Thank you very much for removing the xp pool and changing the skill training system. I hated how it was a complete waste of time and resources to do anything when I was out of xp. I can also maintain my suspension of disbelief easier.
I could not find detailed documentation on how the new system is supposed to work though. It is rather difficult to see if there are bugs or not.
I want to say your focus is the percentage rate of how quickly you learn. So if your focus is 45 you learn at a rate of 45%.
I think the new system is pretty good but it does make skill grinding a bit too easy.
Damnit… I absolutely love the current system. It perfectly incentivizes immersive gameplay in a way no game has ever done before. It integrates emotion into the game in a perfect way. I’ll be really sad when it’s gone.
The new system works substantially the same way, but without the absolute cutoff when you reach 0 xp. It has strong diminishing returns, where in the previous system if you could get your mood high enough you could increase skills at a very high rate continuously.
The primary input to the system is still your morale, so taking care of your needs is still rewarded by increasing your capacity to learn. Or from a different point of view, ignoring your needs and merely surviving leads to a degenerative state where you’re slow to learn new things.
[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:4, topic:1493”]The new system works substantially the same way, but without the absolute cutoff when you reach 0 xp. It has strong diminishing returns, where in the previous system if you could get your mood high enough you could increase skills at a very high rate continuously.
The primary input to the system is still your morale, so taking care of your needs is still rewarded by increasing your capacity to learn. Or from a different point of view, ignoring your needs and merely surviving leads to a degenerative state where you’re slow to learn new things.[/quote]And the bold part illustrates just why the change is good. Little gain is significantly better than no gain.
To be honest, the new XP system confuses me a little… I am just like “KEEP FROM LOSING MORALE, YOU WANT TO LEARN!!1”
Attaching morale to learning always seemed silly, especially in a life and death situation that this game presents.
“Hmm… boy, I should learn to handle this weapon better in order to keep the endless horde of nightmare creatures from eating me… but eh, I’m just not feeling it today”.
Except that is sort of how it works in real life. Real life is all about willpower - maintaining your drive, feeling like you’re succeeding, maintaining clarity and focus. Even if in a life or death situation, especially an extended one, these are all vitally important to maintaining mental clarity.
Sounds like a good change. And I rather like the morale system as it’s conceptualised in Cataclysm, though I do think it defaults to 0 a little bit too quickly.
I’m liking the change so far, the previous XP method was a bit unrealistic.
Try living in isolation for a few days, it is not fun to be alone, much less be chased by packs of wolves, cougars, giant spiders, zombies, etc.
One thing I’d like to see (once NPCs are less crash-prone, suicidal and/or homicidal) is a morale boost for having a companion with you.
I generally take the optimist trait so I’ll have to get a feel for how the system works without it first.
[quote=“GlyphGryph, post:8, topic:1493”]Except that is sort of how it works in real life. Real life is all about willpower - maintaining your drive, feeling like you’re succeeding, maintaining clarity and focus. Even if in a life or death situation, especially an extended one, these are all vitally important to maintaining mental clarity.[/quote]This gives me an idea but i dunno if it will fit with the new system, but
Instead of an EXP pool like the old one, have skills earn ‘Practice Points’, up to a maximum depending on certain factors (more allocable practice points for high level skills, have allocable max be halved for non dominant skill when Savant trait is chosen, etc). Over time (hours up to a day), this will decrease, and gradually add exp to the skill based on the current Practice Points and morale, something like
(morale + baseline )× practice)
To determine every skill check how much experience is added. This is so that even if you are extremely deppressed in and before a fight, you can reflect on it peacefully afterwards over a blunt. Alternatively this could be used as an effective simulation of a self rewarding system, much like how someone might givevthemself a reward like desert after a hard day’s work.
What do you think, griffy?
I’m unconcerned with how realistic it is, so much as the fact that it makes a lot of things designed to grant higher morale or mitigate lower morale relatively meaningless. Who cares about heating up your food for a +5 morale bonus when it vanishes in a few turns? Or similarly, who cares about being depressed when it’ll right itself without any effort after a while?
