1: Not break, just make it levelable for everyone and give it a more linear progression. That way stacking it at start won’t break anything.
Sorry if I was unclear, there are two issues, one you can fix is the part where dodge stacking creates a permanent, unreplicable advantage. I’m not talking just the “break the game” part, which can be fixed, but the advantage to being harder to kill “short term” over “having access to diamond weapon crafting recipes before you search a few labs”, so if you want to fix this, you’d need to give serious survival benefits to each early game craft skill (otherwise it is literally always better to go with Max Dodge) or kill dodge entirely and make it suck for everyone.
Sure, if you have a character that can craft an early welder, that’s good. A character built around dodge (and possibly violence) can walk through town to the local garage, or a Library for Mechanics 101 and the parts they need.
Early access to zombie pheromones would be a great idea, since its ingredients are common even early game. Maybe characters adding cooking at character creation could get that as a starting recipe? 5 points didn’t add it to my test character, so having a Dodge specialist walking into town and grabbing the recipe book was actually better for my early game survival than having a Cooking specialist walking into town looking for the same recipe book.
For EMP, is this lab start, or turrets in town? Robots are only early game enemies with lab runs for me, generally any town-based turret I find can be ignored until it runs out of ammo against a horde, while any “special” turret can be avoided or deactivated quite easily.
Tailoring mitigates damage with armour, sure, but it takes resources to make that armour that you don’t have at the start of the game, and any early game clothing recipes tend to be for the same armour you can find laying around town.
2: The reward is rare recipes you won’t quickly unlock otherwise.
Alright, sure. I’ll accept this IF the recipe is early game craftable (Electronics: Turn 100 batteries into a weak acid bomb that doubles as a noise making distraction with a piece of copper wire, some scrap metal, and a soldering iron). While they’re not perfect, recipes could help make it much less of a bad idea.
A temporary, mid-game, reward of getting a recipe that you can’t immediately use and that our early game character has an easier chance of finding? Early Game Advantage gives Mid Game gear advantage, so any mid-game reward like diamond recipes or mutagen would need to A: Offer the advantage far, far before the Early Game Advantage character could attain it (long before they could safely get to their first lab, for example), and B: Offer such a massive advantage as to exceed the Early Game Advantage guy and equalise with them very, very quickly so that they were even by the end game.
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.
It’s “dismissing ideas out of hand because they have flaws”. I provided a lot of arguments for the dismissal of majority of the ideas.
0. Manageable, balanceable system that either doesn't assume a time scale or enforces it somehow. Freedom in character creation is a bonus, but can't come at the price of turning entire sets of provided options (skills, professions with positive point cost, scenarios with no point bonus) inferior to a limited set of options (all stat starts) or at the price of tedium getting more optimal (skills shouldn't become like tailoring and fabrication currently are).
1. Flaws: multi pool has rather limited stat customization at the moment, due to low point allowance and noticeable penalties for dropping most stats below default. Advantages: it separates "indefinite term" and "short-to-mid term", allowing balancing of both without constantly running into giant outliers that are a huge pain to manage.
2. I assume the proposed system is "single pool with cost penalties for extreme stats, point cost multiplier for stats". Advantages: leads to more rounded characters than regular single pool by limiting extreme values of strength and dexterity. Disadvantages: is still single pool with most of the disadvantages, actually worsens the dodge stacking trick with the point cost multiplier allowing a lot of skill points.
3. A better point cost system for stats themselves. That is, allowing more small variance, penalizing extremes more. Could require totally rebalancing stat numbers to be viable, though. We don't want to end up with a system where everyone is 11/11/8/10 or something like that.
4. Providing a fixed time scale for balancing. This would be very limiting, though. Not likely to get through - even if I agreed to it (I'd be fine with some dungeon crawl-y themes), other devs probably wouldn't.
These are great, and we can work with these, but these are the kinds of question a designer needs to ask over and over again.
0: A: Manageable, balanceable system with a player defined timescale for progression (aka: No time assumption), B: where all character creation options carry similar weight. C: As little tedium, and as much, flexibility as can be reasonably achieved.
1: Current System: Multipool. I’ll ignore flexibility, because that’s a secondary design goal right now it’s not a flaw with the current model, it’s a bonus we can work in later.
A: Narrowed Range makes this model easier to balance.
B: Narrowed Range means character creation options are more restrained, making options have similar weight due to proximity, if nothing else.
C: As this is our base model, we can assume this as our baseline for tedium. This is more of a general gameplay design philosophy, though.
Problems to approach, assuming some of the problems we’ve talked about are patched (like MegaDodge):
A: Only certain skills offer Early Game Advantage (EGA).
EGA provides MGA.
EGA is not balanced by Medium Game Advantage (MGA), and cannot be sacrificed. It is always better to have Early Game Advantage than Medium Game Advantage.
LGA (what stat points you receive) is not worth giving up for EGA, as maximum EGA can be achieved without doing so.
