significant advantage.[/b]

So not only you want to essentially throw away an entire set of backgrounds just so that your idea of progression is in, you refuse to even admit it.

Correction: The time it takes you to replicate the skills and equipment a 4 point background gets is shorter than the time it takes for your character to die from starvation.

That’s great. Drinking unboiled water, accidentally burning yourself to death trying to boil water, and calling down a horde on yourself trying to boil water outside are all probably going to kill you long before you starve. And that’s if you don’t get yourself killed wandering into town and accidentally making too much noise. Crutches are great, because not everybody is you.

These advantages should be priced accordingly (bionic boffin offers very little, if anything, that Bionic Student doesn’t offer a point earlier), but crutches exist for a reason, and whether you notice them or not, they’re everywhere - the race car that has great handling but low speed is a crutch that can be discarded by the player in favour of a fast, slippery speedster when they are good enough at steering.

Multipool says that all cars should have low top speed and great handling, because otherwise those fast cars have a huge advantage, and slipping on corners is annoying. Oh, and scenarios should put cars closer to the finish line, because the start of the race isn’t fun.

Backgrounds also exist for another reason, which looking at things from a powergaming perspective does not cover, which is theme. This is a sandbox. If I want to play an Ahistorical Reenactor then it doesn’t matter if it gives you advantage short or long term, because this is a sandbox game. Sometimes you just want to play a cross-dressing LARPer, other times you want to be robocop.

Bad choices being more fun is balancing through tedium. ie. one of the few things in game design you should never, ever do.

I never said it was more fun - I said it was easier. Remember that I’ve already said that I find the early game to be the most entertaining, because having a stronger early character lets you make mistakes and survive those mistakes, while I enjoy high risk gameplay.

Secondly, this statement is flawed. It’s not tedious to have low skills or be weak, it’s tedious to grind skills because there’s a problem with the skill system. The solution to Survival and Growth stages of play needing attention to make them more enjoyable isn’t multipool “Skip them entirely, lol.”, it’s “fix the problems with survival and growth stages”.

Once again, twofold fix:
Allow the player to expend resources to practise - make them leave the house to get more resources. Scavenging = Fun.
Allow the player to try to do things with a high chance of failure that they do not have sufficient skill to attempt, same as the CBM system. Install a third engine in your deathmobile? 97% Chance of blowing damaging your car. Still Try? Cook Dandelions? 50% of getting [Burnt Leaf], making smoke and losing morale. Still Try? Make Rock Cooking Pan: Failed. Have some pebbles.

Soft ceiling better fits with the Reality Based simulation design goal and is more fun than hard ceiling arbitrary limits, and should work regardless of game length.

Actually yes, yes you can. 15/15/15/8/8/8 is 24 points for a well rounded warrior - "three great stats".

3 OK stats. That’s equivalent of DDA’s 10/10/7/7, maybe 11/11/7/7
Wizard is a bit harder, since D&D mental stats don’t translate well, but 14 in DDA stats can easily be like 18 in D&D ones.

“It looks bad on paper”
The display is a bit misleading, but you’re still heavily exaggerating it.
It’s not D&D where “has a penalty” means “utterly terrible at it”. Here “has no penalty” in some cases (dex/per ranged penalty) means “is really good at it”.
For example, at 5 in all skills, you have an equivalent of 300 ranged penalty from lack of skills - as if a 10 skill character had 3 in dexterity and 4 in perception.

D&D is based on 3-18 mechanics. 15 is top 5% of human capability. Considering you need 13 Intelligence to understand a middle-tier textbook and 12 Strength to wield a decent bow I cannot agree with your assertion that 11 is “top 5% of human capability”.

That said, interesting insight into range penalty, though now you highlight that, let me turn it around on you:

If there’s very little functional difference between 8 Strength and 17 Strength, 8 Dexterity and 15 Dexterity and so on, how is one character “viable or unviable” based on that tiny difference? Isn’t your own argument then that it looks bad on paper?

Because skills change midgame heavily. Most important part is unlocking recipes.

To review our design goals:

Survival - the stage where you have to scrounge for everything and need to acquire basic survival gear.
Growth - Long term personal development, working on getting together skills and gear.
Influence - Working towards permanent, long term advantages. Sustainable transport, clearing out safe zones.
Transcendence - Building a permanent mobile base, planned mutation and bionic completion, and actively changing the world around them.

Your “mid-game” is to completely skip over Growth to go straight into Influence. By your own statement, the only reason to go VBD is if you want “less game” and to skip straight into Influence/Transcendence after a quick and easy skill-bolstered Survival game.

People keep repeating that retarded fallacy, but no matter how many times you repeat it, it won't start making sense. Worse: the more you repeat it, the more obvious it is that it is a meme rather than a well thought out opinion.

That’s how character generation systems work.
D&D doesn’t allow you to put skill points into stat points, Deus Ex doesn’t allow you to put starting XP into augs, Dungeon Crawl doesn’t allow starting with 0 skills in exchange for higher stats, World of Warcraft doesn’t allow you to start with few hour debuff to gain a permanent advantage later on.
This is how well designed systems work: they don’t try to force distinct parts of the character generation system into one mismatched mess.

Not a fallacy, as Cataclysm very much DOES have a system that allows you to put stats into skills and skills into stats. If I recall, so did Gearhead and many “point buy” character creation systems have the exact same type of system, including ones based on a D20 system: You buy points in stats and powers from the same pool of “total character power”, and they’re priced accordingly.

Note that D&D also allows you to pick short term versus long term power in terms of Warrior vs Wizard, as well as in later editions straight up character builds. Many late term builds require jumping through hoops of multiclassing and prestige class qualification that makes you weaker short term in exchange for achieving, and even back in AD&D you have Dual Classing and Multiclassing, both of which were ways of tweaking how powerful you were versus how powerful you could become. Name dropping systems like the one you’re defending isn’t prescriptive, and doesn’t let you sidestep criticisms of the system “because all systems are like that”.

23

People keep repeating that retarded fallacy, but no matter how many times you repeat it, it won’t start making sense.
Worse: the more you repeat it, the more obvious it is that it is a meme rather than a well thought out opinion.

That’s how character generation systems work.
D&D doesn’t allow you to put skill points into stat points, Deus Ex doesn’t allow you to put starting XP into augs, Dungeon Crawl doesn’t allow starting with 0 skills in exchange for higher stats, World of Warcraft doesn’t allow you to start with few hour debuff to gain a permanent advantage later on.
This is how well designed systems work: they don’t try to force distinct parts of the character generation system into one mismatched mess.

