[crossfire] Attributes/Stats

[Mark Wedel]

  following up to myself.  This is more some thoughts on how to handle stat 
points, improvements, and not as much about making all the stats useful.

- Stat bonuses/penalties become linear (for example, (stat - 10)/2) instead of 
the exponential they are now.  Depending on the stat and bonus, it could be /3, 
/4, etc.

- Penalties are still linear, but at a higher value (10-stat).

- Max stat is much higher (easy to do since bonuses are computed and not a table).

- A character has no effective maximum stat through improvement (can get to 100) 
- rather, improving stats becomes more difficult/impossible at some point (based 
on total stat points)

- Stat potions give the character a stat point to spend and don't increase a 
specific stat.  Or maybe potions get removed all together.

- Starting character gets 84 (or so) stat points.  This allows a character to 
have a 12 in all 7 stats, but more likely they may do a distribution like 18, 
14, 12, 10, 10, 10, 10, or maybe 18, 16, 14, 8, 8, 8, 8 (they could do 20, 20, 
20, 6, 6, 6, 6, but hopefully the -4 penalties would make that too painful)

- Stat bonuses for hp, sp, grace go across a larger range of levels (all 100 
maybe) instead of the first 10 like it is now.


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That covers my ideas.  My thoughts on this:

By reducing the stat bonuses (making them linear) and change how bonus for 
hp/sp/grace work, there is need to maximize the stats at first level - it means 
a few extra spellpoints.  Right now, a 25 stat vs a 20 means 6 extra 
spellpoints/level, under the revised system, that might be 2 extra/level.  Con 
actually has a greater difference - 20 con is 10 hp/level, 25 con is 20 hp/level 
- that really makes it so you want a really high con if you can do it, and at 
5th level already amounts to 50 extra hp.

Increasing the max stat is related to changing stat gain.  Under current system, 
characters reach maximum stats for their high starting stats pretty soon, and 
those are probably your class stats.  So they start improving the non class 
stats (fighters start improving pow, int, wis,etc because they have nothing else 
to improve).  Under this system, a fighter could keep increasing his str, dex, 
con, etc to the end up time.  So this means that level 40 fighter may have a 30 
str, dex, con, but his int, wis, pow are still 8 because he is trying to be a 
fighter, not mage, and increasing the appropriate stats.

  This sort of cements him into being a fighter, which from other discussions is 
something we want.  But at the same point, a character that is trying to be a 
fighter/mage (of which there are some classes like that), can do so - they have 
more stats to improve, so he may have 20-25 in most his stats.  This means he is 
not as good as a fighter with 40 in the fighters key stats, and probably not as 
good as a straight mage, with probably 40 in his key stats, but with the bonuses 
more linear, is not hopeless outclassed (can still be a somewhat effective 
fighter or wizard)

  However, for that to work, he needs better control of what potions do than 
random luck.  Because a lot of play is solo, if potions increase a specific 
attribute, the player will probably use it - not much else to do.

  Exactly how potion improvement works is a bit different discussion.  One 
thought is a characters first 10 potions are sure to work, and potions after 
that have some reduced chance (maybe -10% for each potion, so potion 11 is 90%, 
potion 12 is 80%, etc, to a minimum chance of 20%).  These numbers could be 
adjusted for what is considered appropriate (number of potions sure to work, 
reduction in probability, etc).

Potions could also just go away completely, and maybe the character gets some 
number of stat points to spend as they advance levels, do quests, etc, which 
puts some effective limit on their stat total.

Those are just my thoughts - it seems to fix some number of issues, but I'm sure 
also creates new ones.