General Game Balance Ideas

[DerGilb]

I've been playing this game now since the first days of world 3. In these 4 month i had a lot to discover and think about. What follows is the condensed essence of my ideas that i got during that time.

Attributes:
I would like to start with those numbers that every RPG uses to define its characters. They are the foundation of every little Hearthling.

Stength, Dexterity and Intelligence:
These are attributes that no RPG will ever miss. They build a really nice balanced triangle to define the "active" side of a character, whether he is a hefty whopper, a nimble trickster or nerdy mage (yes i know there is no magic). All active skills should be dependend on or be governed by these attributes in a balanced way.
Strength:

• Smithing
• Carpentry(argueable, see further down)
• Melee Combat

Dexterity:

• Sewing
• Farming(arguable, see further down)
• Marksmanship

Intelligence:

• Cooking (seriously that should not be governed by Perception)
• Survival
• Exploration(arguable, see further down)

Constitution, Agility and Perception
Where i come up with an active side i will also explain the passive side to you. Passive means for me that actually any character can benefit of raising these attributes because they affect everyday situations in the life of a hearthling.

Constitution:

It affects how you cope with damage that gets through armor and your HP of course. It also should affect your amount or drain rate of Stamina in my opinion. Together with Agility they could be taken to calculate your Swimming Ability.(more info on that further down)

Agility:

I really like how it influences traveling at the moment and i quite like the traveling system in general. Furthermore i suggest to use Agility as the attribute that defines your armor along with items.So the higher your Agility the harder it gets for anything to actually hit you. Together with Constitution they could be taken to calculate you Swimming Ability.(more info on that further down)

Perception:

This attribute is not my favourite, but lets give it a purpose. It's name already says it all, it means how capable you are of perceiving your surroundings. In D&D this was done by the skills of "Listen and Spot", so you can do it either by skill (d&d) or by attribute (h&h). If i had to choose between Exploration and Perception in H&H i would vote to keep the attribute because you can use it to passively influence a lot of other stuff. Keep it balanced though. A melee fighter could get a bonus just like the marksman by spotting the weak points in his opponents armor.

Psyche and Charisma:
Now we are coming to the best and worst attributes in my opinion. I love the idea of an attribute that governs everything artful in the game. And i completely agree with Jorbs statement in another thread that every Hearthling should have some Psyche. After all i think it just needs some balancing and more importance ingame. Considering the "balance of 3" , every type of character (Str, Con or Int) should have the ability to craft artful stuff. The Smith already has the jewelery, the Cook can set tables or may be even create special artful dishes, but what about the Tailor? Give Psyche also some influence in the Dexterity branch pls.

And now Charisma. My simple suggestion: Drop It !!!!! In every RPG i wonder what it is good for. The only thing my friends and i came up with is interaction with NPCs. May be my diet was lacking some carrots lately, so my Perception isnt that great, but i didn't see any NPCs lately. Now i know for what Charisma is used ingame but i am certain these things can be handled different. Let the highest of the "active" attributes for example affect authority gain by that Hearthling. (Nowadays the skill "Intimidate" in D&D is not based on Charisma anymore but you can intimidate someone with whatever you are good at.)


Skills:
Attributes alone don't make a playable Hearthling yet. Its missing the action. And here comes what we all like to spent our precious LP on and brag about.

Unarmed Combat:
A skill that in my opinion is more confusing than helping. As a melee fighter i was not really sure where to invest my points in until i recieved a sword. Now im going into Melee Combat, that by its name "melee" actually should include Unarmed Combat. Fighting unarmed at a distance is rather ridiculous. To distinguish between 2 fightingstyles i would solve the problem with the Moves and Maneuvers alone. Again i call upon some balance here. There should not be 5 of 6 Moves that are influenced by Unarmed Combat. I would drop that skill.

Marksmanship:
All fine with the general idea. Just how it works at the moment is crap...

Melee Combat:
All fine with the general idea. Just how it works at the moment is crap...

Smithing, Sewing, Cooking:
My intuition tells me so strong that these skills are governed by Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence that actually i dont even want to write it .
Just to Cooking i want to add that it should play a part in EVERYTHING edible, roasted meat too! So it would not be too bad for any chatacter to push it to at least 10 ... or 40 if he wants to eat twice as good.

