Zero skill level should mean that I know nothing about it

[Killer-of-Lawyers]

Someone has never tried to shoot a gun with a right side ejection port with their left shoulder. Maintaining and working with a gun, especially the more complicated or strange ones, isn’t as easy as you think. I shudder to think of what one has to do to reload the calico without the speed loader for it.

[EkarusRyndren]

Someone has never tried to shoot a gun with a right side ejection port with their left shoulder. Maintaining and working with a gun, especially the more complicated or strange ones, isn’t as easy as you think. I shudder to think of what one has to do to reload the calico without the speed loader for it.

Correct. But as it stands the game simulates a novice trying to use the weapon, that is to say at a “noob” level you’re still going to get the bullets going in the general direction you want them to go in. Sure you might end up with casings in your face, sure you might end up with an increasing amount of jamming, but it’s not like you’re going to pick up a rifle and shove the barrel up your ass, you know?

[Killer-of-Lawyers]

“You squeeze the trigger. Nothing happens. Perplexed, you look down the barrel, BANG! You have died.”

But yeah, I know what you mean. I’ve mostly just been suggesting ideas for ways a gun might fail in combat on you and how your skill level could affect how your character reacts.

[Binky]

I don’t think it should be that low/not enough skill should equal not being able to use something at all, but just that you’d be terrible at it and are prone to hurt yourself. My friend from the UK with no experience in weapons fired a shotgun and couldn’t use his left arm for weeks - similarly, butchering an animal and accidentally puncturing the guts will very, very quickly ruin your meal, and is pretty easy to do without some sort of actual direction and training.

Definitely shouldn’t be a ‘you can’t even pick up this rifle because you don’t have enough skill in it’, as that’d be really annoying.

I really do think this would add so much more to a sense of progress - really hope someone finds the time to implement it!

[timtek]

[quote=“Binky, post:25, topic:4348”][quote=“Cherry, post:23, topic:4348”]So this is basically added difficulty for newbs and people who don’t spend points in skills.

Yeah it doesn’t stop us from raiding houses and finding Mechanics Monthly to skip it though.

I believe I’m playing a zombie apocalypse game where I get to eat spaghetti bolognese and blast alien scientists with fusion rifles. Not necessarily a gun cleaning, ammo fumbling, bullet counting simulator.[/quote]

From the ‘about’ page on the website: Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is a roguelike set in a post-apocalyptic world. Surviving is difficult: you have been thrown, ill-equipped, into a landscape now riddled with monstrosities of which flesh eating zombies are neither the strangest nor the deadliest.

This is supposed to be a survival game, and part of survival is that things don’t work well - it’s not supposed to be a shoot-em-up- fork it if that’s the way you want to go.
Requiring skill to use an advanced weapon is something that all RPGs do, and makes a lot of sense balance wise.[/quote]

It doesn’t say it’s a survival game though, it says it’s a roguelike set in a post apocalyptic world, and that survival is difficult. To me that doesn’t mean the game is about surviving, it says that survival is just one of the challenges you face. The world has just ended, so supplies are everywhere, that alone drops the survival difficultly down quite a bit. It reminds me of zombieland. Sure they had to struggle to stay alive but they were never short on supplies or anything like that because the world had just ended and they could just walk into any building and take what they needed. Our characters are alive in a time where they still have tons of access to the things that make survival easier, how exactly should that be remedied without making the time and place null and void?

[Binky]

It doesn’t say it’s a survival game though, it says it’s a roguelike set in a post apocalyptic world, and that survival is difficult. To me that doesn’t mean the game is about surviving, it says that survival is just one of the challenges you face. The world has just ended, so supplies are everywhere, that alone drops the survival difficultly down quite a bit. It reminds me of zombieland. Sure they had to struggle to stay alive but they were never short on supplies or anything like that because the world had just ended and they could just walk into any building and take what they needed. Our characters are alive in a time where they still have tons of access to the things that make survival easier, how exactly should that be remedied without making the time and place null and void?

The Kickstarter does say that it’s a ‘survivalcraft’ game though. Not to hammer on with this point, but it also says “You are a survivor of the end of the world. You’ll have to use every ounce of strength, courage, ingenuity and resolve if you want a chance to survive in the new world born from the ashes of the old.” - that certainly doesn’t make it sound like a run and gun ARPG where you can just kick back with your laser rifle and blast everything away.

