[Crossfire-wiki] [Crossfire DokuWiki] page changed: user:mwedel:skills

Sat Feb 26 00:25:11 CST 2011

A page in your DokuWiki was added or changed. Here are the details:

Date        : 2011/02/26 00:25
User        : mwedel
Edit Summary: 

@@ -66,13 +66,25 @@
    * This //fixes// problem of experience gains for skills.  Some skills right now do not gain experience easily - while this should be fixed, some skills just do not lend themselves all that easily for a balanced experience advance, either because they are skills that are infrequently used and would need to then give a very big (and seemingly out of proportion) experience reward when used, or the fact they may be considered too easy to use, and one does not want to give easy experience away.  Using skills would still gain experience, but it would got to the characters overall experience total.
  
    * This adds more choices during advancement and can give some goals for players.  This is purely personal opinion, but I prefer having choices to make about character advancement - I don't want to do it every minutes, but when gaining a level is fine.  And if more effects are put in for skills (at level 20, I get a chance to stun opponents with the hammer), it gives more incentive for characters to get to those points.  Within current skill system, there are things you gain, but in most cases, a character is not going to really do much about them - if a character is killing things with their pyromancy skill, it is unlikely they are going to switch to using another skill because of a bonus they may get 4 levels later.  I will note that the choice here is little like dragon characters get to make choices on focus and slowly increase resistances, which may be one reason that is a more popular character.
  
- === Specific Skill Ideas ===
+ ==== Specific Skill Ideas ====
  
  These ideas are actually independent of the revised advancement system, but since this page is **skills**, seems like a good place to put them.
  
- **Item Creation/Identification Skills** These are things like jewelery, smithery, bowyer, etc.  The item creation aspect should get expanded so there are more easy things to create give minor amounts of experience (for example, smithing a dagger should not be a hard task).  Identification of items should change - instead of there being a chance, it a straight level comparison - to identify a level 5 item, you need to be level 5 or greater in the appropriate skill.  Non magical items would be level 1, each plus of an item might add one level, each 20% resistance adds one level, etc.  Some formula could be determined for objects that do not have an item power setting.  There are a few advantages of this:
+ I decided to look over the existing skills, and try to give a brief breakdown of how each will work, as well as merging some and removing others.
+ 
+ === Skills Vs. Abilities ===
+ 
+ Skills should be areas of knowledge or physical ability that the character can improve (thus, spend AP points on).  Some current crossfire skills are more like abilities - they let the character do a particular task, but that ability never increases (eg, levitate).  In AD&D parlance, these would be feats.  There is still a place for those - just they are not called skills.  In fact, it may be the case the skills grant the characters with new abilities - the effectiveness of these abilities is related to the skills that grant them.  A simple example of this is attacking - it is an ability the character has, but it improves as the skill does.
+ 
+ One reason for skills giving abilities is that just having a single skill and saying 'use_skill ...' makes that command very context sensitive - for example, if you are on top of an altar, praying does something different than when you use it elsewhere.  Some for some of the item creation/identification skills - if on top of the workbench, it tries to make an item, if not, it identifies in the inventory.
+ 
+ I think it would be better to remove this ambiguity.  Have smithery give two abilities - 'identify weapons' and 'craft weapon' as examples.  Likewise, certain combat skills may have special actions that the character wish to use now and again, but not all the time.  For example, there could be a 'sweep attack' which hits all enemies around the character, but for less damage.  This would be handy if the character is wading through some lower level opponents, but might not be something they want to use all the time.
+ 
+ === Item Creating & Identification Skills ===
+ 
+ These are things like jewelery, smithery, bowyer, etc.  The item creation aspect should get expanded so there are more easy things to create give minor amounts of experience (for example, smithing a dagger should not be a hard task).  Identification of items should change - instead of there being a chance, it a straight level comparison - to identify a level 5 item, you need to be level 5 or greater in the appropriate skill.  Non magical items would be level 1, each plus of an item might add one level, each 20% resistance adds one level, etc.  Some formula could be determined for objects that do not have an item power setting.  There are a few advantages of this:
  
    * The server no longer needs to track if an identification attempt was made on the object or not - either the character succeeded or not, and retrying will not work better since there is no random chance.
    * Related to the above, a character can retry and perhaps succeed if they have increased the level in the skill.
    * Items can be traded in hopes that the other character may be able to identify them.
@@ -80,15 +92,17 @@
    * Greater level difficult for items could give much greater rewards - completely reasonable that if you are able to identify a level 20 item, you get lots of experience - there are not going to be many such items about.
  
