More thoughts and ideas about a statistic rework.

[Hamel]

Prepare for a long read. Or a long blip-through-everything-and-see-if-I-can-find-anything-vaguely-interesting, if you don't care that I spent all of this time writing this out and you don't love me. :,(

...Anyway, to start things off:

Why the Tradition/Change slider sucks.

Change. It sucks, because when your character dies, all (or almost all) of that time you spent on your character is gone forever, and then you "Raeg"-quit (probably, anyway). The worst part is that you're practically forced into this, with the quality levels of raw materials such as they are, and the required skill to compete at all in processing it. Not to mention the requirements for all of the black skills, and the all of that LP you need to get if you want to have any weapon skills worth speaking of, which is really quite necessary if you want to protect yourself and your fellows.

Tradition. It sucks as well, because, as mentioned above, (I, too, love commas.) it is just about impossible to keep up with other players unless you want to grind all day for LP. It's also dreadfully difficult to maintain tradition if you plan on changing any of your other sliders. Really, as silly Jackard has so clearly shown us, the only people who use tradition are the ones who plan on dying. Aka, those who plan on murdering, pillaging, and other nasty stuff.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think the Tradition/Change slider is a very interesting and unique idea. Only, it doesn't seem to be working out. My opinion is that you, Broj and Ratfol, should kill it.

This all brings me to my next section:


Possibilities, Proficiencies. (Yet another topic about this? RAAAEEEEGGG!)

Death to our LP overlords! Who needs 'em anyway. Basically, this part of the idea is simple enough, you get better at what you do, by doing it! The idea is entirely unique and unconventional, I know! But, it's typically rather flawed in many ways. For instance, it makes things very grindy. And no one likes grind, that's why we hate tradition, remember?

Therefore, we need other stuff to go with it:


Further Elaboration, Skills. (More raeg!)

Yes, those things you buy for 200LP a piece, Hearth Magic, and such. We all love them, don't we? My opinion is that we should keep them, I like the little pictures and whatnot. Even if they do look a little like worm-poop. :)

I think we should have leveling skills. Novice carpentry, carpentry-carpentry, competent carpentry (hey, this sounds familiar), et cetera, et cetera. In addition to unlocking the next level of carpentry, in this case, these skills would obviously unlock other skills at different levels, such as 'wheel making', 'beekeeping', and 'lawspeaking' (some skills clearly should not have levels). They would also affect the cap for your proficiencies, no more than 20 carpentry for a novice, for example.

Now, you're probably wondering where you'd get these skills, since LP would be gone. Well, you would start out with a few skills of your choosing, to begin with. Other people would be able to teach you their skills. Although there would have to be at least a slight loss for both the teacher and the pupil, that would probably get worse as you try to train higher skills to or from other people. Otherwise people might wander around giving their legendary carpentry skill to every random person they run into on the street. And people would create armies of alts just to give one of their character's every skill possible to start with. I think people could also get "ideas" for skills, fairly randomly, depending on their intelligence and the level of the skill, of course. And then they could try to tap into these ideas to gain the skill, through one of the long processes that J&L are so good at making, probably.

The higher level skills could not be gained through random "ideas", I think. There would have to be more difficult and rarer ways of obtaining those. For instance, slaying a dragon, finding a ancient tomb with a similarly ancient tome (And getting cursed, whee!), or running into an ancient dryad, who will grant you ancient knowledge if you best her at riddles, or something.

Obviously, this section of ideas is still very raw, and needs further brainstorming.

On to the next section:


Last but not least, Stats. (Too bored from the long post to be raegy, now.)

Vucar (aka Curudan) must be thanked for much of this section, as a lot of it was his ideas.

Basically, get rid of the big FEP (Food Experience Point) bar. Instead, have two little bars next to each stat. The first being how much more of the bar you need until you get another point in that stat. The second being your FEP bar for that stat. Your FEP bars would affect how fast (or slow) you gain (or lose) stat experience points (SEP), for each stat.

Vucar was thinking that your stats should raise to 20 by themselves if you had enough FEP into them, as the Hearthling body grows only to a certain point without help. I think they should keep raising very slowly as long as your FEBs (Food Experience Bars) are half way or more, raising faster the FEBs are to full. Both of us agree that your stats should slowly decay if their individual FEB bars are empty. Obviously each FEB bar would slowly drop as time goes by. So you need to eat a balanced diet if you want to keep your stats in shape. This would make Wonderful-Wilderness-Wursts much more valuable.

In any case, the main gist of the idea is that you should gain stats by doing tasks related to them. Since it doesn't make sense that a fat merchant who eats bear meat is stronger than a bear hunter who doesn't eat anything but chanterelles. Nor is the whole FEP system at the moment particularly entertaining or balanced, as we all know. Obviously eating bear meat should make the bear hunter much stronger than if he's only eating chanterelles, but the merchant needs to do some exercise if he wants to be a big tough guy like the hunter anytime soon.


Congratulations if you read this whole topic, I'm impressed. I'd like to hear your opinion on these suggestions, and would love to hear any potential improvements you have for them. :)

tl;dr? Silence! I keel you!

[theTrav]

TLDR;
I kid because I love (actually I only skipped small bits)

I like the suggested FEP model, it encourages a balanced diet. It doesn't particularly reward high FEP foods though, do you propose anything to maintain their value?

I don't know if I like the proficiencies suggestion so much, but it does strike me as being better than LP...

I just posted somewhere else about hating the TRAD/CHANGE slider, I also hate it, and think they should implement ancestor worship and replace the current mechanic with something that leverages ancestors more or less.

[Hamel]

I like the suggested FEP model, it encourages a balanced diet. It doesn't particularly reward high FEP foods though, do you propose anything to maintain their value?

I think high FEP foods would still keep their worth, since they would fill your FEBs so much faster than lesser foods.