In some ways this is a very problematic balancing issue. An MGA can be balanced to work:
High EGA Low MGA Middle LGA - Warrior, starts strong, has a few issues mid-game, then unlocks high level sword skills that help them catch up.
Low EGA Middle MGA High LGA - Wizard, starts weak, gets stronger as game progresses.
Middle EGA High MGA Low LGA - Thief, starts okay, backstabs get strong mid-game, everything is immune to backstab at end game.
But this assumes a strictly defined game cycle. With player defined progression we have only two metrics:
How easily can they survive?
How easily can they progress to the next stage?
High EGA characters can survive very easily, and progress to the next stage very easily.
Part of MGA is gear advantage: Because they progress very easily in the early game, they can find explore more easily, and therefore find better gear.
Part of MGA is skill advantage: Because they have better gear more easily, that includes books to improve their skills. The same books that include the skills they want to progress also include the recipes.
That MGA advantage helps them progress more easily to Late Game locations to find the books and resources there as well.
As so their advantage potentially self-perpetuating.
This is a balance problem that is hard to cure entirely, but can be alleviated a little by increasing EGA to crafting skills, or by giving Late Game Advantage that effectively cannot be feasibly replicated.
B: Character creation options still exist due to the underlying system. Giving up stat points for skill points is a disadvantage from the old system that will worsen as we try to expand flexibility. This problem can be addressed the same way we’re trying to address Single Pool - change the weight of options. 12/0/2 Multipool with Stats Cost 2, 8->12 costs 9 (2+2+2+3 same as 0->3 in a skill costs 5) is effectively the same as 6/0/2 with tighter, but still flexible, banding.
3a: On: Skill improvements: Produce significant difference by endgame. After you raid 1-2 libraries.
I’ll talk about this more in the other thread, since it’s tied in with changes to the skill system, but if we view level 8 skills as a cap, levelling speed provides a bonus throughout the game until reaching that cap. If investment gives a small-scale bonus that allows progress above the cap (assuming skills above cap did not grant additional recipes), this is inherently balanced as an opportunity cost. You pick where your player gains long term advantage.
3b: VBD and Lab starts keep their giant advantage, meaning startscumming is a must.
Serious proposal that we move “Professions and Scenarios” out of design consideration for the time being. I agree they’re not “free”, but I believe they both need serious attention to balance their Very Early balance with much more reasonable point costs.
Infected: 4 point bonus.
Spawn in: Military Surplus which spawns first aid kits. Every character should be infected as a no brainer unless you’re roleplaying and/or self-handicapping, because it’s clearly superior to Evacuee. Even Very Bad Day, there’s a longer term problem with Tweaker than there is the scenario itself.
For Laboratory starts it’s hard to even call them a huge disadvantage. The odd character will have trouble with stairs spawning badly, but the majority of labs can be escaped to produce much stronger characters on average, and a very good chance of starting their life on the surface with a machete and riot helmet at least.
A: Make skill or job point investment in different areas have permanent value.
4: This alone is not an implementable idea, more like an idea for an idea.
Yeah, this is essentially our “design category”. Skill points giving an Exp or success rate bonus, for example. We’re looking for controlled, long term, balanceable, advantages, like crafting bonuses I mention in the other thread.
5: We have three variants here:
5a: Increase skill gain speed linearly. This one doesn’t work for crafting (mostly limited by books and tools), meaning those would not get any points.
True, Experience is not the only constraint for crafting. It would help, but something more would be necessary. 1% increased chance of success per skill point invested? Combat skills don’t really craft, so could this help bridge the divide?
5b: Increase skill gain by only counting “gained” skill level for XP requirements. This one doesn’t do much for crafting, but could break combat skills (especially dodge) really hard, to the point where it would be better than dexterity, making dodge essentially a “5th stat”.
Fortunately Dodge would still be controlled by defining which enemies can grant XP in the first place (I generally max out at around 6 dodge), so thankfully that one wouldn’t be a huge issue. I do take your point on combat skills though, since they have no such restriction. All combat skills would need the same “this task is too simple to raise your exp” restriction if this were to be implemented. That’s not necessarily a bad thing to have to stop people grinding themselves into Chuck Norris on reviving hordes of school children (not that I would ever make this my go to strategy, cough).
5c: Crafting relies on caps, recipes and tools to keep it sanely limited.
I’ve moved fixing this over to the other thread, where it helps increase skill success chance. If this was combined with removed recipe restrictions then points in crafting skills could give a chance for gear advantage that couldn’t be easily replicated with just finding skill books.
"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.
6: More restrictions often result in more choices.
While true, I would also note that even Stats Only Or Suck has several “optimal” spreads of stats, from maximised generalist stats (15/15/15/8), specialisation in multiple stats, to hyper specialisation in specific stat (the 20 Strength hulk with Tough). The better that skills become as worthwhile starting picks, and the better the price for stats matches their value, the more the balance of character creation in either pool will diversify as the best inherent restriction we can hope for is “if I pick this awesome thing, I cannot pick this other awesome thing”.
7: That would require changing the trait system heavily to work.
