Thoughts on the lore skill

[Hormalakh]

There was a discussion about lore and how, in reality, after the first game or after the strategy guides come out, the lore skill can be meta-gamed away and become a pretty useless skill (degeneracy alert, Josh Sawyer). As such, I've been thinking about a few ways to make the lore skill more interesting to use and a useful skill for players to try to invest points in.

 

There are a few goals with my changes to the lore skill.

 

1- Maintain the current "game lore" behind the "skill lore." That is that the lore skill would still continue to be a skill that represents a character's accumulated miscellaneous knowledge and trivia.

2- As all skills should continue to be useful throughout the whole game, in regards to combat, this means that a character should become more effective in combat (as they learn the common "weakpoints" of enemies. For the player this means increasing their cyclopedia entries, but mechanically this should also mean improvements in combat.

3- As with all skills, each party member should have an incentive to want to invest in the skill. 

4- This skill should be an incentive for players to want to engage in combat (instead of combat XP). That means that as players engage in more combat, the effectiveness of this skill should be more apparent, therefore making combat incentivized as opposed to utilizing XP as this incentive. 

 

THE IDEA:

As party members fight and kill more and more of an enemy type, their combat effectiveness (e.g. attack damage/crit%/attack speed, etc) increases when fighting that particular type of enemy. The rate of improvement in combat effectiveness is based on an equation that utilizes each party member's lore skill as well as the number of enemies of that particular type that have been killed by the WHOLE party.

So for example, let's say that if the party kills in total (all party kills) 25, 100, 300, 900, 1500 goblins, each party member will have an increase in their crit% against goblins of 1%, 2.5%, 5%, 9%, 15% respectively. How does the lore skill come into play? Well as each party member's lore skill level is increased, the number you need to kill is decreased by the equation CEILING(TOTAL ENEMIES/LORE LEVEL).

 

So let's say you have 6 party members with lore skill levels of 1,2,3,5,7,9. 

Party member 1 (Lore skill 1) needs to have PARTY KILLS totals of 25(1%), 100(2.5%), 300(5%), 900(9%), 1500(15%) goblins for the respective crit% increases.

Party member 2 (Lore skill 2) needs to have PARTY KILLS totals of 13(1%), 50(2.5%), 150(5%), 450(9%), 750(15%) goblins for the respective crit% increases.

Party member 3 (Lore skill 3) needs to have PARTY KILLS totals of 9(1%), 34(2.5%), 100(5%), 300(9%), and 500(15%) goblins for the respective crit% increases.

...

and so on

...

Party member 6 (Lore skill 9) needs to have PARTY KILLS totals of 3(1%), 12(2.5%), 34(5%), 100(9%), and 167(15%) goblins for the respective crit% increases.

 

So let's say that the party has killed 170 goblins in the game with the same party members as previously mentioned. Assume all players have base crit% of 5%. Their new crit% with the lore skills would be:

 

1: 7.5% crit chance

2: 10% crit chance

3: 10% crit chance

4: 10% crit chance

5: 14% crit chance

6: 20% crit chance

--------------------------------

Different monsters can have different PARTY KILL TOTAL requirements. Other equations can be used as well as other combat effectiveness attributes (as mentioned above) to fine-tune the best range, rate of increase, and value for skill.

 

This is a good way of incentivizing players to enter combat (as opposed to combat XP), each party member to invest in lore, will continue to give back value to the player over the whole game, and can fit within the current game lore.

 

What do the rest of you think?

[Karkarov]

Just to throw this out there but I am sure there will be lore based checks in conversations and scripted events, so there will be plenty of reason there.  Also I am pretty sure Lore already says something about it helping you do bonus damage, doesn't it?

[Falendor]

I'm pretty sure the skills our your out of combat toys so a damage bonus would be inappropriate for lore.

Lore is mainly for conversations and intractable puzzles. Im betting its going to be used a lot.

[DCParry]

Personally, I would like to see lore used as it is now, as well as a complimentary skill to other non-combat skills. 

 

For example, a high survival could tell you which mushrooms are poisonous or tasty, but combined with a moderate lore score you would know that a particular toxic mushroom was used by the Ehthicc Nol in orgiastic rituals hundreds of years ago. 

[Fiebras]

Agree with people saying that lore isnt just to fill your cyclopedia, its used in conversations and probably interactions. Consider it a dialouge skill if the thought of finding out  monster information on your own without consulting a wiki doesnt appeal to you, even if it would be only usable for your first playthrough.

 

Skills probably shouldnt affect combat imo. Though if you feel you need to have everything be about how it affects combat maybe having a full cyclopedia about a creature gives you a small +% damage bonus against it (not several bonuses based on current lore skill) so lore comes in in helping you fill it faster as well as serving for conversations. I feel what you are proposing is a little convoluted when a simple + damage could be enough.

 

 

What I think you are really trying to say is that you lack incentives for the lore skill beyond dialouge choices and cyclopedia-filing, correct? There are ways to do that without bringing in combat mechanics.

 

Not everything needs to be about combat. Sometimes having a skill serve only for conversations is good enough. In fact Id be grateful the conversation skills get as fleshed out as the combat skills (+2% chance of convincing someone/-1 atribute/skill requirement for dialouge/interaction option per point in [insert atribute/skill]).

 

EDIT: Also, if we consider that unlocking the cyclopedia entries could be a way of getting XP (as per Sawyer´s recent coments), then the way you unlock these (currently being limited to fighting everything until it unlocks) may have to be changed to include some non-combat options (books that you can only read at certain lore thresholds maybe? And have each of these books contribute to your unlocking "progress bar" so you dont have to rely ONLY on combat to unlock cyclopedia XP. This would work well agaisnt monsters that your part may not fight enough times to unlock the XP from the cyclopedia like fully grown dragons, chimeras and whatnot. the XP/information ammount would come in clearly identifiable tiers or progress bars that depend on lore to unlock). Though that is probably for the xp thread.

Edited September 24, 2014 by Fiebras

[Matt516]

Replace Crit Chance with Accuracy (Crit Chance doesn't make sense with how the combat resolution system works), halve the proposed bonuses (they're too good right now), and I'm on board.