Hi - completely new poster here, with a suggestion to add to the reality of this amazing game.
I propose that book recipes with (fabrication) skill requirements above current skill levels can still be attempted and if they don’t fail, they produce lower quality (i.e. damaged) items that otherwise work as normal. As fab skill improves, so does quality of item until all are made perfectly. (Unless critical failures become a future development?)
For example, a wooden tonfa is a very easy thing to make IRL but in-game requires fab 4 and bash 3. I’ve modded an easier version but it’s not the same - perfect quality first attempt. My IRL experience is that the first ones I made were flimsy but with practise I improved until they were robust enough that I could bash through a brick wall with them. All with just a 2x4 and a knife!
Am I doing this right, or should I be posting this elsewhere? Thanks.
you’re good
and the problem with that is power creep if the skills don’t matter then it will become a hoarding game where all the lower quality or lower skill stuff is skipped over for the end game gear and just brute forced with whatever loot can be grabbed from the various locations
also with how the skill system progresses now creating high skill requirement things (high difficulty) raises your skills much faster than lower difficulty things
overall this would completely overturn the balance of the skill progression system
Thanks.
Ha - I think it’s already a ‘hording’ game!
And my characters habitually hoard scraps too - the rag and bone man’s approach to the apocalypse. For me, I have too much fun recycling junk to care much about the ‘end game gear’. In fact, all the high-tech stuff is something of a thrill-killer for me because the game gets too easy and I end up mi-go bashing for lulz.
But to address your points:
‘brute forcing end game gear’ still requires costly components acquisition and recipes, which depend on rare book finds etc…
trying something way beyond our skill level is how we learn best, as long as doesn’t kill us - we get stronger.
In PC (Post Cataclysm), no one tells us we can or can’t do something - we have an idea and try it out. And we still are penalised for being too ambitious by failure, wasting time/food, costly components and only ending up with poor quality items i.e. a wooden tonfa that does less damage and breaks easily.
IMHO it would improve game balance not ruin it. My two cents, hopefully not nonsense.
Or am I overlooking something obvious?
One big problem is that the game doesn’t really have a quality system, but instead has a repair system with a potential reinforcement step above that.
Most items, however, can’t really be improved by reinforcement as improvements would require structural improvements rather than repair type ones. Thus, a real quality level system would somehow manage to define different quality items (that can also be in different states of disrepair) in a manner that doesn’t generate silly +1/+2/… items, but items where the quality differences make sense, which probably would require the various quality levels to be defined in the item JSON descriptions, which would probably be quite a bit of work both in terms of brute force work and in terms of making reasonable quality levels.
Thanks for the response. I’m not proposing any new quality levels - just that poorly made items have lower ‘health’. Hmm - perhaps I wasn’t clear enough when I wrote:
Definitely no +1 modifiers etc!
The best a newly made item can be is normal quality but if attempted with lower skill levels, they will likely fail or consume extra materials as they currently do or (I propose) are created with a damaged status, hence just |. or . instead of || etc.
IRL, the first pair of nunchaku that I made snapped after a few swings and nearly broke a window. I guess they were . quality. Better than nothing PC but still risky to rely upon. But my 4th pair could have rattled a skelly real good.