There definitely needs to be a general long term morale stability, so I agree with you.
Basically, I’m thinking that good morale should be much harder to gain and fairly easy to lose (from actual events), but trying to sustain good or bad morale is basically impossible currently, which is a bit unrealistic.
I definitely think this change is a step forward, I’m hoping they come up with a two-stage morale system, with a current mood, and underlying morale.
For example, to simulate the temporary euphoria of taking drugs even though your arm was just blown off. You’d eventually be quite sad (and in pain) after you came down off the high, but I assume if you just took a bunch of crack you wouldn’t give a shit for a few hours, in the current system you would never give a shit again after taking the drugs, as everything is wiped clean into a single variable.
Indeed, it sounds like a fairly good idea to have a split morale, one of which is your current mood and is effected by short term things like eating candy bars or doing drugs, and the other works to set your “baseline” and is determined by a tiny percentage of all of the things that have affected you recently.
Once we have NPC’s back we could add social based moral boosts. OF course not talking to anyone for an extended period of time could get your a ‘lonely’ penalty which would build up slowly over time. But then you would also want a trait called ‘loner’ which would drastically reduce this (but not get rid of). Of course having a dog companion would have alleviate this some. 
I’m glad to hear that people seem to be enjoying the change, and also glad to hear that people are still thinking about how the overall system could be improved :).
We do want to split morale into a long-term and short-term system eventually, although I don’t think anyone’s currently working on that. The XP -> focus change was mostly aimed at making the learning system more logical and fun; morale itself does need independent attention, I’d say.
Also, if anyone has a better suggestion for the help text, do feel free to put it forward! Although, the general idea can be summed up as follows: if you want your character to be successful long-term, keep him/her happy and fulfilled while you’re doing training-type things. If you don’t give a damn about whether or not you’re learning, well, your character doesn’t need to give a damn, either ;).
One thing I noticed in the git was that–if I read it right–reading books also diminished Focus. As an avid reader IRL and in-game (I took Fast Reader, as a rule), that saddens me. ): Your reading was nerfed -10
Aside from that dissatisfying change, I think most of the ideas here are good. Split short/long-term morale would be worthwhile, and social-based morale bonuses seem like a good idea, though (again) there should be non-dog pets. Cat food and perhaps Crow food wold be nice.
There are further changes to skill books being discussed, and they might change immensely in future versions, from becoming an “effective” skill boost, to unlocking higher level recipes with lower level skill, to making you learn faster, or some combination of the above or an alternative approach. We haven’t decided yet.
And yes, the compound nature of morale (intensity is directly and inseparably tied to duration) is incredibly stupid, and it’s something we plan on changing as part of an overall attempt to improve gameplay and align incentives towards more rewarding play. (For example, a good meal might give a several hour long, very mild “contentment” bonus).
There’s also been talking about separating short-term mood from long-term morale, which could provide further opportunities on this front, but that is, in my opinion, a separate issue from the fact that at the moment we have no control whatsoever over how long a boost of a given intensity will last.
OK, I was reading it right…and reading the first point of Pitching A Tent (yay, Survival book on day 1) screwed me all the way to 20 Focus. By comparison, learning the first point of Tailoring from the start-NPC had absolutely no effect on Focus.
I think I’ll stop there as I’m seriously Not Happy with Kevin right now.
Yeah, skill books may have been nerfed a bit too much. That’s definitely something that we’re going to be revisiting, and probably sooner than later.
Conversely, I feel that fun books have gotten a nice buff. Under the old system, getting +60 morale from a fun book would give a 30% bonus to XP gain, which is nice, but IMO felt grindy if you wanted to keep it up long enough to really notice the effects. Under the new system, however, that same +60 morale gives a pretty hefty bonus to getting your focus back up (if you’ve got at least 45 focus, it’ll at least double the gain), and can even let you get a nice 20% - or higher - boost to efficiency.
Kevin’s not the one responsible for nerfing skill books, if that’s what you’re referring to. It was a combination of me and FunnyMan.