Ok, so why ever go full perception instead of full dex in this scenario?
From the sound of it dex will do more or less the same thing, but will ALSO give all the good bonuses dexterity gives that perception does not.
because they compliment each-other in this version of events I suggest, and perception is important for ranged, I believe it should also play itâs own role in general, for example, sewing is very precise, sewing should benefit a lot with it, safe cracking, lock picking, anything precise, involving spotting and identifying things quickly, faster crafting in general perhaps.
Anticipation of things, avoiding staring at flaming eyes for example.
A low dex/per/int character should be a garbage crafter that fails a lot at especially more precision, high skill items.
A dumb, lumbering oaf will no doubt find anything involving crafting difficult unless it is several levels below his crafting skills and trivial at this point, and heâll still be a slow crafter.
Well, thatâs not how the game works, really.
I mean, I agree with you thatâs what the LORE tells you, but, as a matter of fact, you can start with stat value 4 to 20 as a completely ânormalâ human even when using multi-pool.
the only thing a mixmaxed strength character should be good at by virtue of stats is being a tank and smashing things.
Skills may obviously help, but stats are supposed to be BIG.
someone very strong, but otherwise has the abilities of a toddler or young child, should not fare well in many, many things.
I like the idea of perception giving increased dodge chance, especially ranged attacks like spitters that could reasonably be avoided (maybe a small chance of dodging bullets, but it would have to be more along the lines of a warning that an enemy is aiming at you and a chance to dart to the side to break their aim, or atleast moving giving a penalty to an enemy that is aiming at you. Higher perception would increase the chance of you noticing that an enemy is taking aim.)
Crafting penalties for low dex and per isnât a bad idea. It helps to reinforce what penalties minmaxing has on a person, since youâre always going to have the issue of str being the melee stat, per being the ranged stat, etc. If a player just wants to do those things they can max the appropriate stat to their heartâs content, but other things need to suffer.
Again, you keep bringing ideas how to penalize LOW stat values. Thatâs easy enough to implement simply by changing how character creation works to simply not give player an option to min-max effectively
(one way or the other).
More broadly, it is, in fact, not hard to MASSIVELY penalize low stat values. But this will simply reduce the diversity of viable builds, forcing everyone to play more-or-less the same in terms of stats.
What we need, however, is a BONUS for HIGH perception score. A bonus you can build your character strategy around.
Just compare:
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High strength: brute that can take up a beating, largely ignore environmental health hazards, smash/force things open, deal very impressive damage, and in the LATE game carry all the best high-tech equipment and heavy armor without becoming overloaded.
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High dexterity: master of hit-and-run tactics and narrow escapes, simply zips in, gets what he came for, and zips out, dodging hits left and right. In LATE game can maintain very high attacks speed, killing Zâs faster than they can swarm.
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High intelligence: master of crafting and bionics. Can install bionics safely MUCH earlier than anyone else, thus quickly skyrocketing from early/mid character into late-game cybernetic swiz-army-knife.
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High perception: poor manâs high dexterity. Can also see better at night, I guess. Well, better than someone without a flashlight, that is. Can also hear better, thus having a hard time sleeping because of a woodpecker half a mile away. In LATE game can stare very intensively at the choices he made during character creation.
What kind of penalties?
Success chance? Sure, but it will be almost completely irrelevant, as you are almost never limited by the components and can simply try again and again.
Crafting time? Sure, mildly unpleasant, but, again, not a limiting factor.
Ability to craft at all? Well, thatâs not the domain of dexterity or perception, but rather intelligence.
Reasonably speaking you CANâT give a bonus for high stats that doesnât also apply a penalty for low stats. It wouldnât make any sense if high perception made you craft faster but low perception kept the same speed. For the most part stats scale linearly or drop off at the high end, not start normally and start applying a bonus at the high end. Besides, the main point here is penalties for low stats so that people donât just dump all their points into strength, and thereâs multiple ways to go about that.
Strength is a good example actually, as having low strength limits your melee damage, ranged weapon use, carrying capacity, and even your HP. Low strength can easily cripple a characterâs abilities, so it would be reasonable for other low stats to have the same impact.
Iâd say all three. Limiting crafting recipe levels to, say, 1.5x your intelligence would mean that anyone of intelligence 6 or lower would no longer be able to craft top end recipes. It makes sense that a moron wouldnât be able to wrap their head around things like advanced electronics and mechanisms.