Starting with a pile of skills SKIPS the first whole part of the game (which I and many other people enjoy)

Somehow I find it hard to believe that anyone genuinely likes that brainless “smash locker, rip window, craft knife, craft cudgels, craft needle, sew clothing” start game algorithm that is the necessary optimum play for 0 skill starts.
It’s so menial that a bot could do it.[/quote]

So, 1) I don’t think, no matter how much time and explanation I’ve put into the argument that you’ve brushed aside with your logical fallacy (which you blame us for), and 2) Pantalion and I are both lying about what we enjoy in the game.

Well, you sure convinced ME! /sarc

Out of the niceness of my heard, I will attempt to explain the first part one more time.

Before multi-pool was added, people could ALREADY play multi-pool, or not, their choice. NOTHING stopped you from doing so. That is, there was the choice (which you before oversimplified as Split into “fun to play but unviable in the long term” and “boring grind early on but actually has an endgame”. - note that I don’t agree with those descriptions, but whatever).

Arguing for only multi-pool is not giving anything new, as that style of play was already available as one of the choices. You are arguing for taking one of the choices AWAY. That is the “retarded fallacy” we keep pointing out to you. Sorry you don’t like it, but disliking it doesn’t make it a fallacy.

24

[quote=“Rokmonkey, post:21, topic:12248”]I didn’t think I’d start a contentious discussion… if possible, I’d like to steer it in a slightly other direction.

My unfamiliarity of how much stats affect everything I do, as far as success. I know things like range penalty in Perception is a -60, but it isn’t as transparent to me as to what that actually means. When I approach the stats pool, I deal with the really simple hard numbers (ones that I have read, but could very well be incorrect), such as needing 12 STR to use a Reflex Recurve Bow to it’s full effect. To get 12 STR, I would need to be at something like 12/7/7/8, which isn’t all that great considering I need DEX and PER to use a bow very well.

Do the penalties associated with not having enough stat points actually constrain the character, or just reduce the effectiveness. If it’s the latter, then multi-pool would be fine by me it’s just a matter of learning what my stat/trait/skill choices will mean.

I had a thought as I write this that is a smidge off-topic:
D&D doesn’t allow skill points -> stat points, however every 4 levels, you can put points into stats and you get additional skill points. As it stands, the character never increases stats during a game, so to me, starting stats are way more important than skills. Either StatsThroughSkills would be more mainstream, or stats would have to be less important than high level skills. I suppose the latter would be better. If you are unskilled, you can only rely on your innate talents (stats) to succeed, but as you gain experience (skills) poor stats do not hinder you as much. Perhaps it already works this way, I do not know.[/quote]

Sorry, I missed this one. To a given degree you are not constrained regardless, that’s to the sandbox nature even the least nimble character is still permitted to try and shoot a bow. The game is perfectly possible to “win” using a character with 8/8/8/8 stats and no skills, though it might take you awhile tediously grinding archery before you’re actually bordering on competent, and longer still before you can actually use the best weapons (longer than being able to find or craft one, at very least).

Concerning stats. you can get +2 from CBMs, +2 from the right mutations (either a lucky early mutagen from a lab or by the time you can make jerrycans full of the stuff in the mid-game, and by late game all characters can get onto higher tier mutation thresholds which can grant easy +5 or more stat points. With the right choices and a little in-game effort towards “self-improvement” your starting stats and skills become more or less irrelevant.

For multipool, you have some choices, give or take:

12/7/7/8: -75 Dexterity, -60 Perception penalty. Assuming skills don’t have diminishing returns in the code and the numbers are consistent, -300 is the same as 5 levels in Marksmanship and Archery, so this gives 2.2 levels worth of penalty to archery and marksmanship, meaning you’ll need to grind longer to achieve the same result, and not really be that much/any better at it than someone who wasn’t planning to be an archer, but you’ll at least be able to use a Recurve Reflex without penalties. 10/8/8/8 gives you only a two level’s worth ranged penalty, but needs you to mutate or find a CRM.

7/10/7/10: You’ll only have a 1 level’s worth ranged penalty, and you’ll have the stats you’d expect for an archer, but you’ll need to stick to a self-bow until you can mutate or get a CBM, or face at least a 2 square range penalty. 8/9/8/9 increases your skill penalty to -1.5, but you’ll be able to use up to a compound bow, and anything before Reflex/Recurve as soon as you find a CBM.

tl;dr: Multipool can handle archers, they just need more grinding to accomplish.

25

When i can use all stat points on str dex int and per then an overpowered char is te result.

One way to offset this would be to use less points. But its hard to balance professions and scenarios arround points if they can all be put into stats.

26

[quote=“Valpo, post:25, topic:12248”]When i can use all stat points on str dex int and per then an overpowered char is te result.

One way to offset this would be to use less points. But its hard to balance professions and scenarios arround points if they can all be put into stats.[/quote]

From a powergaming perspective at default point levels

Singlepool at the endgame assuming Really Bad Day scenario will have a 15/14/14/14 stat spread and Robust Genetics as their only positive trait and no skills.

Multipool gains no benefits from scenarios aside from more skillpoints, so the ideal setup here is now, “Infected” scenario as a Blackbelt with 15 Dodge, 8 Melee, 8 Unarmed, 1 Positive Trait Point and Zui Quan as the free martial art with 8/8/8/8 stats.

This makes optimal setups for Multipool pretty boring later in the game as even if you decide not to take the Blackbelt profession and its ridiculous dodge levels your stat spread might as well be static because even if you put points into your stats at character creation now Alpha Serum will be the best choice every time. Hilariously this is also the safest mutation path.

Granted at the moment you can choose between each style of play and theres even a freeform mode for those that want to RP a specific thing. But gameplaywise I prefer singlepool as the early game is actually challenging, I can actually use items effectively in the midgame when I can build them and I have actual choices in mutagen paths

27

That’s a big improvement over single pool, where it’s not just fabrication and tailoring, but fabrication, tailoring, electronics, mechanics, survival, cooking and first aid.
That’s more than “halfway fixed” already, compared to single pool.

tl;dr: Multipool can handle archers, they just need more grinding to accomplish.

Or just pick correct stats. Don’t fuss so much about maximum range - that strength penalty is totally fine. Read speed lower than 100% is fine too, it’s just a matter of resources.
All you need to be an archer is not focusing on the limited display at chargen and item descriptions, but the actual effects.
Archery is a bit underpowered at the moment, so it’s not really worth it, not even in easy mode.

