Skill Level and Skill Threshold?

Silencer

Silencer

Night Watchman
Staff member
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Now, this is not exactly a Fallout 3 suggestion on my part, since I'd best see the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. intact. Yes, I'm one of those people. More like a general skill system suggestion for cRPG's

However, Big T's post in News Comments made me think:

Big T said:
[I'm not quite sure why I am doing it, perhaps it is that other games encourage you to level up by perfoming meaningful quests (or even just by killing stuff), wheras Morrowind encourages endless repetition by rewarding it so much. Now, I like the idea of improving attributes by using those attributes, but not quite in the way Morrowind works.
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So... We know that however Morrowind was flawed, also Fallout didn't quite hitt the nail on the head. You could play a diplomat at first, and then use the 99 accumulated skill points after a few levels to make you an excellent marksman.

How about we split skill points into Level Points and Threshold Points? The former would be awarded with experience. The latter would accumulate on the given skill whenever one used the skill successfully. One could use the level Points to increase the skills, but only to the level capped by the Thresholds. If one's skill Level was too low to use if successfully, one could use books or tutors to increase the Threshold.

I was thinking of a similar system (except it had Predispositions and Skills) for PNP RPG's once...

Now, if anyone could think of a way of adapting this to S.P.E.C.I.A.L. without screwing it up...
 
Best idea I'd have on that score is this:

Set a limit per hour or whatever of uses of a skill, and the usage would increase with each level gain. (Now, I'm talking about like five minutes according to a real world clock and an hour on the game clock, so that you can't ham up experience by winding the clock forward constantly.)

Also, decrease the amount of experience gained per successful use by virtue of how difficult the skill check was. (When you are a level 20 lockpick you should not get a lot of exp for locking and unlocking a very simple mechanical lock.)

Set up a sliding scale for the exp that is appropriate to the usefulness of the skill and how often it is used legitmately in the game. (Traps= Not a lot os use, more exp per use, that kind of thing.)

That's my idea.
 
General experience: Will affect stats and HP etc.

Skill experience: will only affect the used skill (or skills used in a single action (throwing + melee for instance).

Basically you would get experience from using the skills and that can be used to raise your skills.

General experience would raise everything else that goes outside the area of skills. Perks would also be gathered from these levels (unless the perk is one gained from skill using (shoveling brahmin crap)

You travel the wastes and complete quest and improve yourself due to practise and experience. You might complete the quests with luck, but you get personal experience. Still...just because you are experienced to complete quest and being able to survive doesn?t mean your good at anything unless you have used your skills.

Just because I save a city from Hordes of mutans by whacking them in the head with a baseball bat doesn?t make me a better scientist, but it sure as hell will make me stronger or more agile or basically anything from the SPECIAL.
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DC MEDICAL MARIJUANA DISPENSARIES
 
Silencer said:
So... We know that however Morrowind was flawed, also Fallout didn't quite hitt the nail on the head. You could play a diplomat at first, and then use the 99 accumulated skill points after a few levels to make you an excellent marksman.
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I don't see any problem with this. Mainly because I don't see experience points the way you see them.
Let me explain using your own example; say you're a diplomat and you get tired of your diplomatic ways because, let's say, there was no diplomatic way to get out of the 100 wolves random encounter which crippled you last night. So you decide you want to shoot stuff. Okay, experience points are not like a magical item that just all of a sudden teaches you how to shoot great, I see them as time invested into mastering a skill. Time that you might have spent tinkering with pistols while you travel through the wastes, or before sleep or whatever. Point is, you might not have actually used guns during your game time but maybe you studied using them when the player wasn't watching. I hope I'm making sense here.

Anyways, the skill level from Arcanum was a good idea I think, and if better implemented it could be great.

Just don't mess with SPECIAL too much, m'kay.
 
Well I kind of like the current system being able to train any skill adds to the openess of the game, and limiting this kind of smacks of classes.

One thing you could do though is use the tag skills.

