General Game Balance Ideas

[Sarge]

Fyi, this was the little biyt I wrote last year on topic:

Attributes
Imho, the attributes greatly lack depth. Those that are actually usefull, are usefull for only a few things and it doesn't seem quite balanced. I would like to see attributes contribute to many more things so that it makes you think more about where to spend FEP (more on this below). A couple of examples,

- if strength adds to melee damage, why does dexterity not add to ranged weapon damage
- what if you could climb a "hill", but only if your dexterity and agility was high enough
- movement speed, agility, dexterity, strength & constitution
- Constitution might reduce rate of stamina drain when swimming, but what increases your max stamina?
- Chakravanti mentioned a great application in the thief vs ranger proposal for checks and I'm sure many others have mentioned great ones elsewhere too.

[Potjeh]

Sure, cooking and per connection is a bit unintuitive, but cooking and int is even less intuitive. You only think it makes more sense because you come from a D&D background. Taking away cooking from per just makes it a crap stat again. Sure, int is a crap stat right now, but it's going to get it's own things in due time.

I'll grant you the roast meat thing, it'd be intuitive for it to be governed by cooking. But it's that way for a reason - so people who hunt can both butcher and roast their kill without loss of quality, without being forced to raise yet another skill. Basically, it's that way so it promotes specialization. Of course, that kinda breaks when it comes to domestic animals, so roasting meat in oven would be neat.

Underlining things doesn't make them true. I fail to see how would my experience be any better if these changes were implemented.

The two ways of melee combat are very much different. It takes some time to get a grasp on the combat system, but once you do you see that both have their strengths and weaknesses, and both are viable (or would be, if melee didn't have OP Thanes while unarmed gets nothing). Melee wins in brute damage and defensive capability, but unarmed gets you heaps of initiative, making it much better for finesse. Having these two distinct skills allows for varied combat builds - you can add a bit of ua to melee to get quick init in a fight (switch to Death or Glory when opponent's attack bar is low) or add a bit of melee to ua to use the battleaxe (use ua to drain defence and get init, and then cleave). Removing one of these two combat skills removes a lot of strategy from raising combat skills, and from combat itself.

Marksmanship, well, it could use a redoing to be made viable for PvP, but not outright broken (which it would be if it did any appreciable damage in it's current incarnation).

Stealth could use some love, yeah. But I don't see anything wrong with it being just for criminals. If anything, we need more specialized stuff. Making everything equally useful for everyone makes for a bland game, as everyone makes the exact same character.

I really don't get the active/passive thing. I think it's completely arbitrary, and restricts future development (say, they decide to make agi matter for maneuvers - ooops, can't do that, agi is passive).

*edit*
Giving people unequal stamina bars is a horrible thing for PvP. The playing field is more than uneven enough right now, don't make it worse.

[DerGilb]

Underlining things doesn't make them true. I fail to see how would my experience be any better if these changes were implemented.

You are correct. I just used it to make it easier to read and find the answer to your "why" question faster.
May be you fail to see the improvement from your character view now. Me too, atm i would not benefit much. But think about character reset in world 4 and a much more elaborate basis to start from.

Seems like you really didnt get my active/passive idea. Let me put it into different words. Str, Dex and Int are called "active" because they affect your ACTIONS. These will be attacks, crafts, active skillusage where you do something. Con, Agi and Per are called "passive" because they affect your REACTIONS. These will be response to attacks, response to damage, response to stamina drain, and passive skill usage like stealth or ranging (ingame you dont run around check things for scents, they are just there).

Your worries about PER beeing a crap stat are not worth it if you consider that my idea was to shift the importance of "Exploring" all to Perception. And because it is a passive attribute you could come up with more ideas where it gives you a bonus. Fishing may be (although you could argue about if it is active or a passive skill as you just sit and wait for something to bite).

[Potjeh]

No, I don't think it'd make any difference even if I just started a new character.

[DerGilb]

what do the other more experienced players think about it ?
how do you like the idea of attributes beeing closer realated to skills and the whole construct more balanced?
did somebody even think about a different system maybe? i am sure you can connect the dots in other ways too

[Reeyfer]

I just wanna say... since when does perception not make sense for cooking? Mebbe dnd does intelligence, but if so its dnd that makes no sense. You don't need to be smart to cook well, you just need to have experience cooking (the cooking skill obviously) and a good sense of sight, smell, taste, all of which fall pretty squarely under the heading of perception, by its definition. Anything in cooking that might be said to be required by "intelligence" fits better already under a specific skill at cooking.

I just didn't see why anyone would say perception didn't matter. Its your sight, smell, taste, etc, all the "attributes" which matter for cooking.

But yeah in general it would be excellent to see the attributes matter more.

[DerGilb]

Let me dig up this old post of mine now that the devs say they want to balance some stuff.
I did not edit the OP even if some things have already changed. Just take a look at it again.

What i want to add now are things i experienced after i wrote that post. Basically i joined a village and got to know comfortable a life can be. I really thought they could make use of a cook character but i was mistaken. Actually the Food System also needs some balancing. I know there were already some FEP threads but i can't be bothered reading through all them if there is so much else going on right now.

We have a lot of (if not enough) recipes at the moment but just some of them are used, at least by me.
STR --> BBC
CON --> cow chorizo, pumpkin pie
AGI --> RoB, Creamy Camembert, DDD
.....

It seems to me that every attribute has a maximum of 3 useful recipes to increase it. That gets a little boring.
What about sorting the existing recipes into 3 tiers. Like Tier1 giving around 10, Tier2 giving around 25 and Tier3 giving max 50 base FEP. Then spread the recipes among the tiers according to their "difficulty". E.g. the higher the tier the more ingredients you need. The more a PITA they are to make. RoBs are just so bad to make if cheese is so easy to produce. And it also should be balanced between the Attributes. MBC gives so much STR like no other food gives for a different attribute.
I dont know the game engine but i imagine the FEP system is rather easy to change or not? Some changes in numbers, some changes in ingredients to make things more hard to cook and that's it ???!!

[Negatron]

like the ideas except cooking. perception makes sense. stealth should have more use, specifically, a stealth mode in the adventure menu, enabling you to hide from hostile creatures, and more interestingly, players, allowing you to spy on people. It could be counteracted by perception.