My thoughts on Skills and Talents

[Hormalakh]

I wrote this a while back but I wanted to post this here to see if people like the ideas and some renewed discussion about the skills system.

 

Ok here goes.
I spent all day a while back designing a few changes to a bunch of the skills to both balance them and make them more interesting for each player to want to use.

Before I get started, I sat and thought about what each skill needs to be interesting to play and advance.
1- to have a benefit to a player who dabbles.
2- to have a benefit to a player who masters.
3- does NOT need to have a combat oriented benefit to be considered useful.
4- to have proper feedback given to players when choosing them (like attributes currently do). This is the proper solution to Josh's "mindless advancement" issue. Players are making mindless advancement because we don't have actual data to make decisions. Just nebulous, hand-wavy descriptions that give no tangible facts for players to gauge effectively.

I identified 5 mechanics (outside of combat) that the skills should affect.

1.Stealth,

2.camping supplies resource management,

3.locks and traps,

4.consummables, and

5.Dialogue.

 

These 5 mechanics (plus one additional mechanic that I created and I will talk about later) are what the skills should effect.

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Athletics: Currently is probably the best implemented, because as has been said, you need every party member to have it otherwise they fatigue too quickly. This effects their camping supply resource management and combat effectiveness. As it stands, the athletics skill is one of the better designed skills.

As for feedback during skill progression for athletics, it should give an approximate "life-cycle" for a character before they get fatigued. So during advancement, it should say something like "This party member can adventure for approximately 21 hours before becoming fatigued." I know that the number depends on how many battles you get into, but just having some information is better than no information. Increasing the skill level would change the number of hours and gives players direct feedback.

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Lore: Currently, the worst implemented. Bestiary information is really easily meta-gamed and doesn't provide much benefit to players who are "serial power-gamers" (and these are peoople too). I considered different mechanics for lore and I think the one that fits the skill best is having an affect on dialogue choices. As dialogues currently go, there are in effect, hard limits on whether your party can by-pass the skill check needed for a dialogue. I considered the lockpick mechanic used for locks and thought that lore would fit this "lockpick" mechanic well.

How it would work is that lore would provide a bonus to dialogue checks based on the cumulative level of lore of the party. A bonus (+1 up to and including +6) can be added to any dialogue check (only dialogue, not scripted interactions). Each level of bonus is determined by the party's lore level in the following way: CHAR1 + CHAR2/2 + CHAR3/3 + CHAR4/4 + CHAR5/5 + CHAR6/6 where CHARX is the lore level of a party character, ordered from highest to lowest lore level. The dialogue bonus is then determined using the same advancement that skills progress (triangular number advancement): thus for a +1 to dialogue you need a lore sum of 1, +2 needs 3, +3 needs 6, +4 needs 10, +5 needs 15, +6 needs 21. Thus, players who dabble can quickly reach up to +2 in dialogue bonuses, but players need to consider mastering 1 or 2 party members in lore to get up to +3 or +4 in bonuses and need multiple party members (2 or 3) to master lore to get +5 or +6.

Lore is knowledge and knowledge can be useful in conversations: you can use it to convince others about what you need or want. At the same time , two heads are better than one. The more people with lore knowledge, the more likely you are to have the information needed to convince someone. However, as you have more people, the information is more likely to be redundant, and so each party member that is added to the equation gives increasingly less benefit to the dialogue bonus. This is the best way to have players seriously consider lore as a skill because it gives real, tangible benefit to the dialogue mechanic.

 

It has been stated that apparently Josh shot down a similar idea in the past because he said that it makes it harder for designers to design skill checks and harder for players to recognize how much they need. I would argue that the whole point of implementing skillpoints in lore is to make all dialgoue choices easier by giving a similar mechanic to how lockpick works. The additional point in whichever check is helpful, but not superhelpful as to make investing in other skills worthless.

Bestiary information can continue to be a part of the skill. However bestiary XP should be removed.

Feedback during advancement would give you your total lore score (using that equation provided above) as well as the dialogue bonus score (+X).

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Stealth and Survival: No changes.
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Mechanics: As it currently stands, the mechanics skills is super redundant. There is no reason to have more than one trapsetter or master lockpick. I started to think about what a mechanics skill is and realized that it's the ability to fiddle with items that have multiple parts and are "contraptions." It's the steamwork skill. So this means that the mechanics skill should affect complex weapons as well.

So I sat down and looked at the weapons. Surprisingly, all the complex weapons are ranged ones: arbalests, pistols, crossbows, arquebuses, and blunderbusses. And they are powerful ranged weapons. There are two other ranged weapons (bows and war bows) that I will ignore for now. I thought that these weapons should have a mechanic that would make them more "balanced" without using the same tired old things that Josh uses for all his other weapons. It can also help balance the property of ranged weapons which cause "kiting" and where AoO has tried (and failed ) to fix.

