XP and learning - opinions?

[Grackle]

[quote=“GlyphGryph, post:9, topic:703”]B)
Have skill books pull from the experience pool, but at a reduced rate. Especially when combined with the above system, this would mean intelligent characters would have more reason to read (they can do it more often) while stupider characters should take up other hobbies that are less of a resource drain.[/quote]

I like this one. Or you could actually have the pool divided in between Book XP and Street XP. A dumb character could have like 100/600, while a smart character could have like 400/700. That would give him better at street smarts and way better book smarts, emphasizing their nerdiness.

I’ve heard DarklingWolf talk about changing how skill books work, possibly removing them entirely. I agree that changing how they work might be good for a full overhaul of the system, although I’m not sure at the moment what the best solution overall is regarding skill books.

Skillbooks would still have a place even if they did nothing but let you increase a skill without using materials. You could skip pointless grinding – like in Skyrim where you have to churn out countless iron daggers to raise your blacksmithing. In Cata there’s enough to do with most skills, like construction and mechanics, that you don’t usually need to craft make unnecessary stuff. (Although, I have hacksawed apart random vehicles just for the skill.) But for things like electronics, it would be nice to have a way to learn without assembling and dissembling radios over over.

Personally I think skill rust is terrible and either it should be taken out Or at least greatly slowed and capped, and recovering from skill rust should be much faster than gaining the skill to begin with and not cost any experience at all. (You’re not relearning, after all! You’re just shaking off the rust.)

Yeah, skill rust is pretty bad. It’s not especially realisitic, and it’s just a really irritating game mechanic. I assume most people just turn it off.

[quote=“GlyphGryph, post:24, topic:703”]What I’d like, as a base “solution” for skill rust and some changes to reading, is to have three “skill values” per skill.

Actual Level
Elevated Level
Rust Penalty[/quote]
I agree with the three levels, but I don’t know if books should be used for giving temporary buffs like that. That’s sort of how it worked in FalloutNV, and I’d have my characters read a magazine right before any speech event. And those were consumables, basically potions. With non-consumable books, your character’s skill is effectively 1 rank higher at the cost of storage space and a round or two to read before trying to hack a computer or whatever.

So books wouldn’t be something you study on your downtime but something you carry with you. It would make them overlap with drugs.

[GlyphGryph]

Well, the difference as that the time commitment for gaining points form a book would be similar to what you have now. It would be a couple hours with the book to gain an elevated level. And then you’d go out and practice that, or you dedicate a whole day to studying the book and go out and practice in bulk.

The temporary elevated bonus would last around a day.

Still not really effective to do in the spot of the moment, but yes, if you’ve got an hour before /whatever/ for some reason, reviewing the book first will give you a boost.

Finally, books would only be able to boost you up to the same levels they do now. It’s not a flat boost, but rather that can raise your skill to the designated elevated skill level for that book.

[Grackle]

So the XP Pool is really weird. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game with anything like it. I sort of enjoy it, because it adds another layer or strategy to the game, but it is also really wonky and encourages strange behavior: like sleeping in the middle of day, or avoiding fights–not because they’re dangerous–but because you don’t want to misspend XP on learning how to better swing your frying pan.

My main complaint with the pool is that it’s so absolute. You either have xp to spend or you don’t. Once your brain is out of juice, you just stop learning. I think a better system would have you gradually stop learning well. As you get tired, you should get steadily diminishing XP returns for your actions. Like you have a normal Rate-of-Gain of 1.0, you get 10 xp per action, and it drops to 0.9, and then you get 9xp per action, etc. That way you have to actually need to think about when to call it a day. As it is now, you don’t have think about it all: your XP runs out and it’s clearly foolish to continue fighting or working. In the middle of a fight, you’ll just drop everything and run home home to boil water or read books or whatever-- or you’re like me and only realize afterward that you had no XP in your pool and gained no skill ranks for shotgunning scores of zombies.

That’s just a suggestion, there are probably other better ways to do it, but it really should have a less stark divide between learning/not learning.