Take it as being that your tag skills represent your training, since you've been trained you know what you've been doing and more importantly what you've been doing wrong so you can improve those skills yourself.

If you want to train non tag skills you need to find a trainer, either a book or a person, before you can spend your experience points on a non-tagged skill.
 
requiem_for_a_starfury said:
If you want to train non tag skills you need to find a trainer, either a book or a person, before you can spend your experience points on a non-tagged skill.
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Hmm... I would somehow combine this to the proposal I had. Somewhat the same genre of idea, but with a different approach.

Still cripling the experience points into tag-skills only wouldn?t work. What if tag-skills would be aided by using them. Not to raise the skillpoints, but to reduce penalties and fuck-ups.

Let me try and explain this (not sure if I know it myself either...).

You have a small guns skill of 163% and it?s a tag skill. You can still putt points into any skill you want, without limitations abnormal to SPECIAL system, but you would also have a different USABILITY stat that comes to tag-skills. The more you use a certain skill, the higher the usability stat would be for that skill (which would reduce penalties and fuck-ups).

Small guns skill 163% Usability 73% ( a 73% chance of reducing guns drops and the gun blowing up in your hand...critical failures)

Small guns skill 163% Usability 3% (you know how to use a gun, but you prefer to talk your way out of things)

Somewhat a reward of actually using that skill. I would like to see this in weapons also. The more you use a certain gun, the more skilled you will become with it (to a certain point).

It?s quite natural that you become better with something you use a lot. I know the idea is a bit far fetched, but I hope you understand what I?m aiming for.
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General Motors Fairfax Assembly Plant
 
Just a suggestion, you could learn the tag skills with using them and you could put skill points in them, but for the other skills you couldn't learn them no mither how mutch you tried. But you still could make them better by using skill points.(this takes away the tags skill point doubling effect) I don't like it, but it is just a suggestion to be developed by others.
 
Seems like we are all heading towards a similar system.

I wonder when a HC-FO-FAN will come and whine that "SPECIAL is best and should be kept this way! Oh yeah, and I want Star Trek 24/7 on every channel! I?m a fuel injected...."
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Babimac
 
DirtyDreamDesigner:

We know that the experience point system/skill point system doesn't work quite that way since the diplomat in question could have acquired enough exp to level through quests, and thus never even have fired a single shot (heck at the beginning of fallout II you gain a level and you probably haven't even seen a gun yet, let alone fired one).


To Everyone Else:

I'm definitely a bit leery about skill level and skill threshold. At this point it seems like it would punish characters more than it would add to the realism of the game. Characters would want to generalize in order to not get hamstringed by the skill cap, but would then soon realize that they have to either specialize or spend much more time using a given skill in order to make it useful.

The skill experience versus character experience distinction shows some promise. The game already rewards characters with experience for successful use of a skill, and this could be attributed towards this "skill experience" total. Though I am not entirely convinced this would be in the interests of all involved since it means we as players would have to watch a new level for the purpose of character advancement, and the designers would have to create an experience point/level system for skills which did not burden the character to the point that they are constantly looking for places to use skills (Gotta find a drug house so I can practice doctor), but not so easy as to afford a character who does practice little or no reward.

I am also quite leery of making only tag skills progress based on use. I have trouble conceiving of why a skill would progress just because I chose to focus on it. The Tag bonuses already account for previous experience and a focused approach to the skill (20% bonus to initial skill value) and the bonus skill gain with respect to other skills suggests that the tagged skill is what the character practices in their "spare time," and thus they gain more skill percentage per skill point spent.
 
I think it would work best if you got an extra point in a skill when you got a critical success when using the skill. It wouldn't be a prevalent or efficient way to increase skills so it wouldn't encourage repetitive tasks but it would be enough to get the idea across.
 
I'm not sure if anyone suggested this, but I had a thought... Wouldn't it make sense from a real life perspective that the skills most favored by your statistics should automatically be your tag skills?