Carpentry, Farming, Survival:
Now it gets a little more difficult. Under which attributes would you sort them? Sure a Carpenter needs some strength but it is also a lot about technique. Before a Farmer skillfully swings his scythe for sure he has to know a lot about the plants. And a Butchers intelligence about the difficult meat cuts isn't enough when he is too weak to cleave a bone. See where i am going? These skills could be governed respectively by two of the active attributes.
Now may be i got the idea of Survival wrong and it is actually a skill made for those who want to "survive" alone but i won't consider that because imho this game, in the long run, is meant to be played together with others.

Exploration:
As i already mentioned talking about Perception i am not really a friend of both together. It's main use at the moment is to spot various natural products like blueberries, feldspar and many others. But actually you have the choice of raising the skill or the attributeof Perception. I prefer the Attribute and therefor suggest to get rid of Exploration. Just let Perception be considered in calculating your chances of seeing stuff.

Stealth and Ranging:
Hey what am i doing here? Comparing a Skill with an Ability? Nope! You might have realised that also Ranging (the chasing of bad guys) is done by Exploration and Perception at the moment. As i would like to drop the Exploration skill we need something to compensate for that. The most logical conclusion for me is to create an exact opposite to a skill that already exists. This way Stealth and Ranging would be much better comparable and easier to understand ingame. Immediately i would think: "Ok Stealth is for the bad guys and Ranging for the good ones!." If i think about the governing attributes Agility comes frist to my mind, as it is used already for far travels i can immagine teleport hunts all over the map ^^. Also Perception could be considered in both cases first not to leave scents and on the other side, well, to find them.

Healing:
If you payed close attention you may have noticed that the triangle of Str, Dex, Int is slightly out of balance. Intelligence now is missing a skill like Melee Combat or Marksmanship. I would suggest something like magic out of pure RPG experience but i read in other threads that magic is not wanted in these lands. So what about Healing? It would also be a skill connected with combat/damage and it would also be a skill that you perform on another person (or yourself). The better you get in Healing the more HHP you can heal or the better the gauze and ointments are that you produce. Without the influence of Healing make HHP recovery really hard.


Abilities:
I dont really understand why the one time buyable skills are still (after some threads) called "Skills"! Since they enable you to do or create new stuff they should be labeled "Abilities" to avoid further confusion with their increasable counterparts. Despite that fact, i really like the implementation because it's logical and reminds me a little bit of D&D with skills (active usable) and feats (passive bonuses or special actions). There are just 2 Abilities that i would like to mention right now:

Cartography:
OH NOOO, yeah you are right ... i hate it too. And i hate the fact that after 4 month there isn't a complete map yet. Funny thing is that i started to play this game when a friend told me of its massive and dynamic world. First thing i said was: "I'm gonna map it all!" After reading the forum i did not even bother buying the skill in the end. Now i got it and i thought a little bit. Screenshotting the minimap and putting it all together is really a pain in the ass. Doing Cartography as it is right now is also a pain in the ass. So PLLLLEEEEAAAAASSSSSEEEE change it!
I am thinking about the size of a supergrid now 5000x5000 tiles. You need 100 localmaps to map that shit and these are just too many minimaps in my opinion. It would be so great if Cartography would be useful ingame to plan your next strategic steps. Basically: "Where do i go next? Is this river running into the right direction? Is there a heath, grassland, mountain or neighbour nearby?". These are so valuable informations for anybody who is starting to play. I suggest to change that Cartography from now on draws immediately localmaps of at least 500x500 tiles. To balance this you could make it more expensive to buy, or that it takes longer to draw, the benefit would be worth it. I would even suggest to increase the radius further to 625x625 tiles. This way it would take 64 drawings to map one supergrid. I dont know if this is possible with the original client and the "one tile one pixel" rule. But i dont think anybody needs an original sized map. Furthermore the trees could be left of the map and the whole thing scaled down. Another question. Would it be possible with the client to export the map in a .jpg file or something. I think everybody watches maps in another program.

Swimming:
Ill make it short. It would be cool to cross a river, giving it 30 tiles width, with 900 = Con*Agi.
Is this so hard to code to adjust the stamina drain?

pua
tired now
see you next time when i want to write something about Hearthfire Rituals and Quality

[DatOneGuy]

This was very well compiled. The only things I see that I don't think should really be changed are exploration being dropped, and charisma.

Charisma can still fit other rolls later, and right now it does have a few mostly as defense for certain pvp moves from what I understand.

The way I see it Feasting is just the beginning of what Charisma will be part of, given that and the Civilization Slider I'd be inclined to believe that in the future Charisma/Intelligence will be very village-oriented.

There are many ways to play this game and I understand that the way you are going by is the most efficient way, but there are many others that are just as fun, in a previous village of mine we had a Chieftain who just kept pushing CHA for feasts, while also farming/sewing.