[GlyphGryph]

Personally I’d like to change the name of the current morale stuff to “Mood”, and have it exist basically as it does now, and then I’d like to have in place of the XP pool a Morale level.

And yeah, the rate at which your skills gain experience would be based on your morale level. So you’d have to dedicate time maintaining that, and a sour mood or even a neutral mood would gradually lower it over time.

My algorithm would be a bit more complex than could be expected,but it would basically be “Over time, your morale approaches your current mood. If your morale is lower than your mood, it will slowly tic up. If it is higher than your mood, it will tic down. The further it is from your mood, the faster it will accelerate towards it.”

[Grackle]

[quote=“GlyphGryph, post:26, topic:703”]Well, the difference as that the time commitment for gaining points form a book would be similar to what you have now. It would be a couple hours with the book to gain an elevated level. And then you’d go out and practice that, or you dedicate a whole day to studying the book and go out and practice in bulk.

The temporary elevated bonus would last around a day.

Still not really effective to do in the spot of the moment, but yes, if you’ve got an hour before /whatever/ for some reason, reviewing the book first will give you a boost.

Finally, books would only be able to boost you up to the same levels they do now. It’s not a flat boost, but rather that can raise your skill to the designated elevated skill level for that book.[/quote]

I’m not against that idea, it works OK in Fallout, and there are some cool things ways you could tie traits or stats into it, like having the elevated-bonus last longer for smarter characters. It’s just that I like having books as a way to skip grinding-- or rather to skip the pointless crafting. Churning out useless stuff just to increase a skill is bad in any game (single player games at least), but it especially doesn’t fit in a game about scavenging and scarcity.

Potentially, you could have types of books that work differently. Or you could have different ways to read a book, like ‘review’ it for a temporary bonus or ‘study’ to spend XP and gain the skill for real.

(We should also probably keep in mind that there will be NPC teachers eventually, and a character will be able to trade stuff for skills.)

[GlyphGryph]

I’d also like to introduce a “practice” action for a number of skills that increase your skill (and consume resources) but don’t produce actual products. Practicing technique and whatnot. Maybe have a product be produced occasionally and somewhat randomly, but that’s not the primary purpose of the action. Similar to how, at the moment, you can often “practice sewining” on something. This is something I’ve been pushing for since Whale’s was the sole developer, and it’s something I intend on putting in myself - if no one else does - eventually.

So you could go in with a book, a ton of thread and a ton of cloth, read the book for the boost, hit ^(practice tailoring) and come out the next morning without any actual useful products but with a solid mastery of the techniques and skills outlined in the book.

So if you want to gain skills quickly and effortlessly (from a players perspective - you still need to find a safe location, the needed tools, and a pile of materials on hand), you can do so. But you’ll need to set up a well stocked workshop for it to be an option.

[Grackle]

[quote=“GlyphGryph, post:28, topic:703”]Personally I’d like to change the name of the current morale stuff to “Mood”, and have it exist basically as it does now, and then I’d like to have in place of the XP pool a Morale level.

And yeah, the rate at which your skills gain experience would be based on your morale level. So you’d have to dedicate time maintaining that, and a sour mood or even a neutral mood would gradually lower it over time.

My algorithm would be a bit more complex than could be expected,but it would basically be “Over time, your morale approaches your current mood. If your morale is lower than your mood, it will slowly tic up. If it is higher than your mood, it will tic down. The further it is from your mood, the faster it will accelerate towards it.”[/quote]

So a more cumulative and long term morale? That sounds pretty cool. The current morale system is very swingy. You can be bleeding, wet, gnawed on by wolves, and miserable one minute, but then a coke and a cigar will fix you right up. It doesn’t really capture the feel of survival horror.

In your proposed set up, I would say that tiredness should affect morale rather than mood-- or, better yet, directly affect the learning rate. There should be something that limits how much one can learn in a day. I assume that was the point of the XP Pool in the first place, to prevent situations where a character goes from novice to grand master in the course of an afternoon.