 

That mechanic is "jamming." The way jamming works is that these ranged weapons have a chance of jamming upon use depending on how impressive the weapon is (arquebuses 15%, pistols 5%, etc etc). If the weapon jams, the player cannot use that weapon for a duration of time until he unjams it (1 - 2 turns). The mechanic skill would then decrease the duration it takes for unjamming the weapon by a percentage (since Josh loves weird numbers). Thus the mechanic skill has a reason for every player to get it: it allows you to increase your DPS when using "mechanical weapons" as mentioned above. It also helps adjust heavy ranged weapons with a different mechanic so as not to have to balance around decreasing damage and other adjustments that have been tried.

Feedback for this skill would show the duration decrease with every level of the mechanic skill.
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Ultimately, I think that Josh's argument that players are making mindless decisions about skill progression isn't really their fault when they don't have a strong understanding about what each skill provides them. This, along with the poorly balanced skills (lore and mechanics being the two that need the most work) makes skill progression fairly mundane.

 

I want to reiterate my dislike of mixing talents and skills together as it has been done. It really limits what players can do and want to do and goes against the idea of a "customizable" character that is the mainstay of RPGs, especially IE ones.

[Quetzalcoatl]

You say a skill

does NOT need to have a combat oriented benefit to be considered useful.

and then proceed to give Mechanics a combat-oriented benefit to make it useful. That's fine, of course, but you appear to be contradicting yourself.

 

 

There is no reason to have more than one trapsetter

A trapsetter can only set up one trap at a time. Therefore having multiple trapsetters allows for setting up more traps at the same time. Though I'm not sure if that particular benefit makes it worth it to take Mechanics for multiple characters.

Edited November 16, 2014 by Quetzalcoatl

[Doppelschwert]

Lore: Currently, the worst implemented. Bestiary information is really easily meta-gamed and doesn't provide much benefit to players who are "serial power-gamers" (and these are peoople too). I considered different mechanics for lore and I think the one that fits the skill best is having an affect on dialogue choices. As dialogues currently go, there are in effect, hard limits on whether your party can by-pass the skill check needed for a dialogue. I considered the lockpick mechanic used for locks and thought that lore would fit this "lockpick" mechanic well.

 

I disagree. Meta-gaming is a bad argument as your solution is meta-gamey as well. Just gonna skill some characters in lore for the dialogue bonus, shuffle your party around while speaking with people in towns and get to the dungeons with the characters that use other skills.

 

The progression is also not very intuitive, I wouldn't consider it passing your point #4. It also trivializes the dialogue system and screws with replayability / roleplaying. For the most part, dialogue checks reflect your character and are used to gain reputation. There is a very specific reasons these skillchecks are hardcapped by your attributes. I'm pretty sure you can resolve a situation in almost every possible way without the skill checks if you just choose proper neutral options, so there really is no need for that.

 

If you want to give lore an additional function, I'd rather argue to add something like better prices at shops or better yet some mechanism like the identification of magical items. The later would be most fitting, but might be a bit heavy on the implementation side. It is still going to be open to metagaming, but really, everything will be. Personally, I also don't think that power gamers should be the crowd that dictates the usefulness of skills. I'll probably take lore on any playthrough - I don't plan to memorize or write down the enemies stats.

 

I think its actually good that the dialogue system averts metagaming to some extent, so I think that should definitely stay the way it is.

Edited November 16, 2014 by Doppelschwert

[Shevek]

I do think lore would be nice if characters with the lore skill got small, passive offensive bonuses (defensive bonuses would have less utility at range) against beastiary enemies that are fully or partially unlocked. A sort of "know your enemy" thing. The higher the skill and the more the bestiary is unlocked for the enemy, the higher the bonus (but never a super dramatic increase). This way everyone would benefit from it. Just like everyone benefits from athletics, survival and, theoretically, stealth. Mechanics still is only good on one character.

Edited November 16, 2014 by Shevek

[Namutree]

I do think lore would be nice if characters with the lore skill got small, passive offensive bonuses (defensive bonuses would have less utility at range) against beastiary enemies that are fully or partially unlocked. A sort of "know your enemy" thing. The higher the skill and the more the bestiary is unlocked for the enemy, the higher the bonus (but never a super dramatic increase). This way everyone would benefit from it. Just like everyone benefits from athletics, survival and, theoretically, stealth. Mechanics still is only good on one character.

That's a really good idea.