As in, if Doctor is based on agility and perception, and you have 10's in those stats, it should be mroe or less favored. And in the case of "ties" skills that you've invested more in should be your tags.

The ramification being boosts or subtractions to your skills, as your tags potentially shift around to reflect the changing and evolving nature of your character.

Just an idea.
 
Keep the SPECIAL system and make the players loose skillpoints not used since your last level up. That way you cant all of a sudden put 60 skillpoints into your new tag skill.

Or play the game rationally instead of min maxing, jack of all trades and master of smallguns :)
 
Since Fallout is based on P&P, why not use one of their ideas, have certain skills synergetic with others, for every 5 skill points in a firearms skill you gain one point in the other firearm skills? It would mean they grouped them into subsections of the skill list, but that'd also make it easier to tailor make your character concept; Being an all around theif with tags in Steal, Lockpick and Traps, say, would increase your skills in all areas of theivery beacuse of the boost to one.

SOrry if that wasn't worded too well.
 
what about a level system that you get core points that you can use to raise stats or else the main skill groups which determine how easy/hard it is to raise the sub-skills.

like Guns has sub-group of pistol, smg, mini, rifles...

and then say you were like level 20 and you had used the gun score was like 15 and your pistol was like 130 score it would be really hard to go to 131 but if you had a like 25 in rifles it would be really easy to get to 26.

i think that COULD work depending.
 
TheWesDude said:
what about a level system that you get core points that you can use to raise stats or else the main skill groups which determine how easy/hard it is to raise the sub-skills.

like Guns has sub-group of pistol, smg, mini, rifles...

and then say you were like level 20 and you had used the gun score was like 15 and your pistol was like 130 score it would be really hard to go to 131 but if you had a like 25 in rifles it would be really easy to get to 26.

i think that COULD work depending.
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That is like, the worst like explanation of any like game system I've heard like so far.
How are these numbers connected? What would the result of such a system be? Why do you want to change it like that?

And why are we discussing the option to completely change SPECIAL in ways that are completely unnecessary? For instance, RPGenius, synergy is an interesting thought. Yet it doesn't add much to the game, and in a lot of situations doesn't make sense. The several combat skills could easily be synergetic, but what do you do with sneak? It's not, rationally, a synergetic skill, nor is lock-picking or stealing.
The problem with changing any system is to maintain the balance, and I can't see this maintaining balance unless you make some at least semi-irrational decisions.

I think the only way to progress with SPECIAL is too look at its flaws, and then change those flaws. Most suggestions here, from what I can see, are based not on correcting flaws, but on adding things to the system 'just because'.

The perceived problem is that skills don't progress via use. Okay. However, it should also be clear that the only way to correct this is to either punish not using a skill (which certainly doesn't make sense in a lot of situations), or rewarding use. Considering the fact that not doing something doesn't necessarily mean you'll get worse at doing it (e.g. bike-riding) and that losing skill points usually is frustrating for players, I'd say that we want to reward use.
However, how do we do that? Anyone can tell that certain skills are used a lot more frequently. So the combat skills will probably be improved a lot, even though you're roleplaying someone who really likes to tinker with things, and hence focuses on repair, science and such.
This would seem unfitting and perhaps unbalancing.
 
Sander said:
The perceived problem is that skills don't progress via use. Okay. However, it should also be clear that the only way to correct this is to either punish not using a skill (which certainly doesn't make sense in a lot of situations), or rewarding use. Considering the fact that not doing something doesn't necessarily mean you'll get worse at doing it (e.g. bike-riding) and that losing skill points usually is frustrating for players, I'd say that we want to reward use.
However, how do we do that? Anyone can tell that certain skills are used a lot more frequently. So the combat skills will probably be improved a lot, even though you're roleplaying someone who really likes to tinker with things, and hence focuses on repair, science and such.
This would seem unfitting and perhaps unbalancing.
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The concept of auto-advancing skills is almost non-existent in P&P roleplaying and should be avoided at all costs. It opens a Pandora's box of exploits and unbalance, completely disrupting the natural character development. To illustrate the point, I'll mention a trick I occasionally used in Daggerfall - namely, creating a cheap spell that uses effects of all spell schools and then casting it over and over again at nothing. Skill points gallore. Now imagine a similar scenario in Fallout, where, for instance, your character constantly sneaks around the town or keeps lockpicking the same door over and over again until the respective skills get boosted to godlike levels.