[Grackle]

[quote=“GlyphGryph, post:30, topic:703”]I’d also like to introduce a “practice” action for a number of skills that increase your skill (and consume resources) but don’t produce actual products. Practicing technique and whatnot. Maybe have a product be produced occasionally and somewhat randomly, but that’s not the primary purpose of the action. Similar to how, at the moment, you can often “practice sewining” on something. This is something I’ve been pushing for since Whale’s was the sole developer, and it’s something I intend on putting in myself - if no one else does - eventually.

So you could go in with a book, a ton of thread and a ton of cloth, read the book for the boost, hit ^(practice tailoring) and come out the next morning without any actual useful products but with a solid mastery of the techniques and skills outlined in the book.

So if you want to gain skills quickly and effortlessly (from a players perspective - you still need to find a safe location, the needed tools, and a pile of materials on hand), you can do so. But you’ll need to set up a well stocked workshop for it to be an option.[/quote]

Practicing would work too. As long as there’s some way to increase skills without mass-producing socks and without having to push the same three buttons a hundred times in a row. If you could combine that with this…

I think the grindiness of downtime is a mostly separate issue, but also in need of being addressed. What do you think about making reading into “read for X time” instead of “read a book”, “read a book”, “read a book”, etc…

…and enter a command to “practice sewing for two hours”, that would be fantastic.

[kevin.granade]

Things that seem to have no disagreement:
Add sanity to rust accumulation (my proposal for practice fending off rust regardless of xp availability) (no one said anything to disagree with this, I view it as a bug)
A rust mechanic that makes it much easier to recover from rusted skills.
xp and morale need a better description, they’re almost totally arbitrary now.

I think we can take #3 as a given, then again it’s not actionable, so rather pointless, let me know if you disagree strongly on #1 and/or #2, because I’ll probably be implementing these sooner rather than later, with full knowledge that it can be scrapped to go in a different direction almost immediately.

Other proposals:
Splitting skills into knowledge/experience, which probably synergize to give a composite skill level.
Re-theming morale/xp to mood/morale
Changing how morale and xp interact
Changing how xp is “expended” on skill gains.
Books as temporary buffs.
Skill books consuming or lowering accrual of xp.

Unless I’m wrong about the first group, discussion should focus on these (along with any I failed to list of course).
My stances on these:
Splitting skills into knowledge/experience, which probably synergize to give a composite skill level.
I’m sympathetic to this, thematically it’s a home-run IMO, and mechanically it’s nice in that it supplies an almost-dilemma between studying and doing. Unless this has massive problems that I’m not seeing or a conflicting proposal is some how much, much better, this is the way I’d like to go.

Re-theming morale/xp to mood/morale
I’ve been struggling to recast morale/xp in different terms for months, and this is it, regardless of HOW they work, I think these are the real candidates for the psychological stats.

Changing how morale and xp interact
Some form of this is definitely called for, it’s pretty rudimentary now, but there hasn’t been a specific enough suggestion to evaluate.

Changing how xp is “expended” on skill gains.
I was making proposals to alter this before I started coding on the game. My favored functionality is to have xp be expended by practice, but to just scale the rate of learning rather than act as a pool, the caveat is that even at 0 xp you’d have a (VERY) small chance of skill increase per practice.

Books as temporary buffs.
I’m not a fan of this concept thematically, books just don’t work this way, and temporary buffs in general are very game-y. I could see a totally different item packaged as a book used in this way for some skills, but it would be more along the lines of using it as a reference work for some long-term activity rather than giving a skill buff with a duration. Alternately if we had a system where you learned a multitude of techniques, I could see learning a technique from a book, but running the risk of forgetting it if you don’t go out and use it soon enough. That implies a major overhaul to how a lot of the game, so I think it’s a bit out of scope for the current discussion.

Skill books consuming or lowering accrual of xp.
Seems like a good plan given the existing system, skill books have a bit of a “have your cake and eat it too” thing going where if you have time to kill and low xp, it’s simply the best activity available.

