Preventing Regenerating Stamina Exploits

[Keyrock]

I am intrigued by the concept of splitting hit points into health and stamina. Personally I think it can definitely work, but I can see it also being exploited.

 

Depending on how fast stamina actually regenerates during combat, I fear it may be exploited during combat. I have no problem with casters using a sanctuary like spell to effectively remove themselves from the field of combat for a short while to recover, or a melee character stepping back while another or two step forward and use aggro pulling skills, like taunt, to get the heat off said character, that's good tactical gameplay and a good use of your smarts and skills to survive. What I'm afraid of is characters simply running for 45 seconds while their stamina regenerates. Obviously this wouldn't be as effective against enemies with ranged attacks, such as archers, although a moving target would likely be much harder to hit than a stationary one, though I'm not sure if or how that would be reflected in actual gameplay mechanics. However if a character was facing melee attackers and their stamina fell to a dangerous level, they could simply run around for a while, staying just out of reach, until their stamina recovered. Then once recovered they simply stop and continue fighting. if they get hurt again they start running again. Lather, rinse, repeat. This is not exactly my idea of good tactical combat.

 

Fortunately there are two easy ways I can think of to prevent such a thing from happening (there are likely other ways too):

 

1) Have stamina regeneration halt when running - This makes sense considering that sprinting for 30 seconds wouldn't exactly help a wounded and beat up character feel better. Likewise, running around wouldn't exactly help any wounds clot, in fact wounds that have begun to clot may become torn open again by the act of running.

 

2) Apply movement penalties to characters with low stamina - Let's say, and I'm pulling these numbers out of my behind just for the sake of example, when a character drops below 50% stamina their movement rate drops by 25%, and when their stamina drops below 25% their movement rate drops by 50%. This makes sense since a beat down, barely conscious character wouldn't be able to run as fast as someone who's in perfect condition.

 

Thoughts?

[Kilroy_Was_Here]

Premature, this concern is...

[Krios]

The developers have considered putting in several levels of difficulty: Expert Mode, Trial of Iron, and Path of the Damned. The higher difficulty levels will be designed to make things harder, potential exploits will be balanced by the additional difficulty factors. It boils down to I believe a balancing act.

[DocDoomII]

Keyrock, I'm quite sure that they already have something in mind to prevent "chicken-runs" to regenerate stamina in combat.

Since this is a system built to prevent sleeping-button exploiting, I'd imagine it to be quite stupid if it introduced another blatantly abusable mechanic.

Edited October 17, 2012 by DocDoomII

[Keyrock]

Keyrock, I'm quite sure that they already have something in mind to prevent "chicken-runs" to regenerate stamina in combat.

Since this is a system built to prevent sleeping-button exploiting, I'd imagine it to be quite stupid if it introduced another blatantly abusable mechanic.

I imagine you are right and I trust that Obsidian will consider such possibilities and others when deciding on how to implement mechanics. These people have years of experience building great games so I should definitely give them the benefit of the doubt. I just thought I'd bring this up because when thinking about the stamina/health mechanic, the little that I know about it, the "chicken-run", as you put it, scenario quickly popped into my mind since I've seen this sort of thing happen in other games.