Then again, just increasing the point allowance would render that argument moot.

Also, from the character stats you listed and the descriptions, it looks like you think that you need 12 strength to use reflex recurve bow effectively.
If this is the case, then you should seriously check what you’re talking about before making this the core of your argument.

Do what you like to dodge, it will not change the fundamental problems I've covered with skills, and it will take some fundamental changes to change the fact that dodge is the riskiest/hardest to increase, most useful to have increased, skill. It's not equipment dependent so it's immediately useful, it's useful for the whole game, and every character needs it - just like stats.

It’s much easier (ie. possible) to fix dodge progression. By limiting the effect of high dodge starts, the only really serious edge case is eliminated.
Without the dodge trick, there would be no such skill that you can dump all points into and gain disproportionate effects.
Other skills are far more balanced. For one, most non-combat skills have books to level them, while combat skills depend on other combat skills and on crafting skills to really shine.

Multipool says that all cars should have low top speed and great handling, because otherwise those fast cars have a huge advantage, and slipping on corners is annoying. Oh, and scenarios should put cars closer to the finish line, because the start of the race isn't fun.

More like multipool says that all cars should have wheels and be touching the road for most of the race, while single pool is a race where you have rockets, race cars and shopping carts with paddles, all pretending to be on equal footing.

You can still play with low skills in multipool. Those 2 points at start in non-challenge scenarios will certainly not put you in midgame. They will not even get you out of early-early game.

Backgrounds also exist for another reason, which looking at things from a powergaming perspective does not cover, which is theme. This is a sandbox. If I want to play an Ahistorical Reenactor then it doesn't matter if it gives you advantage short or long term, because this is a sandbox game. Sometimes you just want to play a cross-dressing LARPer, other times you want to be robocop.

Sure thing - that’s why Freeform exists.
Multi pool is the balanced option, not the roleplay option. It’s the option the game is being balanced around, because no other option so far is “solid” enough to have the game balanced around it.

The solution to Survival and Growth stages of play needing attention to make them more enjoyable isn't multipool "Skip them entirely, lol.", it's "fix the problems with survival and growth stages".

Genius!
I never knew it was so simple.
Now I only need a way to “fix the problems with survival and growth stages”.

Allow the player to expend resources to practise - make them leave the house to get more resources. Scavenging = Fun.

I said I thought about it already.
It would help with grind a bit, but it certainly wouldn’t unfuck single pool.
It would actually make single pool look significantly less balanced than it looks now, since you could just take all stats and then close the faster.

Allow the player to try to do things with a high chance of failure that they do not have sufficient skill to attempt, same as the CBM system. Install a third engine in your deathmobile? 97% Chance of blowing damaging your car. Still Try? Cook Dandelions? 50% of getting [Burnt Leaf], making smoke and losing morale. Still Try? Make Rock Cooking Pan: Failed. Have some pebbles.

“Critical failure” system is a lot of work, a lot of bullshit, with the end result being, in most cases, “you can do all the crap that pretends to be risky, you just need to exploit the weaknesses in the system”.
Allowing crafting harder recipes was considered, as it could help with leveling, but it won’t fix the grind. Just speed it up a bit, patch some holes in autolearn recipes etc.

Wait, no real suggestions then?
At least I have multi pool then, which greatly helps with some of the problems with survival and growth stages.

Soft ceiling better fits with the Reality Based simulation design goal and is more fun than hard ceiling arbitrary limits, and should work regardless of game length.

I semi-agree about soft ceiling in crafting system (not in chargen). The problem is, soft ceilings often turn into just pushing the hard ceiling further instead.
For example, in current crafting system, you can level to [1 + (1.25 * recipe_level)], with penalties for using lower level recipes to level to higher levels. The problem here is that this doesn’t work as a soft ceiling - you can get level 6 with level 4 recipes, you just need to repeat them more times. This turns into grind.
Soft ceilings need a lot of care.

D&D is based on 3-18 mechanics. 15 is top 5% of human capability. Considering you need 13 Intelligence to understand a middle-tier textbook and 12 Strength to wield a decent bow I cannot agree with your assertion that 11 is "top 5% of human capability".

In D&D, 3 stat is essentially a cripple. At low levels, the system stops being linear. 0 stat is “stat death” (actually more like “stat suck”, but a D&D “suck” meaning “taking no actions at all and being fully dependent on allies”).
In DDA, 3 stat is “really low”, but nowhere near a cripple. 0 stat means that the stat is at horrible level, but it doesn’t make you drop and twitch on the ground, it only means you take heavy penalties for doing anything involving the stat.

Back to soft ceilings - they have another risk: people misunderstanding them and thinking they’re hard ceilings. Like in this very case.
13 intelligence to read SICP at full speed (without going back a line to understand it, without stopping to decipher an example), 12 strength to wield the strongest available bow at 100% capacity.
Not to understand SICP and wield a decent bow. To understand SICP fast and to use 100% of the power of the heaviest bow model.

Your "mid-game" is to completely skip over Growth to go straight into Influence.

I’ll just remind that I answered that above, to make it less likely it will be skipped.
tl;dr Except for lab and VBD, the skills won’t even skip the survival stage.

Note that D&D also allows you to pick short term versus long term power in terms of Warrior vs Wizard

You really should get a better example. While this one is an example of short vs long term, anyone who knows anything about D&D wizards and warriors will notice that wizards and DDA stat starts are much stronger by early midgame, than warriors and “balanced” DDA starts.

Name dropping systems like the one you're defending isn't prescriptive, and doesn't let you sidestep criticisms of the system "because all systems are like that".

It shows how it actually works vs. how does the “vision” look like.
Successful systems separate long term potential from short term strength. Or limit the time scale.

Many late term builds require jumping through hoops of multiclassing and prestige class qualification that makes you weaker short term in exchange for achieving

True, although most of that happened as a result of WotC fucking up. Things like exploiting faster spell progression in one splatbook to make a prestige class really good instead of horrible.
Though honestly I’d be fine with this kind of long term vs. short term in DDA. I’m only heavily against no-brainers like stat starts.

28

[quote=“Valpo, post:25, topic:12248”]When i can use all stat points on str dex int and per then an overpowered char is te result.

One way to offset this would be to use less points. But its hard to balance professions and scenarios arround points if they can all be put into stats.[/quote]

I find it hard to define overpowered in a single player environment, but you’re right, it’s very hard to balance a variable point pool when stats and professions and skills all cost the same since it’s always worth putting points into the “better choice”.

To fix this we’d need to not just tweak the number of starting points, but to change the relationship between the two.