[Soron]

Regarding downtime (since this is related to learning and all), the intended motivators are when you’re too injured, when your mood is too low, or when you’re exhausted, right? I thought a bit more about that last night, and I think that injury is the only one that really feels like it works as it should (well, other than bandages being really good). When I’m sufficiently injured, yes, I will flee like my life depends on it - because it often does.

On the other hand, mood isn’t something that I directly account for when retreating, and tiredness tends to be something that just gets taken care of as part of injury. With mood, my character can be thoroughly soaked, somewhat cold, and traumatized by killing two parks’ worth of child zombies, and I as a player won’t really care. As long as my XP pool is still full, or as long as I haven’t acquired the loot I set out to find, so what? Morale can always be fixed up later with two or three reads of a drama novel.

As for tiredness, I generally view it as an excuse to heal up and/or refill my XP pool. i.e., tiredness draws me towards a bed because of all the good things I can get, rather than pushing me away from zombies because of all the risk. That seems a little backwards (not entirely - sleeping IS nice, after all - but still a little backwards).

I think that a good solution (which lines up with what others have suggested, as well) would be to go ahead with the mood/morale nomenclature, add fatigue (possibly with a mental/physical split), and instead of having an XP pool, have both morale and fatigue affect your rate of learning. To avoid exploitive behavior, I don’t think that they should ever give a bonus to learning rate (maybe a bonus to rust removal, though). Mood, morale and fatigue should probably affect other things as well, but limiting it to learning rate seems like a decent first pass.

Basically, how I envision this could work is as follows: you start out with a decent mood (and hence good morale), and a fatigue buffer (since I think a well-rested character should logically be able to absorb some fatigue before they start having issues). Most forms of practice and such will add some amount of fatigue, representing your character’s need to take a break. Rest and leisure time, regardless of its enjoyability, will remove some fatigue. Having a positive mood seems like it should slow down fatigue accrual, and probably speed recovery (I know I can code longer if I’ve got the right music playing).

Morale would have a certain baseline level, and be primarily affected by your mood - increasing slowly over time with positive mood, decreasing slowly over time with negative mood. The difference between morale and fatigue would be that morale can be raised in the field, whereas fatigue can’t be completely dealt with until you have a solid block of time (30 minutes?) to just relax. Finally finding some god damn Twinkies might help you feel better after an awful day, but it won’t change the fact that you’ve been running around, bashing zombie brains for the past 12 in-game hours.

[KA101]

No significant objections here. “Mood/morale”, as terms with similar meanings, may confuse new players but the help file can sort that out.

I agree that books-as-reference-material is a more realistic outlook, long term. ATM I like GlyphGryph’s three-component solution better, chiefly because I think I’ve got a good handle on how it works and don’t recognize any significant problems. Books as project-reference feels vague.

On the open parts of Kevin’s latest:
Splitting skills based on bookXP/useXP seems vulnerable to optimization, but that could just be it being late and my wanting to get a reply in. Will reread tomorrow.

XP/morale as skill-improvement throttle, not capacitor: Support. One of the side effects from losing the 90-minute safe window was losing safe® access to libraries, etc, and a good selection of books to fill up the first XP pool. This way the player can make observable progress from the start, and it reduces the problem of XP going to the wrong skill.

(FYI: in the @/Skills window, you can turn off XP to a skill by highlighting it and hitting Enter/Space. Comes in handy.)

Skill reading reducing XP/morale gain rate, apart from existing effect on mood: I can understand that; not completely happy, but then my combat monster has a thing for romance novels so it’s not like there’s no way to relax with reading material. Strongly suggest (believability) that this not combine with skill-book-as-reference-material.

[Grackle]

(FYI: in the @/Skills window, you can turn off XP to a skill by highlighting it and hitting Enter/Space. Comes in handy.)

Wow, I never knew that was there. What a bizarre fix.