Admittedly, it’s not trying to be something like Unreal world which is hardcore survival and nothing else, but I don’t think any of the main devs are wanting it to go in the direction of a top down blast-em-up with a bit of survival tacked on.

[Ander_Hammer]

‘Survival’ does not mean ‘always kicking and scratching to live’, much in the same way that an FPS usually doesn’t stick you with the pistol for the whole game and most RPGs don’t force you to use only the first character with weapons from the first town for most of the story. At the start, you have to survive. The game opens up depending on how well you succeed.

I know it wasn’t really explicitly suggested, but I’m not particularly thrilled by the concept of low weapons skills causing magic gun fumbles, and as I understand it, most rifles don’t seem to come with scopes mounted, so ‘scope eye’ isn’t going to be a problem. Most of the potential issues suggested for low firearms skill are things that one would generally quickly learn to avoid or treat with care, possibly represented by the faster training of the first few skill levels. Gun malfunctions aren’t particularly common on Cata’s scale.

[Cherry]

Level Requirements: The thread

I say yes for some weapons.
Example. You need like level 8 electronics to make a fusion blaster rifle or NX17 rifle.
Shouldn’t you need a lvl 8 electronics to pew-pew it?

Unless you install the “User-friendly trigger” mod. Which skips that skill check.

hehe, this is a stupid idea why did i post this

Anyways, I state once again that I like that higher-caliber pow-pow guns should have skill requirements that cause you to “Oops shot my foot” if you don’t meet them. I just realized that they do this to stop noobs from being expert sniper users at level 1 in fallout new vegas

[Inadequate]

Why? If weapon maintenance was a thing, electronics skill might be a factor. But even by the standards everyone else is suggesting, electronics skill has nothing to do with it. Firearms maybe.

[Savidiy]

Thanks for your feedback.
I do not suggest to “Your skill level is too low”. I suggest jammed weapon whitch you anyway repair. A professional will do it quickly during the battle, as a novice after, if it survives. And so on. Skill affects the action, but does not prohibit it.

[Cherry]

Yeah that sounds flavorful and fun!
Ooops gun broke better pull out my slingshot. Lvl 0 Firearm Class skill
Oh no, (gun jargon problem), 1 turn later nvm fixed it. Lvl 5 Firearm Class skill

So how would you imagine that the malfunctions play out?
Do you automatically try to fix it when it breaks, using your turn?
Or does it gain a general “Jammed” status that you attempt to fix by pressing the reload key?
Other ideas?

[Savidiy]

1. The chance of weapons jam depends on the weapon and its status. Does not depend on the skill of the character.
2. You press R or F, depending on your skills you solve the problem or not. Your skills affect the duration, the chance of success and the number of thrown on the ground cartridges.
3. The game tells you about the result. Theoretically, if the monsters close you take another weapon. If they are far away that you are trying to eliminate the jam.

[Cherry]

There was a thread a few months ago that wanted to implement gun maintenance.
Seeing as there still aren’t any weapon repair kits and guns don’t damage themselves over time, I doubt anybody decided to take up the project.
It might be planned though.
I wouldn’t know

[Binky]

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a big pop up or something that actively stops game play - it could just take a long time to reload (try reloading a belt fed machine gun…) or cause jams which require you to reload (I think this definitely needs to be on a button press, not automatic).

This could be on a scale, so if the weapon required a firearms skill of 4, having a skill of 1 would mean loads of jams, incredibly long reload times and some injuries (again, combat shotguns/assault rifles need a LOT of practice to use safely) whilst a skill of 3 would almost negate penalties, perhaps just being a bit slow with reloading and very infrequent jams.

I don’t see this being something which is of constant annoyance, because you just wouldn’t use weapons you couldn’t use well until you were able. If you did, well then it’s your fault really/desperate situation - which I think is fun.

[EditorRUS]

Are you comprehend that such complex skill system WILL be unbalanced? To balance it we need to split START POINTS into two branches: “Mental points” and “Body points”, which are not equal. Mental points and body points should be used for skills and STR-DEX-INT-PER and mutations respecially. An average human, usually, knows most of skills written above. I’ve never seen an young human who haven’t sew a button or haven’t even tried to put a bandage over a cut. Moreover, mental points should depend from intelligence - than more INT, than more skill points. Briefly, there’s a huge work to find the balance with such system.