A: Raise the value of skills and jobs.

For jobs, it’s worth noting that there are actually some really great jobs out there. Black Belt is a GREAT deal, even on single pool, since it’s worth 53 points - 17 skill points for three 8s + 2 trait points for a free martial art. A few points from your stats (you’ll get them back when you get mutagens anyway) will give you 8 Dodge (basically impossible), Melee and Unarmed and Dragon Style Kung Fu? That’s well over 6:1 efficiency. If Black Belts could get stuck in labs, hospitals or fallout shelters or have very bad days they’d be strong choices.

If all professions were as efficient as black belt then I doubt there’d be a problem. Juvenile Delinquent would give 2 in Melee, Marksmanship and Dodge for 1 point, and it would be a very worthwhile sacrifice of 1 point in stats for a big increase in early survivability.

For skill points, one way to raise their value is simply to give them permanent effects. For each point spent in Archery, you get a 5% bonus to all exp you get from archery forever. This would massively raise the value of skills, since the bonus would be permanent and would make them stand out against professions.

B: Lower the cost of skills and jobs.

This is actually the method Multipool uses. It lowers the opportunity cost of skill points from “Could have been Stat Points” to “Otherwise worthless”, while lowering the opportunity cost, and benefit, of challenges and other ways to increase points to effectively nothing.

I started with this as an initial idea, but honestly I’ve moved away from it. Overly high starting skills destroys the early game challenge regardless of stats and it’s pretty hard to balance the game around mid-game characters starting alongside early game characters.

C: Decrease the value of stats.

The easiest way to do this is to strip away the benefits of having higher stats (and very naturally falls hand in hand with method A by giving those functions over to skills).

While this is possible, honestly I’m not sure at this point if high stats are actually that big a problem. Most things that stats increase they appear to do so linearly, and linear progression gives diminishing returns on investment (10->11 is a 10% increase, 11->12 is only a 9% increase). There may be a few fringe cases where megastats becomes problematic (kung fu slimes comes to mind), but it might be worth just addressing those anomalies where they occur.

D: Increase the cost of stats.

Absurd as it may sound, currently stats are cheaper than skills. 3 points in a skill costs 4 points, 4 points costs 6. 6 points in a stat is enough to raise it to 14. Since stats are (by design) stronger than skills that’s a double whammy to game balance that makes it such a bad idea to invest in skill points in the current system.

In a way, your suggestion falls into this category, since you’re increasing the cost of an individual stat by decreasing the amount of points overall (which naturally increases the percentage of those points each stat is worth). The big problem (as you spotted immediately) is that it also does the opposite, increasing the cost of skills. The divide becomes smaller, because the difference between best and worst is reduced, but it doesn’t fix the underlying imbalance.

If the problem with stats is simply that it’s too easy to raise them to ridiculous levels and that makes the difference too big between characters that do and don’t raise stats, raising the cost is a great first step to reaching balance, and has the advantage of being very flexible. If 12 Strength is okay but 14 is too much, point values can very easily be tweaked to get them “just right” without rewriting the entire game.

As should be obvious from my posts in this thread, I’d favour a mix of A + D, more valuable skills and jobs, more expensive stats.

What approach (or mixture thereof) do you think would give the best compromise?

From a theoretical powergaming perspective, I think you can go even better than this. 15/15/15/8, skip Robust Genetics and get Parkour Expert or Packmule (or both, you might have enough points).

15s become 18s, while 8s still become 15s, so you’ll have 20/20/20/17 after CBMs, and a few nice bonuses that you can’t otherwise get from mutagen.

29

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:27, topic:12248”]That’s a big improvement over single pool, where it’s not just fabrication and tailoring, but fabrication, tailoring, electronics, mechanics, survival, cooking and first aid.
That’s more than “halfway fixed” already, compared to single pool.[/quote]

While I didn’t explicitly mention them in my last post this doesn’t change the post before, where I clearly state the only skill worth raising is Dodge. In terms of optimal play, outside of Lab starts there’s nothing that isn’t better handled by taking dodge and grinding up the rest. Anything that increases short term player safety is outright superior to skills, which are late game.

tl;dr: Multipool can handle archers, they just need more grinding to accomplish.

Or just pick correct stats. Don’t fuss so much about maximum range - that strength penalty is totally fine. Read speed lower than 100% is fine too, it’s just a matter of resources.

Then again, just increasing the point allowance would render that argument moot.[/quote]

Out of curiosity, what, exactly, do you think the argument is, at this point? Multipool shortening games and hurting character variety for no good reason is a big one for me, and the “best possible archer” being literally identical to the best possible anything else is pretty damning.

Also, from the character stats you listed and the descriptions, it looks like you think that you need 12 strength to use reflex recurve bow effectively. If this is the case, then you should seriously check what you're talking about before making this the core of your argument.

Honestly the penalty for not being able to draw a bow should be much more extreme, since range is a function of projectile velocity, but currently 12 Strength permits you to fire the bow at maximum distance, every point less reduces range by 2 squares, no? I might be overestimating how short range that leaves the reflex/recurve, but by the time you’re aiming at things less than two reloads away you might as well forget stringing the bow and just hit them with it.

It's much easier (ie. possible) to fix dodge progression. By limiting the effect of high dodge starts, the only really serious edge case is eliminated.

Like I said, limit away, it will change literally nothing so long as a character with 15 dodge is better than 14 is better than 13 and so on. It will remain superior to put points into dodge rather than other skills that are irrelevant to both necessary survival and can easily be acquired through long term grinding until you either break dodge for everyone entirely forever or decide that multipool needs another arbitrary cap on how many points you can put into a single skill, at which point optimal remains “as many points in dodge as possible”.

Multipool says that all cars should have low top speed and great handling, because otherwise those fast cars have a huge advantage, and slipping on corners is annoying. Oh, and scenarios should put cars closer to the finish line, because the start of the race isn't fun.

More like multipool says that all cars should have wheels and be touching the road for most of the race, while single pool is a race where you have rockets, race cars and shopping carts with paddles, all pretending to be on equal footing.

You can still play with low skills in multipool. Those 2 points at start in non-challenge scenarios will certainly not put you in midgame. They will not even get you out of early-early game.[/quote]

Single Pool simply doesn’t offer the difference in kind that you’re claiming it to have. Look above, single pool optimisation: 20/20/20/17, multipool optimisation: 17/17/17/17 and 15 dodge. If you want to claim there’s a major difference in kind between the two, I’ll ask that you demonstrate that, experience and your own statements show quite the opposite.