[Grackle]

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:33, topic:703”]…
Splitting skills into knowledge/experience, which probably synergize to give a composite skill level.
I’m sympathetic to this, thematically it’s a home-run IMO, and mechanically it’s nice in that it supplies an almost-dilemma between studying and doing. Unless this has massive problems that I’m not seeing or a conflicting proposal is some how much, much better, this is the way I’d like to go.
…[/quote]
Whoa, do you mean you would have two levels for a single skill? A level for book-knowledge and another one for hands-on-knowledge, that together add up to an effective level? Like, you might have Construction 8/6=7. That could lead to strange things.

Imagine a master carpenter who’s never read a book, he has a 0/13 in Construction and has an effective level of 6. He reads “Birdhouse Monthly” . Even though he’s built a million houses, reading a magazine would increase his effective skill from 6 to 7, because he never before realized that wood had a ‘grain’ to it or some other basic fact that would be in a publication for amateurs. (And obviously the system could be more complex than simply averaging the two scores, but you see how it might cause weird things like this.)

A split skill would pretty much force book-reading, instead of having it as an option as it is now-- it’s really good option that is heavily encouraged by the system, yes, but it’s still a choice. Currently you never HAVE to read a book, and if you can’t find the book you’re looking for, it’s not a huge deal to train it through practice instead.

And, I might be misreading what you’re saying here.

[Qemist]

I like the idea of short term mood feeding into long term morale. Mood would be exactly the same as morale is currently and the new morale would travel up or down, taking at least a few days of extreme mood to go from very happy to utterly depressed or vice versa.

I liked the earlier suggestion of replacing xp with a focus stat. Instead of being a pool, focus would modify skill comprehension and skill application (like combat accuracy or crafting success chance) and would be tied to tiredness, mood, morale, and intelligence.

On the topic of books I feel a good idea (especially reference-type books like the high level crafting ones) would be for them to increase your skill gain while the book is in your inventory instead of being able to read them. I feel this would be a bit more realistic because someone who is simultaneously practising the skill and using a text as a reference would learn a lot faster, and for 99% of people just reading how to do something without applying the info is not an effective way to learn. The weight and volume of the books would stop someone from carrying them around everywhere.

[KA101]

Reference books as a skill-gain booster: seems questionable when applied to active skills (there are books for Unarmed & Cutting). For crafting purposes, I’d appreciate letting the book be in the same “nearby” radius that gets checked for crafting gear, rather than having to have it in personal inventory.

The illustration Grackle raises seems a bit extreme (I’ve not had a skill get above 10 yet, but a few combat ones are getting there) but the point itself is sound:

In the current system, Illiterate is pretty damaging early-game, but can theoretically be overcome. If book-skill is a separate but essential part of skills, it may well impose a cap on skills and permanently cripple Illiterate characters.

[sodapop]

I think crafting is what most people had in mind when referring to the skill-gain booster idea. Perhaps implement buildable training dummies you can train up your combat skills on that will let you use those books as a ‘reference’?

[KA101]

Heh. Yeah, maybe two Logs, two Heavy Sticks, & some rope for a melee target. Archery target would be neat-o but isn’t really necessary: one can shoot at a Rock fairly well. Figure a 2x4 if you want to make a top-shelf target?

[GlyphGryph]

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:33, topic:703”]Books as temporary buffs.

Skill books consuming or lowering accrual of xp.[/quote]
Just so you know, though my proposal may LOOK like “books as a temporary buff”, it isn’t. It is, rather, the only effective way I can think of to implement “Skill books consuming or lowering xp” in a reasonable way. That is through a temporary (but fairly long lasting) higher effective level, but consider this:
People can’t practice effectively if they don’t have the unlocked abilities a higher level would grant. Maybe for produced /quality/ of items, it would use the AL, but it could use EL to determine the recipes you have access too.

A buff implies a certain amount of points over your AL. This isn’t true - gaining skill doesn’t increase your Skill Level while you are operating under the effect of the book. If anything, it’s a way to take out a loan against the future, and promising you’ll pay off the experience later (though it will be easier than without the book, thanks to the gain boost)… although not too much later. And the level it brings you too is governed by the book in question. But still, reading a book that is your level or below would grant no benefit, and I think we agree that’s desirable.

