I'm thinking about using a combat and skill resolution system which is both simultaneously simple AND tactically complex. It would work by comparing skills against each other (say in hand to hand fighting) or against some arbitrary challenge rating (say the difficulty in defusing a bomb) in order to get some percentage. This percentage would then be tested against a random "roll" to determine success or failure. That's standard stuff but the wrinkle I'd like to introduce is the idea that some situations or abilities cap skills. The rationale is that no matter how good you are, some challenges are such that nobody can be godly facing them. For example, let's use stealth: Let's say that you have to cross a room with a single guard. Your Stealth Level is 100, the guard's Detection Level is 100. Normally your chances would be 50% to cross undetected. But in this example let's further say that you've triggered an alarm and that this incurs an automatic Stealth Cap, regardless of your abilities. In this situation, the Stealth Cap is generated by a module in the base called Second Sight (a special sensor and AI system located somewhere on the level). Second Sight, when activated, brings all Stealth Levels down to 50. This means that no matter how godly your Stealth Level is, unless Second Sight is disabled your Stealth Level can never be higher than 50 (giving you a 33% chance to cross undetected). Caps can come from abilities, gear or tactical situations and, in turn, can be blown automatically by the same. In the stealth situation, for instance, you might use a Tachyon Jammer which disrupts the signals Second Sight relies on, returning your Stealth Level to 100. Levels would be the general case in most situations, but caps would provide wrinkles. Dogs might cap your Stealth Level, for instance, because they use scent to track you. Or maybe you're a great noble among your own people but scum to the bigoted invaders who have conquered you; so your Reputation Level is whatever it is among your kind, but among the invaders it's capped. The goal with all of this is to provide challenges regardless of your skill levels, to simplify the skill level itself so that you know your general case effectiveness, and to allow for procedurally generated levels where the difficulties can be either generated randomly or keyed off of your character / party details. Thoughts? Is this too arbitrary? Would it invalidate the whole point of leveling if you found some situations brought you down to the effective abilities of a early level character?

Maybe instead of capping skills due to environmental factors and such, you could apply percentage changes to them. Rather than limit skill to a max of 50 for the Second Sight, it just reduces skill rolls by a percentage. This seems to make more sense to me, since someone with a 50 Stealth might only have a 33% chance of making it through normally, but the Second Sight thing doesn't affect them at all because it is a cap not a reduction.

Also, it would allow you to increase skills as well (you could wear your semi-invisibility belt module for a 10% boost to Stealth).

Or maybe a hybrid system, where there is a percentage reduction / increase but also a hard maximum / minimum (10% off Reputation with invaders, with a hard cap of 70).

I don't love caps - they lead to situations where a higher skill doesn't offer any advantage. Some math trick whereby increasing skill offers diminishing returns could achieve the same result (challenges against which no skill level can do better than a desired percentage of success).

For instance: to roll a skill check take the first ten skill points and roll once floating_point_random (10). Roll the second ten skill points twice and add the lowest result to the total. Roll the third ten points three times and so on. For a 64 skill roll fp_random (4) seven times and add the smallest result to the total. Compare to the challenge difficulty (which itself may be randomized depending on the challenge - a d5+9 challenge would require a level 10 skill level to have any chance to succeed at all - a d15 challenge could be passed by any skill levels with a bit of luck but would require a high skill to succeed consistently) to get success or failure.

[Edited by - Diodor on March 19, 2010 2:08:58 AM]

I think the system itself makes a lot of sense. It'll allow for a lot of skill gain (we all like it), while maintaining a mental challenge even in the late game.

Agree with krez's hybrid system.

I lean more towards diminishing returns, perhaps logarithmically.

A level 5 is far ahead of a level 1 but a level 50 only has minor gains over a level 25.

Quote:Original post by Iron Chef Carnage
Just to be clear, do you mean to say that a guy with 40 skill in sneaking would not be adversely affected by the alarm, and a guy with 55 and a guy with 100 would both be dropped down to 50 by it?

Yeah that's it.

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Introducing an arbitrary cap does feel phony. Your example makes me think of a Splinter Cell game or something, but from your other posts I'm guessing you're dealing with a more abstract interface than that, maybe something as simple as a minimap with a room highlighted and "Hangar A: One Guard (Patrolling), Active Second Sight, Exits to Courtyard, Comm Center, Storage Locker A" in a "Current Location" window somewhere.

Right, with some mechanism of showing your options and their chances for succeeding.

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I'd say a system of buffs and debuffs would be more intuitive to players, so they could see that the room has the "Second Sight" buff on it, which penalizes sneak by 50% and reduces the response delay if the guard calls for backup by 25%, and then they can choose to deploy one of their Tachyon Jammers to debuff the room, or just hope their skill check goes well, or go out the way they came in and try to find the Second Sight console and disable it, or say, "Fuck all this tiptoeing, let's rock and roll," and get out their bazooka and start making their own doors to the data storage wing.

The end result would be about the same--reduced success rate and a series of measures and countermeasures that can be played--but the whole thing might be easier for players to wrap their heads around if it's percentages rather than hard restrictions. Plus it allows a higher skill to confer some benefit regardless of the situation. Even if the benefit is negligible, you don't feel like the skillpoints you allocated were totally wasted.

The only problem I see with applying percentages as buffs or debuffs is that it's harder to bring a disparity involving a big number and a small number into line. If the numbers are uncapped, which is more threatening, to know that your 1000 points will be brought down to 10 or that you'll be cut to 50%?

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I think just making a hard cap on total skill level might be the ticket for your overarching goal to prevent godhood.

My goal in making skills uncapped was to allow for a sense of nearly unlimited growth and to allow groups to combine skills points toward a single objective. Let's say, for instance, that you've got a door with a shield which can be dispersed provided you can overcome the difficulty level. I was thinking that there would nominally be natural caps (100 sounds good), but that you could put together a team and achieve more from the sum of your skills than you could alone. So if the door was something like 500, procedurally determined based on stats for the area you're in, a maxed team could put 500 against it, giving them a 50/50 chance.

Uncapped skills allow me to do other things like pepper the game world with special locations in the game that break your natural skill point caps and any outside imposed caps (so maybe you find that mystic monastery that can teach you to walk on the rice paper without leaving a single step). I can also throw highly arbitrary barriers in the game world and tie them to time, technology level or team sizes: Maybe the "Entropy Tombs" have some superscience barrier that amounts to a 10,000 difficulty total. A single character maxed has not a chance, but rich entrepreneur or faction leader with a shipload of experts might make it. If I allow you to gradually reduce difficulty in the same way a treasure hunter works to gather clues then I can dole out points here and there, allowing you as the player to determine if 100 here and 50 there is really worth enough to bring down 10k. Or maybe you can go trekking for a phenomenal gadget, like that neural accelerator that will give you 1 turn of 100x skill for the small cost of 50 years of your life.

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You could even have the facilities change up their defenses, or have scheduled maintenance periods for certain key systems, so it would be like planning the perfect bank heist.

This is cool. I'd like to have this approach be viable, but I also like the idea of not only leveling up but "leveling out." Being a faction leader that can leverage a small army against a problem would be cool as well. (Side note: Without something like this there's never any real way of providing really viable non-combat paths through a game; if you focus everything on non-combat skills and find yourself in a violent situation, this group notion is one potential way to automatically protect you)

In terms of getting the gist of your chances I take your point, but I'm already amenable to having to provide quick calculations to show you the chances of what you can do (and maybe the ability to modify them so you can see what it would take to have this or that chance).