Also note that being able to choose between low skills multipool and high skills multipool is pretty much exactly as I described it: You get to choose how close or far your car is from the finish line, not what kind of car you drive.

Sure thing - that's why Freeform exists. Multi pool is the balanced option, not the roleplay option. It's the option the game is being balanced around, because no other option so far is "solid" enough to have the game balanced around it.

Why would freeform need to exist to voluntarily play a suboptimal character? A balanced option means the difference between optimal and suboptimal is narrow, not that you tell everyone who doesn’t fit an arbitrarily narrow style of play to take their ball and go to the sand pit out back.

I said I thought about it already. It would help with grind a bit, but it certainly wouldn't unfuck single pool. It would actually make single pool look significantly less balanced than it looks now, since you could just take all stats and then close the faster.

Hold up there, friend. Who cares if it doesn’t fix single pool? Take a step back for a second, these are two distinct issues we’re talking about here:

1: Single pool vs. Multipool and getting the best out of the two systems.

2: Problems with the game that makes it tedious to improve skills from 0.

I go into problem #1 and the ways to balance a character based points system up in my previous post. You go back up there and go right ahead and tell me all about what you would consider to be necessary, or what problems you think would make it impossible, and we can work on it. This, however, is problem #2, consider it in isolation from a design perspective for a second:

We both agree, 100%, that there are skills that are annoying to grind, and that they shouldn’t be.
We both agree that one should not balance through tedium.

Fixing the grind does not in any way change single pool or multipool balance. The best character will continue to be the best character, just less annoying to play. It’s pool agnostic.

I raised this again because your only arguments against this idea are that it won’t fix the system you don’t want to balance around anyway, and that removing boredom based pressure against optimal play is somehow a bad thing.

Now, thinking impassively, what problems would this change introduce?

It won’t make multipool or single pool worse or better - you can still gain skills with or without a fun system of improving your skills.
It won’t change the meta except by removing tedium aspects from it - again, you still gain skills either way, the only difference is how fun it is.

Will it make books less valuable?
Will it make exploring less valuable?
Will it make gameplay less fun?

If you have valid reasons against it, then we can talk it out and try to solve it or come up with another solution to those problems, but single pool still being imbalanced is not a counter.

"Critical failure" system is a lot of work, a lot of bullshit, with the end result being, in most cases, "you can do all the crap that pretends to be risky, you just need to exploit the weaknesses in the system"

This is better, you gave some reasons here, so we can work it through.

1: Critical Failure systems are a lot of work, sure, but the failure system is already in place for skills, isn’t it? “You fail and lose some materials” is a reasonable place to start. Is there a similar failure system for cars? I barely notice crafting failure as it is, but I do note that there are faulty engines in the game, perhaps this could be revisited when the vehicles system is next reviewed?

Even if it’s just “you fail and lose some materials” or deal a % damage to the car in that location (exactly the same as tailoring and repairing damaging garments) it would take the biggest hard ceiling off of the early game where you need to grind up to 2 mechanics without being able to even practise on one of the thousands of useless, broken down cars that litter the streets.

This means “You can do all that crap that pretends to be risky”. - If someone is going to savescum, they’re going to savescum, this does not mean that Faulty Bionics Removal is a bad thing, not a risk that the player needs to work around, nor one of the most entertaining parts about playing faulty cyborg characters.

So what could be done to make fake risk real? If the penalty is as simple losing your materials 9 times out of 10 and it’s dandelion greens, then no big loss and the player eventually gets breakfast, even if it is a little black (roughly the same as my cooking methods). What if it breaks your only baseball bat? In the early game where resources are tight losing those resources can be a major penalty. Expend resources to lower the risk: Amphetamines, coke, caffeine, booze, music, or run the risk as is. Later game, when the grind is terrible (level 12 electronics, anyone?) you can pour resources into trying over and over again, requiring even more resource intensive exploration.

So it won’t fix the system on its own, but recombine the two suggestions: You can expend resources to practise without grinding menus, and you can try to accomplish things even if your level is low, so long as you have the recipe and resources.

What problems with the early game does this not fix? What more would we need to do?

At least I have multi pool then, which greatly helps with some of the problems with survival and growth stages.

It either “skips” those problems by giving you Mid-game tier skills, or “does nothing” about those problems because all the grind and tedium is still there because you played optimally and ignored a bunch of skills anyway.

I semi-agree about soft ceiling in crafting system (not in chargen). The problem is, soft ceilings often turn into just pushing the hard ceiling further instead.

Alright, let’s explore this:
A: “You can try to craft any recipe so long as you know that recipe.”
B: “Your chance to succeed at a level 12 (max?) recipe with level 0 is 0% at 8 intelligence” and improved with skill and intelligence, up to 100% at skill level 18 (success chance chosen arbitrarily as an example). Failing to succeed by over 10% means that some or all materials are lost, but still grants some skill based on how close it was to a success.

Assuming the player does not savescum, because we do not balance around cheating, what are the downsides to a completely unrestricted crafting system? Faster progression for a lucky character? More demand for resources as a player constantly fails?

13 intelligence to read SICP at full speed (without going back a line to understand it, without stopping to decipher an example), 12 strength to wield the strongest available bow at 100% capacity.

Yeah, I admit the whole book thing is a little strange anyway. 13 intelligence to read a simple computing book, 12 intelligence to understand laboratory notes detailing cutting-edge fringe science, 12 intelligence to understand a college level textbook on chemistry and circuitry, it’s not consistent, and seems redundant when there’s already a system that defines how quickly you read and understand books called “intelligence”.

But yeah, back to bows, modern hunting bows have a draw weight around 40lbs and up by law. If we assume the reflex-recurve is designed for a decently fit, large framed adult male it’s probably in the 45-60lbs range.

The British Longbow had a 110lbs minimum draw weight in order to qualify as a war bow. Alpha mutagen had not been invented by that point, so we can assume that those archers and their 200+ yard range probably were well within the realms of human strength. A sixty pound draw weight and a college level text book sounds about right for “12” as “pretty strong, pretty smart” but still doesn’t come close to “peak human capability” which is far higher than the minimum draw English longbow and the things kids learn in college.

You really should get a better example.

You’re right, but not for the reasons you claim. Wizards and other spellcasters offer a significant difference in kind to what Fighters can offer, while DDA stats vs skills offers only differences in scale.

Though honestly I'd be fine with this kind of long term vs. short term in DDA. I'm only heavily against no-brainers like stat starts.

Well this is progress, let’s work on this.

