Bay 12 Games Forum
Other Projects => Curses => Topic started by: praguepride on March 08, 2010, 05:07:38 pm
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Basically the current system has it where you gain skill points when you pass a skill check. You might also gain skill when you fail as well but I can't verify that 100%.
If you always gain skil when you succeed though, this system favors "obscenely statted" characters. So learning a skill like dodge or rifles is extremely difficult in the beginning of the game. YOu're missing your shots all the time and getting shot/stabbed/punched in return. You try to sneak around and everyone spots you. You try to talk to people and nobody will give you the time of day.
However, once you get those skills to the double digits, it becomes obscenely easy to level up. You hit all the time and you evade every attack against you. You can go buck naked through the White House and convince the CCS Leader that liberalism is the way of the future.
However, your stats continue to climb, usually even faster then original because you're passing skill checks left and right so without even trying your skills reach XX.99+ with nary a thought. So that means that the strong just get stronger. And the difficulty curve is only at the beginning of the game. Once you're uber-statted, you fly through the game no problem.
But what if this was flipped? They say you only get better by playing a smarter opponent. You learn from your mistakes. You've gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelette.
Now this would need to be refined, but the basic system would be that you gain XP when you fail. So when you get stabbed, your dudge goes up a little. When you miss, your pistols goes up a little. This has many benefits:
1) It's very easy to initially learn any skill. Because you suck at it, you'll fail all the time and quickly rack up tons of XP.
2) It increases the challenges of getting stats into the "obscene" level. When you dodge every shot, you stop gaining experience in it. When you hit every time you stop leveling up your pistols/rifles/martial arts. So you won't be able to farm out Crack Heads and Fast Food Workers for XP. You'll have to move on to harder and harder opponents. If you're not facing a challenge, you're not gaining XP. I think this is a bit more realistic because beating up retiree's shouldn't train you to super-human skills to take on an army of agents or soldiers with your fists.
3) Increases end game difficulty. Again, you have to always be facing a challenge to improve.
4) Rewards players for taking risks. Instead of sticking to the crack houses, you'll gain huge rewards by going to more dangerous places with harder locks, more observant conservatives, tougher opponents etc.
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Generally speaking, you gain skill regardless of success or failure. Where it is taken into account, performing worse on your skill checks, failing, or having lower skill only results in more experience.
The only exception to this that I know of is hacking. If you assign hackers that are so low skilled that they don't even know where to start, you will fail the hacking attempt and get an insignificant amount of skill points for compensation. Adding even a single person who knows what they're doing will result in everyone, including the unskilled, switching to full skill gains.
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Well, fudge. There goes my idea :(
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Well there is an advantage to failing
You don't succeed so you can keep trying.
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this is already kinda in the game. To train security go straight to the downtown apartments. Sure you don't open the doors but you go up a level in security before you get to the end of the corridor.
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I know. Fox already said as much.
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CONGRATS praguepride! You just gained +1 to "Idea Generation" because of this current failure to generate a proper idea!
In all seriousness, both in the game and in real life, we learn more from failure than success. Most of us have probably mentioned thousands of ideas, of which only a small amount are good, and among those that are good, only a couple are actually implemented.
But those few good ideas that are implemented really improve the game, so keep suggesting!
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Don't worry, I can handle criticism. There's not much that will stop me from coming up with new ideas.
I was just pointing it out because this idea was settled by Fox rather quickly, but people kept on posting about how they thought you already gained XP from failure.
I'm just reiterating that yeah, I know. Fox said so in post #2 :D
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I generally use seduction up until I am successful, at which point I don't anymore to avoid losing juice if I get multiple successful dates.
More on topic, this also applies to LCS.