At the moment there are too many free point traits.
Agreed. I’d pick Far and Near-sighted anyway (being blind as a bat, I expect my characters to suffer as well), but for 4 points for something that has come up as a problem once or twice, ever, it may as well be free. If you didn’t start with glasses, of course, completely different story).
It seems to me that there’s a lot of interconnected minor balance problems in character creation once you start picking at threads that probably need attention at some point regardless,
7b: Traits technically could be balanced against stats, though many traits would have to go. Mutation system could be disregarded here if the balance could be ensured in some other way.
Alternatively, there could be “stat tier traits” like parkour expert and quick, and “trait tier traits” like less hunger, with the former sharing their pool with stats. This is because Quick is a permanent advantage, while hunger stops being a problem after a while.
In one way, traits are inherently balanceable since the number of traits you can have is capped at 12, regardless of how many points you have available, so it becomes as much a quality of life choice as anything else.
Assuming we can fix the problem of free “disadvantages”, and we’re still talking about multipool, then the 12 stat points we’re talking about could be 6 into stats, 12 points of traits with no bad traits, or up to a maximum 26 points for skills, profession and scenario (2 + stats + an assumed 12 bad traits and no good), or anywhere in between.
If 1 point of strength can buy you the “Martial Artist” profession and exchange half a point of maybe damage for a less gear dependent, safer early game, that actually sounds to me like “Meaningful Choices”, and a pretty good balance for fun, varied play. It gets somewhere close to what single pool should be doing in terms of freedom vs. balance. I’ll try a character out with those point restrictions in mind and see how it feels.
8: Dodge bonus from dexterity protecting from hulks is just one thing, but it’s a real pain to balance around. Hard to get a good formula that doesn’t flatten weak characters, but still hits the strong ones. 2 in dex and 2 in per will now affect dispersion noticeably and in a way that hurts the probability of getting good hits more than at low levels (sum of random numbers is weighted towards the expected value). It’s not just sniping, it’s (laser) pistol spam.
True enough. I assume that if you’re happy for multipool balance to allow up to 6 stat points (14 in one skill) then can we balance any variation within 6 points from one stat to another? Or were you planning to tweak stat formulas behind the scenes to deal this this already?
Also, I thought that ranged penalty stopped at 12? If we’re assuming 8+4, wouldn’t that be the same as 12+4 in terms of ranged combat?
8b: Martial arts are a big deal, so they can’t be just ignored here.
It’s because martial arts is a big deal that I asked. If the problem is just martial arts then it would be simpler, overall, to put diminishing returns into martial arts formulae.
8c: Then there’s the part where skill plateau is mostly similar. The time it takes a high-stat character to reach it may easily be lower than the one it takes a low-stat one, despite the low stat one starting with superior circumstances.
Yeah, this falls into the “no time constraints” consideration, I suppose. Part of the issue is that skill and playstyle do play an important part in defining what’s worthwhile. I do stand by my newbie self’s decision to invest in a martial arts trait, they helped me survive encounters I’ve now learned to bypass and let me progress further as a result.
9: You mean “bands” as in “thresholds”? I don’t like thresholds because they limit the choice. Results in characters who will be aiming for alpha taking only enough stats to get the best option.
Your terminology is a little confusing, considering the context of “threshold” here. I don’t think we’re talking the same thing, based on what you’re saying, but just in case:
Prime Increases 4-7 strength up to 8, 8-14 strength up to 15, 15-17 strength to 18, and so on.
I’d call this a band. It homogenises strength from within a defined range (band) to a preset result.
This could potentially be used as a balancing factor in itself. If the “best” choice for mutation was to invest one stat up to 13 (-> 16) while all the best bonuses are at 12 or 14, you now have a reason for people to pick 13, when otherwise they’d stick at 12 or 14.
Likewise, if the next breakpoint was 11, you could sacrifice the overall power of specialisation in favour of having enough stat points necessary to get two stats up tp 11. They can either get the long term bonus of having 12 or 14 in stats and waste some future mutant potential once they reach that point, or they can make do with 11 until they can find the mutagen after surviving a year without it.
This, I feel, works better than just “Add 7”, since it gives a developer a lot of power to make each mutation strain feel like its own beast, so to speak, while smoothing over any imbalance with diminishing returns and carefully defined maximum stats:
Bears are super strong. They should have a big increase! 4 → 8, 7 → 12, 11 → 14, 13 → 18.
Cattle are even stronger! But they’re also more balanced critters. 4 → 10, 7 → 11, 11 → 14, 13 → 16.
The weakest cow is stronger than the weakest bear, but the strongest bear is stronger than the strongest bull.
There’s not even the need to have the same breakpoints. If cows had breakpoints at 5, 8, 10 and 12 then that would be another layer of variety within the system, and make each of the mutations feel distinct, while also still being balanceable against one another and making sure there’s no “best mutation” for every character, and while you could build a character around becoming the best “bear” he could be, he’s not the best Chimera, and he’d make a terrible plant.