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GH2: Character System Changes

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Joseph Hewitt:
Previously I posted my ideas for revising the damage system. Here's an idea for revising the skill/renown system. As always, I'd like some feedback before I go doing anything stupid.

The number of skills will be cut drastically. Each skill will correspond to a specialty or career path, such as "Mecha Combat" for all mecha fighting skills. Different uses of a particular skill will use different stats- Reflexes for attacking, Speed for defense, etc. Characters may take all skills without penalty. Each skill will have its own individual Renown value; these separate renown values will be used for generating skill-specific plots.

Prospective skill list, subject to change:

* Mecha Combat
* Personal Combat
* Subterfuge: Thief skills (Stealth, CodeBreaking, PickPockets)
* Scouting (Awareness, Survival)
* Interaction: Covers all the speaking skills (Conversation, Intimidation, Taunt)
* Performance: Singing (Charm), making art (Craft). Maybe change name to Art? Humanities?
* Insight: The detective skill, maybe change name to Detection? Investigation?
* Medicine
* Technology: Covers repair and science
* Arcana: Mysticism, secret knowledge and lost technology
* Regimen: Healthy living. Vitality, Athletics, Concentration, and Toughness
There should be plots/story branches based on different skills. The non-combat skills should allow access to different branches rather than simply making the existing branches easier- these different branches should lead to different outcomes. I'll have more to say about that when I get the revamped story system fully written up.

Talents will be expanded to cover many of the special abilities currently handled by skills. Mecha Engineering would be either a talent or series of talents- no more rolls for part destruction, you can either do something or you can't.

Personal history should be more important in character creation. Right now I'm thinking about four steps for the lifepath- social class/birth, education/job, personal hardship, and reason for becoming a cavalier. In addition to setting skills and personality type these lifepath steps could also set special traits that will follow the character for life- key skills (cheaper to advance), interaction bonuses or penalties for certain NPC types (based on job, personality, or faction), mutations and so on. There should, of course, still be an advanced mode to let players pick their exact traits a la carte.

Advantages over the current system: Stat distribution would be more important. The line between skills and talents would be more distinct. Jack of all trade characters would again be possible, but would not have a big advantage over specialist characters. By having separate renown scores for separate skills a character will not be offered unwinnable personal combat missions just because they've advanced far in mecha combat. A smaller number of skills means that it'll be easier to create content catering to each of those skills.

Lord Afabie:
I like it, but I do have a couple of suggestions.

With the new skills covering multiple old skills they will be used more frequently, and thus improve faster, unless the experience curve is re-balanced.  And if you are already changing the amount of experience you get, I would like to suggest a change in the way experience is calculated.

In one of my vapor-ware projects I had a system where the amount of experience awarded on skill use was based on how close the skill roll was to the minimum roll required for success.  I abandoned the game before I was able to test this idea in play, but I think it has several advantages.  It makes challenging, but not suicidal, fights give the most experience, thus reducing the inclination towards both grinding and power diving so many RPG’s suffer from.  It also seems more realistic to me since you learn fastest when pushed just slightly outside your comfort zone (so perhaps failure should give a bit more experience that success).

Another concern of mine is that reducing the number of skills might reduce the diversity of characters.  This problem can be reduced by making it impractical to become proficient in all skills, but then you run the risk of recreating the problem in the current skill system, where so much of your experience needs to be dumped into ‘essential skills’ everyone will take that you can’t spare enough for adequate customization.

My solution would be an increased reliance on talents to provide that customization.  This would mean giving each character more talents, and providing a larger list of talents arranged in ‘talent trees’.  The initially available talents should be fairly weak, but they would open up the path to more powerful talents that could make two characters with the same stats and skills play very differently.  Each talent tree should have multiple branches (some of which could merge back together) and be large enough that a single character can’t fill one entirely, but not so large that he can’t gain powerful talents from at least two trees.

These suggestions (particularly the second) could have a major effect on how the game feels, and so might not fit with your vision.  I understand that maintaining that vision means you will have to reject even some brilliant ideas, therefore I won’t be upset if you fail to endorse these.  ;)

Rowanthepreacher:
I wouldn't take it that far, nor do I think that talents are the best way to go.

Gearhead 2 has a suitable number of traits and skills; rarely will I have every trait or skill that I want, but usually I've got enough that the play experience isn't lacking. Reducing the number of skills would abolish the fine balance that players must strike.

I could get behind the "do or do not" functioning of skills though. A lot of skills already operate that way and the only one that doesn't is the biggest pain in the arse to fail (Engineering).

Something I'd like to add in early: Renown needs to go down slower when you fail. I've just quit playing GH2 again because I accidentally committed a couple of crimes and now, whenever I back out of a fight with the police, I lose loads of renown and have to do a dozen missions to raise my mission pay back to normal.

I'm not sure how well "xp based on near-failure" would work though. I can see that it would be relatively easy to pick a fight with a very nimble but weak opponent (Dora, anyone?) and just fire weapons with -2 accuracy penalties and the like. Then, you'd be likely to miss by a bit and rack up the xp. As long as you both miss a fair amount, you could grind to your heart's content. Hell, you'd train up your dodge at the same time.

Joseph Hewitt:
Thanks for the comments. One thing about the skills is that ever since they've been decoupled from specific stats, there's no reason why a single skill can't do multiple things- just paired with different stats.

Even if the skill system isn't changed, I think that converting MechaEng to a talent + having multiple Renown scores would be a good idea.

Lord Afabie:

--- Quote from: Rowanthepreacher on January 16, 2012, 03:47:24 AM ---

I'm not sure how well "xp based on near-failure" would work though. I can see that it would be relatively easy to pick a fight with a very nimble but weak opponent (Dora, anyone?) and just fire weapons with -2 accuracy penalties and the like. Then, you'd be likely to miss by a bit and rack up the xp. As long as you both miss a fair amount, you could grind to your heart's content. Hell, you'd train up your dodge at the same time.

--- End quote ---


But if you're missing a lot, then you're missing BY a lot.  Even if you could tune things so that you frequently barely miss, you will be barely hitting about as much, and any enemy that isn't a significant challenge should die off fairly quickly. 

I will admit that with mecha engineering you could design a mech that lets you get experience from a much weaker opponent, however that means you won't be capable of fighting anyone stronger then that without changing mechs.  If your opponent isn't a threat, that means they probably can't hit you effectively, and that means you won't be gaining much experience from dodging, or blocking, which happens much more frequently than attacks.  And you have to work harder to grind efficiently, making it less appealing. 

Plus this whole argument applies only to meha combat skills (in the new system there would be only one of those) there isn't a way to make you less effective with most other skills by more than a couple of points.  it's also harder to predict the difficulty of most non-combat challenges.

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