Survival → Growth → Influence → Transcendence

Type A character stronger and easier to survive and reach next stage of development → Type B character overcomes early game trouble and comes into their stride, gradually closing the early advantage of Type A and catching up to their technological and progress advantage → Type B overtakes Type A → Transcendence, Type A and Type B more or less equalise asides from ways in which they are specialised over other, similarly advanced, characters.

Ideal balance is that different types are equally viable, and that non-optimal and optimal, VBD and Evacuee don’t fall too far apart, while still rewarding optimisation and specialisation.

To make this viable we need, and feel free to add any I miss:

Type A short term (skills and professions etc) must give a tangible early advantege over Type B long term (stats and long term trait advantages etc) in the early game, allowing them to gather more, better get faster, survive more easily, and lose less often.
REQUIREMENT: Type B characters must be able to survive early game with skill, perseverance, and optimal play in order to reach the next stage.

Type B long term must give a tangible advantage over Type A in the longer term. This should be large enough to allow them to close any equipment or skill gap with type A characters and equalise.
REQUIREMENT: Type A characters must still be able to survive mid game threats, develop their skills and generally advance through optimal play, skill and perseverance.

Type B long term must surpass Type A as diminishing returns and escalating costs on skill growth and optimal equipment loadouts are reached.
REQUIREMENT: Type A players, while having the hardest experience at this point, should still be able to confront and defeat the challenges or the Influence stage.

Types merge in the transcendence stage because:
Stats don’t matter when you run people over in your six square wide Megatruck → Equipment reduces the value of stats and skills.
Stats become much closer together post mutation → Increases to stats become more widely available, and the proportional differences shrink.
Skills begin to plateau as they reach high levels and exp costs to raise them increase → The difference between a single level of skills becomes less than the starting advantage,

OVERALL REQUIREMENT: Sub optimal builds within reason (all stats set to 8, all skill points set to 0 “forgot to buy skills” character should be able to achieve all challenges with caution, patience, and optimal play.

Is this a worthwhile design goal? If not: What else does it need? If so: What changes to game balance can help bring it about?

30

The dodge skill is extremely hard to raise past a certain point.

If stats where trainable like skills…

I would say set up an upper limit for humans to achieve in each stat like with skills. And let people train.

Then If you put points into stats a chargen its like putting them into skills.
They would be equal. (Maybe adjust point cost to match the effort it takes to train whatever skill/stat)

Mutations and trais that affect stats should then effect upper and/or lower limit.

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[quote=“Pantalion, post:28, topic:12248”][quote=“Valpo, post:25, topic:12248”]When i can use all stat points on str dex int and per then an overpowered char is te result.

One way to offset this would be to use less points. But its hard to balance professions and scenarios arround points if they can all be put into stats.[/quote]

I find it hard to define overpowered in a single player environment, but you’re right, it’s very hard to balance a variable point pool when stats and professions and skills all cost the same since it’s always worth putting points into the “better choice”.

To fix this we’d need to not just tweak the number of starting points, but to change the relationship between the two.

A: Raise the value of skills and jobs.

B: Lower the cost of skills and jobs.

This is actually the method Multipool uses. It lowers the opportunity cost of skill points from “Could have been Stat Points” to “Otherwise worthless”, while lowering the opportunity cost, and benefit, of challenges and other ways to increase points to effectively nothing.

I started with this as an initial idea, but honestly I’ve moved away from it. Overly high starting skills destroys the early game challenge regardless of stats and it’s pretty hard to balance the game around mid-game characters starting alongside early game characters.

C: Decrease the value of stats.

D: Increase the cost of stats.

Absurd as it may sound, currently stats are cheaper than skills. 3 points in a skill costs 4 points, 4 points costs 6. 6 points in a stat is enough to raise it to 14. Since stats are (by design) stronger than skills that’s a double whammy to game balance that makes it such a bad idea to invest in skill points in the current system.[/quote]

I’ve found myself agreeing almost perfectly with Pantalion anyway (at least in this thread), but this post in particular sums it up SO SO well for me. His points A-D are well thought out, I think, with the bit about why multi-pool fails (in his opinion) being particularly well put.

32

Not wanting to read a huge wall. I’ll just ask a simple question.

Why change anything?

Skill gains via reading manuals is realistic. You screw up a few times at the start and you actually learn something. Working on something is a little slower of course but also realistic. If you just randomly start sawing crap out of a car and you don’t learn much. Well, no sh!t right? You learn slowly manually doing stuff and should probably find a book that tells you how not to cut you arm off while using First-Aid skills lol

I have a few gripes with some skills but I can deal with it as realism in a fake world made a little bit reasonable.

Actually my only gripe is skill rust. I know I personally don’t remember everything I read and it kinda makes sense using the Intelligence rust method. But I get kinda pissy about things not scaling. I think the stuff you learn should be scaled.

Is there an option for this? I’ll give an example:

Tailoring 0 = I know how to make socks and mend a few things. 25% skill I think I should know a few more recipes. 50%.75%. more as I go until the next level.

Maybe this would only piss everyone off. BUT you get a few recipes in the level up and gain them all when you gain the level level.

0% skill you have only a few items to craft and each should help you gain in that level incrementally as normal to make more recipes. level 1 at 50% should give you a few level 2 recipes to work with and all of level 2 recipes by time you make level 3.

Crap idea? I dunno. Just a thought.

One caveat I’d still like to see happen is the difference between soft(light) leather and hard(stiff) leather. I don’t want to be in a leather tank outfit I want a few light leather upgrades that protect me slightly so I can move quick and avoid scrapes(not a battle axe to my face). I think the topic of this got buried last year =/

33

That’s bullshit, as multipool greatly improves character variety. Single pool character starts are all stats and few good traits, multi pool is some stats, some traits (including the lower-tier ones) and some skills (not just dodge).
At this point you are just regurgitating old “but dodge” argument. Dodge can be fixed by just lowering its value to the point where it’s not worth starting with, then buffing its skill gain. And even now it isn’t the end of all things, since it does nothing to help with bullets.
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”.

Honestly the penalty for not being able to draw a bow should be much more extreme, since range is a function of projectile velocity, but currently 12 Strength permits you to fire the bow at maximum distance, every point less reduces range by 2 squares, no? I might be overestimating how short range that leaves the reflex/recurve, but by the time you're aiming at things less than two reloads away you might as well forget stringing the bow and just hit them with it.