  In many ways, this would just have it work the same as literacy and reading books - either you are sufficient level to read it, or you are not - there is no chance involved.
  
- **Weapon Skills**
+ **Smithery, Jeweler, Alchemy, Bowyer, Literacy ** are current examples of these skills.  It might be worth while adding something like leather worker or otherwise split up smithery some (armorer vs weapons)?  Otherwise, smithery covers a much larger base then any of the other skills here.  Literacy does have some other uses.
+ 
+ === Weapon Skills ===
  
- One thought is to break down the weapon skills some - instead of the basic breakdown of one handed, 2 handed, and missile weapon (ignore the various hand to hand skills), do it more functionally - axes, clubs/maces/hammers, swords, spears, bows/crossbows.  From the basic table above, it is likely that different classes may have a different mix on cost here.
+ Weapon skills get broken down and re-arranged some.  Different classes may have a favorite (low cost one) and others are at a higher cost.
  
- For example, fighters may be able to get all of those at cost 3.  But clerics, following AD&D tradition, might be clubs/maces/hammers at cost 4 (they are still not as good as fighters), and the other weapon skills at cost 5, and perhaps some at cost 6.  Paladins might get swordsmanship at cost 3, but higher cost for all the other skills - perhaps bow being cost 6, since paladins should really meet their foes in face to face combat.
+ For example, fighters may be able to get all of those at cost 3.  But clerics, following AD&D tradition, might be clubs/maces/hammers at cost 4 (they are still not as good as fighters), and the other weapon skills at cost 5, and perhaps some at cost 6.  Paladins might get swordsmanship at cost 3, but higher cost for all the other skills - perhaps bow being cost 6, since paladins should really meet their foes in face to face combat.  Barbarians, being traditional people who uses axes, may get Axe at 3, and other ones at a higher costs.
  
- In order to balance the system, one must think about what the advancement of the weapon skill is.  Off the top of my head, this is what I've thought of - at first level, a character does damage around 10 @ speed 0.75.  Weapon speed will peak at 2.0 - exactly when that happens could vary on a lot of factors - if the character is not wearing armor, they may get that speed much sooner, but there is clearly a disadvantage there.  Weapon damage should peak around 35 for the weapon itself (note, there are many above that) - at first level, weapons the character is likely to find should be less than 10.  A characters skill, at level 100, might give another 25 damage points, and strength 25 more.  So that is a damage value of 85 @ 2.0 speed.  That is a very big swing, but one also has to figure that at first level, the characters they are fighting have 0 armor, and at level 100, everything should have 75% armor.  So that first level character 3.75 damage/tick on the actual creature, at level 100, the character would average 21.25 DPT to the actual creature - 5 times as much - but that opponent is also going to have a lot more hitpoints (probably closer to 10 times as many), so would take longer.
+ In order to balance the system, one must think about what the advancement of the weapon skill is.  Off the top of my head, this is what I've thought of - at first level, a character does damage around 10 @ speed 0.75.  Weapon speed will peak at 2.0 - exactly when that happens could vary on a lot of factors - if the character is not wearing armor, they may get that speed much sooner, but there is clearly a disadvantage there.  Weapon damage should peak around 35 for the weapon itself (note, there are many above that) - at first level, weapons the character is likely to find should be less than 10.  A characters skill, at level 100, might give another 25 damage points, and strength 25 more.  So that is a damage value of 85 @ 2.0 speed.  That is a very big swing, but one also has to figure that at first level, the characters they are fighting have 0 armor, and at level 100, everything should have 75% armor.  So that first level character 3.75 damage/tick on the actual creature, at level 100, the character would average 21.25 DPT to the actual creature - 5 times as much - but that opponent is also going to have a lot more hitpoints (probably closer to 10 times as many), so would take longer.  Those higher level characters are also likely to have a dodge skill.  So there are lots of way to make the combat take sufficiently long time.
  
  Unfortunately, doing the math, a 1000 hp creature would be brought down in 53 ticks, or a bit under 7 creatures.  IMO, such a creature should be epic (not a huge number of level 100 creatures about.  Increasing armor or hit points would increase the time, but one should not have super well defended creatures.
  
  However, a lot of this is also based on character hit points - a high level character could have ~750 hit points if they really tried.  I'd personally like to even out the con bonus so it is for all levels, not just the first 10 (a level 10 character with 30 con could conceivably have 500+ hp - how can one balance that when a more typical character is probably at ~120?).


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Old Revision: http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/user:mwedel:skills?rev=1297320845
New Revision: http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/user:mwedel:skills

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