Exploration might require perhaps a change in it's name, but other than that the way it currently works is actually pretty good, however yeah scents do need to be changed altogether...

Melee Combat should indeed have it's name changed to Armed Combat or something similar to avoid future confusion.

With salves/better gauze a village Healer would be a very very nice addition, I like that idea the way you describe it, a lot.


The most important thing you bring up that does bother me a lot is that some skills should indeed be effected (but at a lesser rate) to many different things. For example Farming should be effected by both Dex and Int, but Dex should be the main skill Int taking a backseat. (Perhaps 1/4 and 1/12 weight respectively)

In any case: +1

[OvShit]

Had anyone suggested this before?
Anyway, great idea.

[sabinati]

you make some good points, one thing though: crafting ranger gear (pants, shirt, cape, boots) and bear capes uses sewing, dex, and psyche, so there is something for the artful tailor to make.

[Lordofdragonss]

I see great ideas here!
In future maybe we will get many new plants and items for healers, so exploration could be usefull.
And I hope we will see many Martial arts skills for unarmed combat too!

[vikingdragons]

good idea, very well thought out, but i have a few little things i don't like.

-i would like to keep all the current attributes, but with changes definitely.
-keep exploration, don't add ranging, but change how exp and stealth work.
-My Idea for Stealth: Stealth should not only effect scent quality, but also the perception of animals. Such as if you have high stealth and move slowly, you should be able to sneak up to within a few tiles of a bear without it even knowing you are there.
-Love the idea of Healing!!!
-a different way for carto to work would be nice.
-new swimming system for the win

[Salinn]

-My Idea for Stealth: Stealth should not only effect scent quality, but also the perception of animals. Such as if you have high stealth and move slowly, you should be able to sneak up to within a few tiles of a bear without it even knowing you are there.

I agree. Especially with the re-rolling making scents easy to see, I think stealth should allow you to be sneaky in the forest when it comes to things that want to eat you.

Then again, maybe it does, since I ran into the ass-end of a bear the other day (it was behind a tree) and kept running up against it about 3 times before it noticed me. Do bears and other animals have line-of-sight vision? (You can sneak around their backsides?)

[Potjeh]

You do a fine job explaining the how part, but I really don't see the why part. Ie, this to me looks like just changing things for sake of changing things. Convince me that your way is objectively better to the point that implementing it is worth the very limited development time.

[DerGilb]

ok let me explain the "why"

Since i began playing H&H i was suprised a lot of times how wrong my intuition was. My favourite example is the Cooking and Perception conection. Also the thing with Cooking and roasted meat. One of the first things i did was raising Cooking to 10 to get some base quality food. You can say now that in the beginning you have to survive so raise your Survival skill, true, but i did not immagine that Survival plays a role in preperation of food, more like getting to and eating the raw stuff.
In general i have the feeling the game is slightly out of balance and you could improve the gaming experience and also the noob experience by changing the stuff i mentioned. 2 ways of melee combat vs. 1 way of marksmanship. The versatile Exploration skill vs. the just criminal oriented Stealth. Cha and Int beeing important for villages but why should Guardsman/Smith raise Int if there is no other use for him?


Now DatOneGuy got it right , normally my way of playing RPGs is a quite efficient way, I love making progress. However some of my friends that i normally play with also usually come up with crazy ideas of character builds, and i love it as it is really fun to play together with those guys that excel at what the standard player sucks at. My suggestion to drop Charisma was may be a little bit fast. So keep it but i think its time to give it a more clear purpose like Psyche. Make it like the "Village Attribute" then. What i want to point out is the difference between the attributes. Therefor the active, passive and special side of a character.

[Sarge]

@ OP: I did not read all of it, since I did not need to as i agree whole heartedly. I actually posted something similar last year, but did not make the effort to make it quite as thorough as you have. I even started compiling a skills table complete with contributing attributes, but aborted it as I did not feel that the time and effort it would take was justifyable considering the minimal chance that anything will actually be done about it.

@ Potjeh: The 'why' in my opinion is:

- Some contributing skills are not necessarily logical
- Contributing skills are faaaaaar too flat and that is well illustrated in the OP.

E.g. Swimming should cause stamina drain as it is right now, but stamina drain should be determined by a ratio of constitution and agility (how healthy you are as well as agile determines how well you can swim).

There are tons of examples where more than one skill in varying ratio's should apply to determine the outcome and this is where I strongly agree it currently to be imbalanced and lacks depth.