Maybe it should. But it isn’t. We aren’t talking about some future bow nerf, we are talking about its current state.
And now pretty strong evidence that you didn’t actually play an archer at all and are basing the entire argument on display. You don’t snipe things too far away as an archer and reload speed greatly improves with skill.

Like I said, limit away, it will change literally nothing so long as a character with 15 dodge is better than 14 is better than 13 and so on.

It will change everything because skills aren’t fixed in place and have those soft caps you said you liked earlier.
Training dodge from 0 to 4 is easier than training it from 7 to 8. Training it from 10 to 11 is nearly impossible. At this point it’s easier to gain 2 dexterity than to gain 1 dodge.
The more you armor yourself, the less you need dodge. And honestly, if you somehow manage to survive the late game with low armor, that’s pretty impressive. But SOMETHING tells me you didn’t try and are basing it just on numbers of display - numbers you don’t even fully understand.

Single Pool simply doesn't offer the difference in kind that you're claiming it to have. Look above, single pool optimisation: 20/20/20/17, multipool optimisation: 17/17/17/17 and 15 dodge. If you want to claim there's a major difference in kind between the two, I'll ask that you demonstrate that, experience and your own statements show quite the opposite.

Alpha mutagen roulette and full set of CBMs is not just post-endgame, it’s pretty much asymptotic extreme. It can be considered in some “theoretical design”, but it doesn’t actually impact the game at all.
It can possibly happen. But not feasibly.
At this point player burnout is the primary risk, because of all the grinding involved, pushing the game into the worst designed segment of it - one I didn’t try balancing yet.

If you want sane arguments, try aiming for something like 8 in all important skills, at most +4 to stats in total.
At this point the skill difference between those two will be small. Melee skills have a negative feedback loop (the harder you strike, the faster you end the combat), crafting skills are capped, books offer a hard-capped flat boost to many skills, dodge is capped by monster accuracy. And most importantly - skill level is a square root of “skill practice”.

Stat difference will not be small. At 0 point scenario, we can expect +4 to one stat with no trait fuckery. And if you’re going for single pool, you’ll want VBD or lab start and startscum until you survive anyway. So we can expect one character to be 14/14/12/12 and other to be 12/10/8/8, even with some scaled down stat progression that actually turns all characters identical.
At this point the stat character can already snipe, gets a significant boost in specialized melee (Niten+wakizachi, unarmed+tiger/dragon), dodges better than the skill character (in some not-so-rare cases even if the skill character stacked dodge), can take mixed mutations like hollow bones (20% to move and attack speed, but great penalty to weight capacity) and if he also got some mutant body parts, those hit often and hit hard.
Skill character has 1 more point in 2-3 skills, if that.

2: Problems with the game that makes it tedious to improve skills from 0.

It would be the best to discuss that in a different thread. This one is mostly concerned with pool balance and any arguments here are necessarily involving it.
I created a thread here:
http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=13007.0

Fixing the grind does not in any way change single pool or multipool balance. The best character will continue to be the best character, just less annoying to play. It's pool agnostic.

If we go by my definition of “best character”, then yes, that is true. At some point you wanted to introduce a character who would have both skills and stats - for this one, skill grinding would make the skill side less important.

This means "You can do all that crap that pretends to be risky". - If someone is going to savescum, they're going to savescum, this does not mean that Faulty Bionics Removal is a bad thing, not a risk that the player needs to work around, nor one of the most entertaining parts about playing faulty cyborg characters.

I don’t mean savescumming, I mean “preparations”.
One common example that was thrown around was making gunpowder. IRL doing it in low-tech environment can cause an explosion. In the game this would be tedious because you would need to wear a bomb suit and keep all supplies away from “gunpowder crafting room”. It wouldn’t actually be all that harmful, just tedious to set up.
Most critical failures would be like that. There are very few critical failures that make sense. Losing materials for no gain is kinda OK, but losing/damaging used tools would in most cases just suck, in other cases would be hard to enforce (pseudo tools, integrated toolset). Losing materials is good because you can’t protect yourself from it - it requires the exact same setup as regular crafting.

It either "skips" those problems by giving you Mid-game tier skills, or "does nothing" about those problems because all the grind and tedium is still there because you played optimally and ignored a bunch of skills anyway.

Addresses and heavily improves, doesn’t fix fully.
It helps with early book hunt, which stops being mandatory to unlock skills like electronics and first aid.
It allows grabbing rare recipes without lab diving. For example, atomic coffee maker and zombie pheromone.

It is a giant improvement without actually skipping the progression. It lets you start out as a character who can get right into action instead of just hanging out at the edge of the city, pulling single zombies to bushwhack (pull into a bush, whack, kite into another bush etc.). It lets you start with equipment which may be long term (crafting tools) or long term (shotgun+ammo).
If high-point scenarios also allowed high-point professions, it would also allow starting with bionics, which are essentially mid-term.

Assuming the player does not savescum, because we do not balance around cheating, what are the downsides to a completely unrestricted crafting system?

I didn’t actually consider a skill system that’s fully unrestricted “up” (allowing crafting all the harder recipes). I’d probably be fine with it.
Not sure about other devs, as the idea is rather unrealistic and they tend to care about realism. It is unrealistic because IRL attempting something you don’t understand can be a huge risk (chemistry tools blowing up in your face, showering it with acid, molten metal getting on you, ruining tools etc.) or simply impossible (programming a robot AI when you can’t program a “Hello world”, designing an airplane when all you designed is a paper airplane).
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.

Yeah, I admit the whole book thing is a little strange anyway. 13 intelligence to read a simple computing book

SICP is a bit of a meme book.
I assume the intelligence requirements are based on what it trains and to what level. The IRL equivalent of 8 lvl “computers” skill is something closer to genius than average.

A sixty pound draw weight and a college level text book sounds about right for "12" as "pretty strong, pretty smart" but still doesn't come close to "peak human capability" which is far higher than the minimum draw English longbow and the things kids learn in college.

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.

As for the bows: reflex recurve war bows actually had more draw strength than English long bows. The bows in the game are based on sporting bows, not war bows. It wouldn’t be hard to add war bows, but at the moment archery is rather underpowered for multiple reasons, so it’s not a good time for new bows.
Plus, having bows that require huge strength, good dexterity and good perception would cause arguments like “why doesn’t the game allow me to play as mongolian horse archer, sans horse?”. With the answer being a combination of balance and having to allow superhero characters or stat training (both of which would wreck balance at best, cause incredible tedium AND wreck balance at worst). This answer however doesn’t satisfy many people, who will then go “but this is a single player game so I should be allowed to do it”. The answer to that is “you can, in freeform”, but that answer only provokes a “I want my cake and eat it too. That is, I want it possible in point systems that call themselves balanced”.