Speed would also make sense, a combination of intelligence, perception, and dexterity that all affect how quickly a person can put things together. Some things wouldnât matter, like boiling water, so there would have to be a way to mark recipes as an exception, but for the most part being slow, blind, and stupid would make it really hard to put together complex things quickly.
Success chance is also good. High intelligence already gives a small bonus, increasing that or adding a penalty at low levels would be good. A bonus for perception, representing your ability to perceive when youâve made a mistake and limit its effect or fix it before it becomes a problem, would be a good idea.
I disagree that success chance is irrelevant. Earlygame failures can really slow you down, or even get you killed, if you arenât able to put together something important with what little materials you have. Lategame it would be even more terrifying to risk your super rare components that you only have one of.
This really bring me back to the question of what exactly are we solving here:
- min/maxing as such (e.g. the fact that a build with one âprimaryâ stat can be just as or even more viable than a "balancedâ build)
or
- the fact that strength is much more useful than other stats
Because for me min/maxing simply isnât really the issue. Itâs the fact dexterity and perception are flat out BAD for âmaxingâ.
And weâve had quite a few good ideas for dexterity, but I really struggle to find a role for perception that will make âmaxingâ it a viable option.
We want to solve both, ideally, as theyâre both a problem in the long term and both reinforce each other.
Our ideal end result is minmaxing a particular stat has a positive effect, e.g high strength = more hp, better smash, carry more, etc. But it also has to have a negative effect, e.g low intelligence = Slower reading, harder crafting. Either way our net effect has to be neutral, or even negative. Minmaxing should basically be an RP tool or something for letting you try a particular playstyle earlier and more effectively than normal. If it has a net POSITIVE effect then youâre never going to have balanced characters, just those that prefer ranged and go for perception, those that prefer melee and go for strength, those that prefer speed and go for dexterity, and those that prefer equipment and go for intelligence.
That said, the only way to fix strength with regards to other stats is to give the other stats equivalent penalties to those that strength has, and equivalent bonuses to those that strength has. Otherwise you will ALWAYS have the issue that one or more stats is a dump stat that you can safely ignore for others. Dumping a stat or two because you want to go for a particular playstyle is fine. Receiving no penalties to other playstyles is not.
An overmap sight range bonus for perception would be good, especially once Z levels are properly implemented and being in a high location that gives you an unobstructed view of far away things would actually be affected by how far away you can make out those things.
Ok, so the one piece of the puzzle I still canât see is what kind of a positive bonus high perception can give that will be good enough to consider it over strength or intelligence.
Because
high str = use things you otherwise canât and smash things you otherwise canât
high int = install right away bionics you otherwise canât
high perception = ???
Well, we use our strength mainly in combat, our intelligence mainly in crafting, and our dexterity mainly in avoiding danger. Our senses, however, we use all the time. Our general situational awareness and ability to make sense of whatâs going on is ALWAYS important, and should probably have effects on anything and everything. That said, actually applying it that way would make it boring as hell, since you could never have low perception and maxing it would have little or no tangible effect.
As for more things it would make sense for it to strongly affect, ranged combat is the first thing that comes to mind. I heard an idea, probably on Discord, of using it to modify headshots. I.E low perception makes it nearly impossible to get headshots, higher perception gives you a better chance. I rather like it, effectively making it the crit chance stat for ranged, while dex is the crit chance stat for melee.
Thereâs also something to be said for overmap ranges, since that can make a big difference ingame, actually knowing when thereâs a useful location nearby or just driving past because you canât see it can make a huge difference.
I like the idea of it modifying hearing quality, but thatâs currently handled in a nearly binary fashion, I.E you have good, normal, or bad hearing. Trying to expand that might get difficult.
Having it modify the chance at which you can identify items/enemies isnât a bad idea. Something along the lines of anything beyond triple your perception tiles away is just listed as âsmall itemâ âitemâ or âpile of itemsâ. Enemies too, could be âhumanoidâ âsmall quadrupedâ, etc. High perception would help keep you safe, while taking low perception makes you roll the dice on how close youâre willing to let a potentially dangerous creature get before you know if you can fight it, possibly with the ability to activate binoculars or a rifle scope to get a better look at something far away.
