Suggestion for increasing stats

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Currently the only way to increase stats is to get lucky with mutation. So, I started thinking about ways that they could be increased in game. I wanted to keep it simple and intuitive, while not encouraging “grinding”. This is the best I came up with:

Every skill has one or two governing stats. For example, bashing weapons would be strength, dodging would be dexterity, mechanics could be intelligence or intelligence\strength. Raising a skill by one will give you one point towards the stat for the skill. In the case of a skill with two stats, it would be half a point towards both.

Now, I would imagine strength would be the easiest to raise, followed by dexterity, with intelligence and perception very difficult to raise. To simulate that (and provide an easy way to adjust balance) you would gain a new stat point when you reach a total different for each stat. I’m thinking 8-10 for strength, 10-15 for dex, and maybe 20+ for int and perception.

So, in practice this would mean that if you raised your bashing skill, for example, from 0-8 you would gain a point of strength. However, to raise int a point you would need to learn 20~ levels worth of crafting skills(or whatever skills are assigned to Int). So a character would be unlikely to gain more than 1 or 2 points of int during the game.

It seems pretty intuitive that smashing things makes you stronger, and dodging things makes you more agile, and so forth. It kinda encourages grinding I feel, but everyone grinds skills anyways. It would reward specialized characters with stat gains.

A small note on this; skills raised from books or at chargen should not lead to stat increases. This would give books a small drawback which may or may not be a good thing.

As always, fell free to provide criticism or add on to it.

2

What if you want to raise a stat without messing with the skills? I want to become stronger for the extra HP and carrying weight, but I mainly use guns, should I have to pick up a baseball bat, putting myself at high risk because of my lack of skills with it, just for that?

On the other side of the coin, this makes long term characters even stronger than before, as now that they’ve got the skills that make them really robust, they also have additional stats to go with them. Also, increasing your intelligence in chargen would cause you to get strong faster, since you would learn Bashing faster due to it.

I agree that there should be some other way to gain stats post-chargen, but this way is probably not a good way to do it.

3

While it would obviously require some balance, I don’t think it would be hard to make it so that there are diminishing returns.

If you have skill bashing which puts a point into Strength training, the number of points you need to raise your Strength could be equal to the Desired Stat multiplied by 1.5 (rounded up).

So in order to get from Strength 1 to Strength 2 would only require 3 points (desired stat 21.5), but to get from strength 9 to strength 10 would require 15 skill raises (101.5). This way it makes it rather hard to raise a skill more than once or twice unless you started pretty low.

One problem is that would encourage min/maxing somewhat, as lower stats are easier to raise with skills, but it is helped by the fact that it would be rather difficult to raise a stat more than a few times even when starting at a very low number, as the amount of skill raises required to go from, for example, 2 to 8 would be prohibitive (it would require 51 skill raises of skills that impact strength. More if a skill only gave half a point to strength).

So although you could get extra points by taking very low stats, and improve them more easily, you will probably never get those stats to a point where they are particularly good despite your starting circumstances.

But it would let a person gain one or two raises over a long period of time and give some sense of progression.

4

[quote=“sodapop, post:2, topic:780”]What if you want to raise a stat without messing with the skills? I want to become stronger for the extra HP and carrying weight, but I mainly use guns, should I have to pick up a baseball bat, putting myself at high risk because of my lack of skills with it, just for that?

On the other side of the coin, this makes long term characters even stronger than before, as now that they’ve got the skills that make them really robust, they also have additional stats to go with them. Also, increasing your intelligence in chargen would cause you to get strong faster, since you would learn Bashing faster due to it.

I agree that there should be some other way to gain stats post-chargen, but this way is probably not a good way to do it.[/quote]

Thats a good point. I read your post and thought about it some more and I think you are right and that this is not really a good way to implement stat increases. Tying it into skills makes sense in that you get better at what you do, but it also might make people grind skills useless to their character\playstyle just for the stats. This would instantly ruin immersion (and isn’t that what its all about?), and upon thinking further about this, I realize this would encourage grinding in a big way.

Hyenas diminishing returns idea really helps discourage grinding I feel, but it still doesn’t address the issue of a gunslinger who would otherwise never bash skulls in just doing it for the stats.

I don’t really see a way around that though. . .there’s nothing besides skills that keeps track of character progression. So there’s nothing besides skills to base stat increases off of. Most other roguelikes I’ve played give you stats when you level up, but you never level up in Cata.

I guess the biggest question is should stats increase from skills? And, if not, how should they be raised?

5

Related to thread;

There were somewhat different idea about stats increases in form of workout where you’d get stat boost but you’d have to commit and upkeep to keep the benefit.

http://www.cataclysmdda.com/smf/index.php?topic=461.0