In my view, SPECIAL is an excellent ruleset in its present form and needs not be changed in any drastic way. Perhaps some minor changes to skills might be in order, though - for instance, it might be a good idea to merge Energy Weapons with Small Guns and Big Guns (as far as I can tell, in the Fallout setting the only difference between a laser rifle and a normal rifle is that the former zaps the enemy while the latter drills him full of holes), and possibly to merge Doctor and First Aid skills (and avoid absurd scenarios like a character who can perform a cardial bypass with household materials, but doesn't know what a compression bandage is).

Most of the perceived "issues" stem from design of the Fallout games rather than design of the SPECIAL ruleset. Many skills are grossly underused and might as well have been removed. Radiation (which is - contrary to what Sander implied - very adequately taken into account by the ruleset) is practically a non-factor in both games, but especially so in the sequel. Low-intelligence characters are barred from many quests and thus greatly handicapped (even though Fallout is likely the only RPG that lets you play a "stupid game"). And those are just some of the examples.
 
Ratty said:
The concept of auto-advancing skills is almost non-existent in P&P roleplaying and should be avoided at all costs. It opens a Pandora's box of exploits and unbalance, completely disrupting the natural character development. To illustrate the point, I'll mention a trick I occasionally used in Daggerfall - namely, creating a cheap spell that uses effects of all spell schools and then casting it over and over again at nothing. Skill points gallore. Now imagine a similar scenario in Fallout, where, for instance, your character constantly sneaks around the town or keeps lockpicking the same door over and over again until the respective skills get boosted to godlike levels.
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And then there's the obvious example of jumping in Morrowind.

Ratzors said:
In my view, SPECIAL is an excellent ruleset in its present form and needs not be changed in any drastic way. Perhaps some minor changes to skills might be in order, though - for instance, it might be a good idea to merge Energy Weapons with Small Guns and Big Guns (as far as I can tell, in the Fallout setting the only difference between a laser rifle and a normal rifle is that the former zaps the enemy while the latter drills him full of holes), and possibly to merge Doctor and First Aid skills (and avoid absurd scenarios like a character who can perform a cardial bypass with household materials, but doesn't know what a compression bandage is).
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No, merging the gun skills messes with the balance way too much. Currently, the three gun skills are probably the most important skills in the entire game, to then merge them to make them even more powerful completely throws off the balance.
Merging Doctor and First Aid, for instance, would be a much better idea, because those skills were underpowered in Fallout. There are more of these skills, too, such as Repair.

Ratzorsy said:
Most of the perceived "issues" stem from design of the Fallout games rather than design of the SPECIAL ruleset. Many skills are grossly underused and might as well have been removed. Radiation (which is - contrary to what Sander implied - very adequately taken into account by the ruleset) is practically a non-factor in both games, but especially so in the sequel.
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Eh? I implied no such thing.

Ratzors said:
Low-intelligence characters are barred from many quests and thus greatly handicapped (even though Fallout is likely the only RPG that lets you play a "stupid game"). And those are just some of the examples.
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Ehehe. Shall we get into this again? ;)
 
but what do you do with sneak? It's not, rationally, a synergetic skill, nor is lock-picking or stealing.
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Off the top of my head, here are how I'd break up the groups:(Sorry if I miss any skills)

Firearms
Smal Guns
Big Guns
Energy Weapons

Melee
Melee Weapons
Unarmed

Stealth
Sneak
Lockpick
(Possibly Traps)

(Need a name for this group)
Repair
Science
(Possibly Traps)

Social
Speech
Barter

Really unsure about where Traps belongs.
 
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