The Trait Limit

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

This is more of a question of “why” than any suggestion.

Why is there a 12-point limit on negative and positive traits? I just don’t see a reason for it.

If it’s there for balancing issues, then perhaps have something in the options that lets you change the trait point limit, similar to changing the starting point limit.

The reason this bugs me so much is that I like to make RP-based characters, and it’s hard to get some character ideas when I can’t get all the good/bad traits I want.

The only reason I could see for keeping it is if there is some technical limitation, but I don’t see how that’d be an issue since as far as I can tell there aren’t any combination of traits that would break anything, or at least as far as I can see.

2

AFAIK it’s a balance thing. If you want more/less traits you can use the debug menu and wish the traits in.

3

For RP purposes, or when ever I feel like having very little FUN!, I use Cheat Engine to hack points…
Works for permanent numbers. Ie Skills, skill points, Item stacks (like batteries).

I highly recommend sticking to Start up skills and traits though as item hacking is hit and miss as well as buggy.
Be sure to freeze the numbers and unfreeze them BEFORE doing any thing else. You WILL crash your game.

4

To be honest I feel that the 12 point limit is a bit constricting, but then again there is balance to deal with.
Still, I think it should be upped to a minimum of 14 at least.

5

I think ideally those 12 points should be linked to something else that affects how many points you get. Though I’m not quite sure what at the moment. Smushing it against the base stats seems a little out of place.

6

It does suck that you can’t take a certain set of traits you want because of the limit. Some of the traits cost like 4 points. That means you’re pretty limited if you are working with high value traits, versus taking a bunch of low value traits.

But it’s weird when you have a character with like 50 traits because you took a pile of good ones and bad ones to compensate. Nobody is that messed up.

So some limit makes sense. I suppose you could limit by number of traits rather than point value of traits.

So you might take 6 good traits (worth 15) and 6 bad traits (worth 12) and end up costing 3 character creation points. If the player wants to balance their trait values to equal zero they can do that, but not by using a bunch of low value negative traits that have little to no impact on the game.

7

…It’s full of stars. Of course, then we’d have to decide on the value of the better traits vs the useless ones. If heartless is worth the same as android, for example.

8

Originally, there was no limit on number of traits, and people were able to make fiendishly overpowered characters by selecting nearly every trait and raising their stats to absurd levels.

After that there was a hard limit of three traits of each kind, but this made negative and positive low point value traits worthless.

The problem is that nearly every single negative trait will make your character more powerful with than without. Most negative traits simply reduce your characters choices or introduce an annoying element- an easy trade for +3 STR or +4 Dex. When there was a three trait limit, I always took Schizo, Asthmatic, and Glass Jaw, because this was simply the optimal choice of traits.

With six bad traits, I could take Asthmatic, Schizo, Glass Jaw, Addictive Personality, Bad Back, and Poor Hearing for a total of 26 points with the starting 6. That’s enough for 14 in every stat and 2 left over for traits. Such a character would be significantly more powerful than one that you can build with the existing system.

I think the way it works now is just fine. If you feel the need to play with more traits than you can start with, you can use the debug menu to add them to your character. Maybe someone could add a option to increase the maximum point value of starting traits. Though using such an option would be akin to cheating in my mind.

9

Why take negative traits for more points when you can just change it In the options? I mean in a way your cheating in either case.
Also again for those of us that RP it does get in the way sometimes.

10

…It’s full of stars. Of course, then we’d have to decide on the value of the better traits vs the useless ones. If heartless is worth the same as android, for example.[/quote]

The traits could still cost the same number of character creation points. It’d just be that you could only select a maximum of X number of good and X number of bad traits, rather than stopping you when you reach a value of 12 regardless of how many traits it took to get there.

@Vucar Fikodastesh;

Yes, you could take a large number of debilitating flaws and get piles of points. But if the point reward for these flaws are not representative of their imposed difficulty then they should be lowered. Frankly the character you just described sounds pretty hard to play even with 26 points - and no doubt much of that would be going toward positive traits.

I don’t really see a problem with what you just described, in any case. But that’s just one perspective. If you want to horribly handicap your character for some particularly nice traits and some extra skills, what is the problem with that? That’s the whole point of the trait system. And again, if the negative traits are not imposing adequate difficulty for their reward, lower the reward.

If we want to talk about ‘optimal’ builds, it’s really easy to get 12 freebie points by stacking a pile of 1 and 2 point flaws onto a character that barely have any impact on the game (some have literally no impact on the game as it is now). At least the high value flaws actually do create problems for you. So 12 freebie points with barely any impact, or 26 points with serious repercussions.

11

That collection of traits isn’t “horribly handicapped”, it is literally the character I would play if this suggestion went into the game. With the exception of asthmatic(make sure you have an inhaler, and schizo(a collection of minor issues which are easy enough to work around if you know what you’re doing), none of the traits I listed would have any serious affect on my game play. I’d probably spend the points for 14 in every stat except int, and just pick up quick for a trait.

With the exception of a few seriously flawed traits such as meat allergy and illiterate- that no one in their right mind will choose, every negative trait is worth getting for more attribute points.

The people who load up on tons of negative traits are not the ones who are horribly gimping their characters. It is, rather, the people who aren’t.

12

As long as we have the option to increase the starting points from the options menu, any “free” negative trait is just non-sense, unless someone wants an uber-build. I like the traits for what they add to the game and i use them to add spice to the gameplay. Mostly bad traits, for added difficulty. Whoever RPs needs freedom of choice as to how to build their char, but even this is possible through the debug menu, so again i fail to see where the problem lays. You need a shitload of points, get them directly. You need a shitload of traits, just do the same.