It’s realistic. If you’ve just read a recipe for a cake, you will probably be able to make the cake even if you aren’t an expert cook. But if you DON’T make the cake, there’s a good chance you’ll have forgotten some important ingredients and the times involved by the next day. I’ve had plenty of times where I’ve read a chapter, thought I grokked it, solved a problem or two (but not enough) and found myself having to come back and read it again several days later as the knowledge flits from my mind.

Implementing a book where it (somehow) increases your level of skill growth, without actually giving you any skill, is not only unrealistic, but any implementation I can think up is sloppy and unnatural feeling and generally very ‘gamey’ without being fun. Now, you know I’m all for gamey when it would actually increase enjoyability, but I’m honestly not seeing it here.

[Dominae]

I imagined “books as a skill booster” (in the current discussion) as more of a “it unlocks potential” / “it allows me to learn faster” but it isn’t temporary. Think of it as “the next level worth of skill will happen faster” because I have knowledge of how to do it the right way.

For example:

I just hit Cooking 3 (+0%). Making a cake gives me +5% toward the next level. So, after one cake I’m at 3 (+5%). It will currently take me baking 19 cakes to get to Cooking 3 (+95%) and the next one will put me at Cooking 4. So I’m 20 cakes to the next level just by repeat practicing.

I find the Cookbook “The Cake is a Lie”. It has an effective level of (up to) 4. If I read this book, it will give me 1 full level of cooking knowledge. This will not instant-magically-I’m-so-smart boost me to Cooking 4 as it currently would in game. I’m still at Cooking 3 (+0%) but I have an effective knowledge “boost” for the next level worth (+100%) of skill practiced.

I know how better to make cakes from now on, I think. I still haven’t made one though. I’ve unlocked a level worth of potential, though, because I know now what I didn’t before. I will practice/skill more efficiently.

So, I make a cake. This time, thanks to having read the book, it gives me +10% toward the next level. Now it takes me only 10 cakes to get to level 4, because I’m so smart and I know that the cake is a lie already.

If you make “The Cake is a Lie” work up to level 4:

• sooner or later I’m already too skilled to benefit from it, so no abuse.
• If each title only works once per character, for ONE level worth of knowledge/potential then you can’t just chain-read a book to skill to level 3 like you can right now.
• If I find the book early, I can use to to skill faster from, say, level 0 to 1 … or from 2 to 3 … so I as a player have a trade off to think about … hold it until later when it takes longer to skill up or read it now for a quick & early boost?
• you can code in multiple different titles for each of the skills. Raiding a library might get me “The Cake is a Lie” today … maybe the library in the next town has “How To Feed Man (but not to Zombies)” that will give me another potential boost to my cooking tomorrow.

If books unlock potential/faster skilling … you can see how it applies to the combat books as well. I read “Not In The Face!” about melee combat, and learn some pointers. Now when I venture out, I practice what I learned … and thereby skill faster.

Illiterate? No biggie … you just skill at the normal rate. You’re punished by your choice in negative talent because you can’t use books to speed your skilling, but you’re not crippled. “Bookworm” positive talent (yeah I made that up)? Maybe you get double (or whatever balances best) benefit from books … they unlock “extra knowledge” for you.

Int can still unlock what books you can read. … or maybe … int can have a direct percentile influence on how much knowledge/potential you unlock from a book. 10 int, you get the full 100% (1 level) knowledge from a book. 9 int? 90% … 11 int? 110% … etc.

(Note: I even drew pictures to back up my babble above, but spared you from my Excel drawings … lol … and thank you for your work on the game, and listening to my TL:DR ideas … I come up with ideas & pitch them for a living, and it has been a slow month at work, so this gives me an outlet)

[GlyphGryph]

So… almost exactly the same as what I proposed, but without the time-based use-it-or-lose-it component?