Once stealth mechanics get fleshed out it could be exceptionally useful, letting you spot hidden enemies faster and from a longer distance, but also letting you use your senses to determine whether your own hiding spot is adequate, helping you sneak more quietly and stay out of lines of sight, etc. While most of that would be primarily player input, thereâs something to be said for noticing a stray stick or piece of gravel before you step on it, or noticing that your foot is sticking out of the long grass youâre hidden in.
So what exactly will you be able to do with high (say, 14) perception you will not be able to do with normal (8) perception?
If we really want to go ALL the way with intelligence, Iâd say
- limit recipes level you can âauto-learnâ (aka âthink of by yourselfâ) to (intelligence - 3)
- limit recipes level you use (if you already know it or have reference) to (intelligence - 1)
- make if so you permanently learn any âauto learnâ recipe if you ever attempted to craft it even once (to make sure you donât suddenly forget how to make arrows because you have a flu).
So now with int 4 you are stuck with just basic stuff (level 0-1 auto-learn), with average you can get most things, but you need above average (or drugs) to invent functional survivor gear or to understand complex chemistry (cooking in game terms).
Youâd have a higher chance of headshots, higher general accuracy, higher overmap sight range, be able to see things from a greater distance, and be harder to detect while sneaking/hiding. Thatâs a pretty good array of decent bonuses, even if a lack of any of them doesnât actually cripple the player. Which is about how it should go.
Itâs the same for strength, really. The only real âthresholdâ bonuses for strength is being able to smash certain things with slightly weaker weapons and access to stronger bows, though thatâs effectively just bow damage scaling, not an actual can or cannot do.
While I do think limiting SOME recipes on intelligence is a good idea, looking at it again there may have to be some caveats. For example, a nodachi is difficulty 10 for fabrication, and that doesnât require any particular intelligence beyond knowing where and how to hit a piece of metal (oversimplified, but the point stands) while something truly difficult knowledge-wise, like complex chemicals or an advanced piece of electronics would definitely require a high level of intelligence.
To that end, I suspect the way to handle it would be to limit certain technical skills (electronics, computers, cooking, and first aid off the top of my head) to the height of your intelligence stat. That not only limits a number of high-end recipes, but also limits the actual effects of those skills, hacking with computers and healing with first aid.
That said, you may also be able to limit certain other skills to other stats, bashing weapons to strength, marksmanship to perception, dodging to dexterity. That might be more trouble than itâs worth and I canât say I honestly like the idea, just would like to put it out there.
Yea, well, the reason I want an âumbrellaâ rule for crafting vs intelligence is that it would be easy (easier, anyway) to code and easy to communicate to player base.
A few cases like nodachi needing 11 int to craft does not seem THAT off the mark and may have more to do with the fact nodachi should not be lvl 10 recipe in the first place (seems more like lvl 8, thatâs what you need to read the recipe from the book).
Issue being an âumbrellaâ rule is a bit harsh, and makes it basically impossible to play without 10 or more intelligence if you want access to reasonably good gear. The issue is simply that some skills are not as technical as others, and donât rely on intelligence so much as practice and/or knowledge. Fabrication, for example, does max out with high-end metalwork like swords and armor. Anything more complicated tends to be pushed into mechanics.
Not really?
I mean, with int 8 you will be able to craft anything up to lvl 7 by default and thatâs where most of the âreasonably good gearâ is. And the few things that are beyond lvl 7 you will STILL be able to craft if you boost your int with some drugs.
But Iâm ok with having more lax restriction for high-end fabrication and tailoring as far as actual crafting goes, as long as you still need high int to âinventâ all that stuff without a reference.
Pneumatic bolt driver, ANBC suit, and mutagen are all level 8. A substantial portion of the good lategame gear is level 8 or higher and craftable only, so there are some fairly serious limits to what you can actually reach, and being able to drink some coffee just so you can be smart enough to cook mutagen is awfully weird.
One way or the other, I really think that would be enough to make intelligence 11 a must-have for most people simply because it blocks off some content, and Iâd like to avoid that sort of thing.
I can agree with the autolearn recipes, but for the most part if you have a circuit diagram and a set of blueprints in front of you youâre going to be able to manage it. Maybe something like with reading, where having less than the required intelligence substantially slows you down so it takes it twice as long to make, but blocking it off entirely wouldnât sit well I think.