13

[quote=“Vucar Fikodastesh, post:11, topic:1115”]That collection of traits isn’t “horribly handicapped”, it is literally the character I would play if this suggestion went into the game. With the exception of asthmatic(make sure you have an inhaler, and schizo(a collection of minor issues which are easy enough to work around if you know what you’re doing), none of the traits I listed would have any serious affect on my game play. I’d probably spend the points for 14 in every stat except int, and just pick up quick for a trait.

With the exception of a few seriously flawed traits such as meat allergy and illiterate- that no one in their right mind will choose, every negative trait is worth getting for more attribute points.

The people who load up on tons of negative traits are not the ones who are horribly gimping their characters. It is, rather, the people who aren’t.[/quote]

You seemed to miss this even though I said it twice for emphasis, so I will say it again: if the penalty for a flaw doesn’t reflect its point value, then lower its point value.

Nothing you’ve said here says anything to me except that given someone is a min-maxer, they will exploit the system. So… make the system less exploitable. You are arguing as if the current system isn’t perfectly exploitable, yet it is. In fact, exploitation is built right into the options menu in the form of freely giving yourself as many points as you’d like.

Personally, I fine tune characters to fill a certain role, whether that is a lab geek or an ex-soldier or a street kid or a schizophrenic cannibal with a side helping of mood disorder. So when people tell me they don’t want more options because they’re going to find a way to exploit it and min-max, I say have at it. Do your thing, man. Enjoy it. I like to create challenges, and even if there’s a more open system I’m still going to do that.

The best solution to min-maxing is to balance the system better. It’s not necessarily the best solution to arbitrarily limit players who might want to simply craft characters the way they’d like to, just because some players can’t help but max their stats with the same cookie cutter builds every time.

Granted, I suggested switching one arbirtrary limit for another, but it’s a less strict limit; but one that keeps you from stockpiling minor flaws. In order to pay for those big merits you need to choose your flaws wisely. And on the whole, merits are costlier things than flaws compensate for. Or at least, they should be. Stuff like Schizophrenia shouldn’t reward as much as it does unless its effects are worsened.

14

First of all, trying to make the most effective character you can within the limits of the game environment is a very different thing than giving yourself more character points. The first is the point of the game for many people, and the second is simply cheating.

And you don’t have to be a “min-maxer” to pick whichever are the best traits for your play style. I’d dare say that this is how the majority of people play roguelikes. The concept of game balance has to be kept in mind. If a given change will result in more powerful characters for a great deal of players, then the game must be made more difficult in other ways. And as I said before, I am fine with people having the option of increasing the trait limits, but as with the option of increasing starting points, people would have to understand that they might be making the game easier for themselves.

And as far as balancing the point cost of traits, this is only possible up to a point. Different people have different play styles, and different traits can be very effective or simply worthless, depending on how you play. In my case, I usually play melee characters, so I always pick trigger-happy, because I never use automatic firearms. Likewise, my characters almost always use tons of addictive substances, but for characters who choose to never use them, addictive personality is essentially free points.

15

This is what i don’t get, why pick a perk that will not influence your game in any way…
Forgetful with no skill decay, ugly and Truth teller with no NPCs, trigger happy for melee chars, and so on.
I’m not telling anyone how to play their game, but i am curious … what’s the point? If you need more free points, just get them from options, this is no “balance” anyway, it’s just another form of , well, cheating yourself.

16

So far as I can tell it’s a separate challenge: to make the most “powerful” or “interesting” character within the rules of the game. Simply turning up the points is too easy, whereas effectively picking traits so they don’t over-impinge on the player’s options adds its own challenge.

And my melee character takes Trigger Happy. He also has Glass Jaw and both sleep problems (Heavy/Insomniac). Unfortunately, he also started with only 12 IN, 11 ST, and 10 DX/PE. And I’ve a lovely stockpile of firearms & ammo that I’m afraid to use for fear of not finding more. But if need be, he could grab an MP5, Saiga-12, or FN SCAR-L and cut loose.

17

Based on discussion, I think that the suggestion to make the trait cap configurable rather than hard-coded (whatever form the trait cap takes) is probably something that should be implemented. That would allow people to RP their choice of positive or negative traits, without impacting the gameplay possible with the default settings. And, unlike using the debug menu, it doesn’t require post-chargen tinkering (and hence, they can save their archetypes as templates if they desire).

[quote=“Ferodaktyl, post:15, topic:1115”]This is what i don’t get, why pick a perk that will not influence your game in any way…
Forgetful with no skill decay, ugly and Truth teller with no NPCs, trigger happy for melee chars, and so on.
I’m not telling anyone how to play their game, but i am curious … what’s the point? If you need more free points, just get them from options, this is no “balance” anyway, it’s just another form of , well, cheating yourself.[/quote]

Because the number goes higher! On default settings! I can’t NOT make that number go higher :P. Although I do avoid traits that are complete no-ops - Trigger Happy with a melee/bow character is fine, IMO, but I dislike doing things like Forgetful with no skill rust.

18

One possible solution is add another option or mode.

RP mode. This mode gives massive points in character creation, no trait limit, and a starting item selector.

This way:
1)RP-ers can do they thang.
2)Legit players and brag-aholics can do thay theng.
3)Erry bodies happy*

In the mean time you have 3rd party hackers and a retarded debug menu.

Who messed it around anyway?

*3 does not apply to the coders whom have to figure out how to code this.