Except with the assumption that mongolian horse archers are bionic mutants. Then it gets doable.

OVERALL REQUIREMENT: Sub optimal builds within reason (all stats set to 8, all skill points set to 0 "forgot to buy skills" character should be able to achieve all challenges with caution, patience, and optimal play.

Is this a worthwhile design goal? If not: What else does it need? If so: What changes to game balance can help bring it about?

It is achieved already, but mostly due to endgame being DDA’s weakest point.
Honestly I’d rather have it stop being the case. My ideal endgame would be one where a high-strength character who mutates into a giant bearmode bear can, without too much risk, complete a “challenge branch” centered around strength, but not the one about dexterity, which would be very risky in a way that can’t be compensated by just playing carefully (though still doable).
But this will most likely stay. DDA endgame difficulty is currently tied to early game difficulty in many ways and that is one of the biggest problems with design in the whole game.

34

Coming from a tabletop RPG design background my preferred solution would be to have stats cost more than skills on a single pool system. Additionally the starting pool would have more points.

If stats cost 2 points per level from the very beginning while skills only cost 1 point for early levels you’d have a decent balance from early to mid game, you’d have a choice between a highly skilled low stat character or a high stat unskilled character. As it stands in the current single point system even if you go low stats you’ll still only start moderately skilled.

Another option would be to have stat progress at a triangular cost, 8->9 costs 1 point, 9->10 costs 2 points, 10->11 costs 3 points, etc.

Another measure I’ve used for shared-point systems is that unused stat points flow down to skill points but not vice versa. You can get extra skill points by opting not to spend stat points but not the other way around.

I think it’s also worth considering how Stats Through Skills interacts with all of this and if a more refined implementation of that mod into the core game may be able to alleviate some of these issues.

35

I’m sorry, i can’t really follow this thread. Read a bit of it, but not everything.
Here 's my summed up thoughts re the charbuilding system.

  1. ‘The multiple pools’ system is better balanced than the ‘one pool’, for reasons summed up by coolthulhu.
  2. The ‘one pool’ makes for more varied characters (and stronger ones) since you can pump many points wherever you wish (i usually start as 8/8/8/8 with loads of traits, with long term goal to mutate into the alpha line - by the time i can achieve this, my 8/8/8/8 char is pretty powerful without great stats)

Anyway, my real problem with the ‘multiple pools’ charbuild option is that it does not give too much room to play. With 2+2+2 pts, i can barely customize my char, pick only a few traits and some skills.
What makes a game fun, is having options, and so few points per category limit options. Or appear to. These days i do play freeform, so that i can make chars with a background as i like it. (but never use more than 4 pts for stats and always take some neg. traits if i take many positives. I do increase many skills to 2-4 though as befits the char)

Well, i know that we do not want to have OP chars from the get-go, so what else than ‘multiple pools’ is there?
My suggestions:

i. Change the effect of stats: Make 20 the average, 10 the poor, and 30 the world-class, allowing for more granularity in stat effects.
ib. Make points invested in stats to have diminishing returns (eg. moving from 25 to 26, costs 2 points)
ic. Start us at default 18 in each stat, giving a psychological ‘deafault’ of 18 even if 20 is the norm. This will show people that an 18/18/18/18 char is not crippled (make sure to balance the game around that)

ii. Traits are fine as they are. I mean, they could always use more overhauls, but their cost vs benefits is not a problem now. Of course it should be adjusted to have costs follow the changes in (i)

iii. Reverting skills to easy to raise when low level (1 point spent for 2 effective lvls at lvl 0), as Pantalion suggested, is good. Just remember to count in the formula any skills given by the profession so that there won’t be skilllevel stacking.

iv. Maybe steal a fun option from D&D, where we can roll stats with a small bonus to total pts, up to 3 times, but we do not get to change the given stats, also gaining a useful bonus item from our selected profession’s list if we do that. [this is in brainstorming stage and would need some more polish]

Anyway, bottom line is that only issue with the ‘multiple pools’ system is the very small leeway it gives, in contrast to the old system, plus the assumtion that any stat lower than 8 is ‘problematic’. It is really better balanced that the old one, sure, but more ‘dull’

36

Only in the sense that Freeform allows more varied characters.
It restricts the character creation much, much more than multi pool if you want to play well instead of rp or voluntary challenge.

Anyway, my real problem with the 'multiple pools' charbuild option is that it does not give too much room to play. With 2+2+2 pts, i can barely customize my char, pick only a few traits and some skills.

This was because multi pool started out “on top” of single pool. Now that it is well established and known to work well, the defaults can be rebalanced with multi pool in mind.
For example, by allowing more stat points at start.

Reverting skills to easy to raise when low level (1 point spent for 2 effective lvls at lvl 0)

I think that is a bug, but one that wasn’t discussed much because some people liked it. 1 point for lvl 2 makes sense.

the assumtion that any stat lower than 8 is 'problematic'

This is mostly psychological, though reinforced by stat displays. 6 in intelligence and perception is totally fine.

37

6 intelligence won’t let my character understand certain books if not mistaken. While perhaps not crucial, does having a 6 intelligence make a character unable to learn recipes or information altogether from such tomes? Or does it just take a really long time for my village idiot character to understand said tough tome?

38

So balanced that every character is literally 100% the same after you raid one lab MAYBE two if you’re unlucky.

The problem with Multipool as it stands right now, is you do not get enough stat points to make investing into stats worthwhile. Frankly you’re starting with skills and potentially traits that make going into labs trivial regardless of scenario choice and Alpha mutagen isn’t so hard to make that you can’t just take every single mutation in its line and call it good as it has no purify immediately mutations.

39

Can someone explain to me the different StatsThroughSkills mods?

I saw 3 or 4 of them the first and only time i used the launcher for cata as options to download, but the core game only has the basic(first?) one included.

I’ve used it a few times and i liked it.

40

I find it interesting that the guy who wants one mode removed from the game considers this to be some way of increasing options. You are subtracting options by definition. How is this in any way doing the opposite? It’s like saying 2 minus 1 is 3.

Clearly the people who actually made the stupid thing have a better idea of what they’re talking about than someone who picked it up and just played it. To assume otherwise is simply ignorant and someone might need to get off their high horse. Crack open the code and contemplate the entire thing from top to bottom before you go preaching to the developers how to do their job.

(I say, as one of my first posts on the forum was raging at the developers on how to do their job.)