Mixture

[Adam Wiggins]

[JCL:]
> I also like levelless numberless classless goal-oriented systems (and
> no, I'm not convinced that skill trees are the one true solution).

Well...ya gotta admit, they do work pretty darn well. :)
Don't know that there's any 'one true' solution to anyhing like this,
but for the time being skill trees are the cleanest to implement, well
within our technology capabilities, and have yet to be taken to their
full potential.  I'll worry about the next step when we've beaten
skill tress into the ground...

> FWIW this numberless area was under fairly hot discussion on Wout's
> list.  I'll see if I can't dig up a few key threads later.

I remember some stuff, but not a whole lot.  Maybe I came in on the
tail end of it.

> >Usually you don't find out your
> >actual stats (numerically, that is) until high level, and in some
> >cases never.  
> 
> I see no reason that the system should ever report stats for things
> like dexterity, strength and such (aside: I can see no possible excuse
> for an intelligence stat.).

Oh?  It's all a matter of what you have to compare to.  I remember feeling
quite smart in my middle-school years.  I was better read than anyone else
I knew (including most adults) and I had yet to meet anyone that could
even give me a mild challange at chess.  Then I went off to some gifted
summer school camp thingy my parents thought would be educational for me.
It certainly was, but not in the way that they might have thought.  After
those two weeks I felt about as sharp as a lump of clay; don't think I won
a single chess game that whole time (out of dozens that I played), and I
constatly found myself saying, "Oh...no...I haven't read that..." etc.
It's a matter of what you're used to.

> >Of course, it's not really too necessary, because it
> >quickly becomes obvious what your stats are. "Let's see, I can wield
> >pretty heavy weapons without difficulty, so I must be pretty strong,
> >and I've gotten good hitpoint gains, so I must have a good con. 
> >Hmmm, my skills are learning rather slowly, though, I must not be too
> >smart."  Etc.  
> 
> *That* is exactly the sort of play I expect.  "Oh, my magical spells
> are succeeding more often == I must be getting better at magic.".  I
> don't want the system to come back and report some sort of meaningful
> comparitive value or phrase to the user at any point.

Welll...the thing is, people want a way to be able to judge their character's
advancement.  As much as I'd like to think that just practical use is good
enough, I kind of doubt it.  Our skill display currently just tries to
give a rough idea of your abilities at a given level of the tree, like so:

> skills
You are very skilled at combat, particularly offence and ranged attacks.
Your stealth is quite good.
Your knowledge of theology, particularly the goddess Celendria, is very good.
You know a few things about thaumaturgy.
> skills stealth
Your stealth is quite good.
Your specialty is picking locks, but you are also good with traps and disguises.
> skills lock
You are very good at picking locks.
Your specialties are elven needle-links and Tookish spirals, but you
also have a fair knowledge of dwarven tripplebolts and latch-hooks.

I'd like this to be more natural...not sure where we want to take it,
exactly.  But I know that 'brag sheets' (what you get when you type 'stats'
or 'score' or whatever on most muds) are pretty important to players.
You want to know where you stand, both for gauging your rate of learning
and so that when you bounce around between characters you can remember
what they are good at :)
At the moment we have no stat display whatsoever, other than the lifepath
stuff from the character creation.  So if your guy is pretty strong just
due to luck and not because you selected 'particularly big and strong'
in character creation, there's no way to know it except via actual use.
On the other hand, our stats don't fluctuate a whole lot.  You can get
the info file on your race and it will fill you in on the strengths
and weaknesses of your race, and you can assume that your own stats
are fairly close to what is described.  Not sure if this is a good
thing or not; we'll see as we get more testers playing.

> If you really feel that you have to provide your players with some
> sort of comparison value, make it entirely relative.  Say for
> strength, make the reported strength a rough approximation to a
> fraction of the strongest character your character has seen in the
> last XXX time, or if he's stronger than all those, just report a "very
> strong" equivalent.  Ergo, the values are compleatly and utterly
> meaningless, but the users are still satisfied tht they have something
> with which to measure their own advancement.

Yeah, we've pondered this at length.  May still go ahead and do it this
way if people complain enough...

> Note: You'll have to add a median function to the above, or a single
> glimpse of a super-strong character will lead to scenes such as:
> 
>   > l
>   Bubba is here
>   > score bubba strength
>   Bubba looks about two thirds as strong as you.
>   > score strength
>   You are pretty strong now, stronger than most you've seen.
>   Boffo enters.
>   > score boffo strength
>   Boffo is amazingly strong.
>   > score strength
>   You are very weak.

Although you must admit, it does make a strange sort of sense :)

> cf Legend's skill document.  Its well worth a very detailed read. 
> They are one of the few to build a hierarchial skill system that is
> both internally self-consistant, and acts as the fundament for all
> player actions.  Its been posted here before.  I'll repost if
> requested.

Absolutely...I beta'd on Legend (around three years ago now, I believe)
and had some long email conversations with Ptah (Legend's creator, now
working on Ultima Online, which sounds actually pretty cool).
Even though the direction Legend took is entirely different from what
I desire, it's still one of the best implemented skill/stat systems I've
seen, and indeed the whole mud is very high quality and quite original.
And based on Merc, to boot...

> What I don't like about the above BTW is that the reported values are
> absolute (and I suspect advancement is linear).  This means that a
> "superb" rating to one player has exactly the same meaning as superb
> to another.  Not Good.  It makes for a single universal scale on which
> all players can place themselves, and removes all mystery as to
> exaclty what your status is.

I agree...but keep in mind that mystery is not always a good thing.
It's a question of balancing this correctly - usually the 'superb' etc
style skill-display I mentioned is relative, meaning that superb simply
means you're at your maximum possible skill level (usually related to
your class and wisdom stat).  So while it gives a rough comparisson,
it's not exactly perfect.  You can assume, however, that if you're a
mage with a low wisdom, your skill in 'long blades' at superb probably
means it still mostly sucks.

> >This would actually all work pretty well, except for a nasty little
> >thing called breakpoints.  
> 
> As you described, I use formulas thru-out.  They're more expensive,
> but they are also more responsive and tunable.

Nod...although you can still get breakpoints in formulas if you're not
careful.  The guy who's writing our combat system spends most of his
time plotting graphs and shading intersections to make sure all our
formulas work correctly at all points on the curve.