[Binky]

Are you comprehend that such complex skill system WILL be unbalanced? To balance it we need to split START POINTS into two branches: “Mental points” and “Body points”, which are not equal. Mental points and body points should be used for skills and STR-DEX-INT-PER and mutations respecially. An average human, usually, knows most of skills written above. I’ve never seen an young human who haven’t sew a button or haven’t even tried to put a bandage over a cut. Moreover, mental points should depend from intelligence - than more INT, than more skill points. Briefly, there’s a huge work to find a balance with such system.

I think you’re right, eventually we’ll need to do that, but in the mean time, I think having the skill levels being more of a curve is better than nothing.

[kevin.granade]

1) The chance of weapons jam depends on the weapon and its status. Does not depend on the skill of the character.

The issue is we don’t want boring busywork the player has to do, so the assumption is that if the player has a higher skill, they know to take better care of their guns, but it happens in the background.

2) You press R or F, depending on your skills you solve the problem or not. Your skills affect the duration, the chance of success and the number of thrown on the ground cartridges.

I was thinking just R, but now that I think of it, any interaction with the gun, F, R, or U should try and clear the jam if there is one. The time spent per keypress should be limited, so that the player can try and clear the jam, but if they fail, they won’t be stuck getting attacked.

I’m for having very occasional misfires (which we have already, based on weapon reliability) and jams, just haven’t gotten around to it. I’m also for factoring the pertinent gun skills into it so that unskilled PCs have more frequent jams and misfires (don’t clean the gun, or not often enough, or not correctly, don’t handle ammo properly (dirty ammo?), don’t resolve issues correctly when they do happen). Either way, it should be appropriately rare, with notable exceptions, misfires and jams are very rare, and I see no reason to make them artificially common. Bringing it back to the thread topic though, gun skill level 0 PCs would have fairly frequent jams , because they’re assumed to be taking very poor care of the weapons.

[Savidiy]

[quote=“Savidiy, post:41, topic:4348”]1) The chance of weapons jam depends on the weapon and its status. Does not depend on the skill of the character.

The issue is we don’t want boring busywork the player has to do, so the assumption is that if the player has a higher skill, they know to take better care of their guns, but it happens in the background.

2) You press R or F, depending on your skills you solve the problem or not. Your skills affect the duration, the chance of success and the number of thrown on the ground cartridges.

I was thinking just R, but now that I think of it, any interaction with the gun, F, R, or U should try and clear the jam if there is one. The time spent per keypress should be limited, so that the player can try and clear the jam, but if they fail, they won’t be stuck getting attacked.

I’m for having very occasional misfires (which we have already, based on weapon reliability) and jams, just haven’t gotten around to it. I’m also for factoring the pertinent gun skills into it so that unskilled PCs have more frequent jams and misfires (don’t clean the gun, or not often enough, or not correctly, don’t handle ammo properly (dirty ammo?), don’t resolve issues correctly when they do happen). Either way, it should be appropriately rare, with notable exceptions, misfires and jams are very rare, and I see no reason to make them artificially common. Bringing it back to the thread topic though, gun skill level 0 PCs would have fairly frequent jams , because they’re assumed to be taking very poor care of the weapons.[/quote]
I like the background service of the weapon. Another example, that a person with a survival skill 0 can not think pack matches in a plastic bag and if it did get wet, it will lose matches.
I’ll think about calculations chance of jam and misfires.

[Binky]

A passive system is fine really (I’m sure a mod could be made for advanced weapon care), and I completely agree that any button could be used to try to clear jams (and only in small increments as stated).
I also envisage jams and misfires being quite rare when close to the skill level required (and none at the level) as it’s mainly a system to stop PCs with level 2 firearms using a level 6 weapon effectively. I would definitely like to see minor injuries factor into it as well - it makes sense realistically, and adds an extra level of danger rather than ‘use until it’s jammed and then swap out’

[kevin.granade]

FYI, misfire frequency is one in 2^4 (1 in 16, sawn-off shotguns and homemade laser gun) to 2^9 (1 in 512, USP family, Saiga, AK-47)*, that actually got shifted at some point, it’s supposed to be one in 32 to one in 1024. That’s the ballpark we’re looking at, if we add jams, that number of errors will be split between misfires and jams, and if we add a skill-based modifier, it will maybe be slightly more common than that for skill 1, much more common for skill 0, and rapidly less common for skill 2+.

*The actual calculation is 2 ^ weapon_durability, factoring in skill might be as simple as (2 ^ (skill + durability - 1). Another potential concept is adding a ammo reliability stat too.