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Finland > Eurovision! in General
PirateKing
Apprentice
Member # 7135
 written Tuesday, May 23 2006 06:50 Profile #26
quote:
Ash Lael:
I thought they were genuinely enchanting. :(
My biggest problem was that the woman was out of tune for at least half the song. My second biggest problem is that the song was, objectively, rubbish. ;) But hey, I liked Denmark...

quote:
Pez:
Finland, your song was played on CBC radio (cdn national radio) and an overwhelming response to this eurotrash was play something else please. We in Canada have no taste, eh.
I think their victory came mostly from the fact that nobody ever plays rock songs at Eurovision. Nice to see something different for a change.

I'm just waiting for all the rock entries from the other countries next year!
Posts: 7 | Registered: Tuesday, May 16 2006 07:00
Finland > Eurovision! in General
PirateKing
Apprentice
Member # 7135
 written Monday, May 22 2006 13:18 Profile #20
France were utterly appalling. So were Spain. We (the UK) didn't do much better.

Finland definitely deserved to win, if only because of the torture they must have put themselves through wearing those masks! I did like Latvia, and Lithuania... and I really liked Denmark's song too, even though they didn't do very well.

Very funny to watch Russia voted for by all its former colonies and the Baltic states, and the Balkan countries all voting for each other!
Posts: 7 | Registered: Tuesday, May 16 2006 07:00
Taskmaster system in General
PirateKing
Apprentice
Member # 7135
 written Monday, May 22 2006 13:14 Profile #23
quote:
OfOut:
If realism is the goal, what is the justification for declaring that low-level enemies are harder to hit with a bow than a high level enemy? I think a puny goblin would be a more difficult target than a majestic and very large dragon. Spells can't miss at all, so it seems to me that the practice would all come from the casting regardless of target. How exactly does one "practice" in skills like Endurance? Get beaten up? That seems like a recipe for enduring a great deal of pain in the beginning of the game when cave rats are able to make you into an invulnerable iron man.
Good point. Maybe dragons are easier to hit due to their size, but the dragon would be able to dodge more quickly than a slow-witted goblin. It was just an example, and something like the size of targets could be factored in to the equation.

For spells: I've always liked the idea of spells misfiring at low levelks, and even sometimes at high levels! Besides being unpredictable and dangerous for the player, it would guard against overpowered mages. And it would be fun to do the same thing with enemies. :)

In terms of skills like Endurance, I agree that you couldn't really TM a skill like that. That's something (in my formulation) that you'd have to pay for training in, or perhaps complete a certain quest or set of tasks - washing in the acid in the BoA scenario for example.

The kind of thing I'm talking about is the law of diminishing returns - it gets harder to level up as you get higher up. Maybe if your character takes a lot of punishment he/she will gain an Endurance boost... eventually. These sort of things could be tweaked so that as time went on you'd get less for more. Balancing it well is the key.

quote:
Zeviz:
So learn-by-doing system works only when there are almost unimited opportunities to train a skill of your choice, in which cases it leads to very boring gameplay as you spend hours "training".
Not necessarily. It depends on the skill of the world creator, and a well-balanced world should leave you enough opportunities to train and gain upgrades by fighting or doing quests, without having to grind away at levelling up.

quote:
Thuryl:
Learn-by-doing creates an additional tactical consideration: what skills to use now in order to build them up for later use. Players may therefore sometimes have to make a decision between using the currently optimal skill for the situation they're in or the skill they're trying to build up. Whether creating this additional tactical consideration is a good thing or not is a matter of taste.
Yep. It's definitely to my taste. Makes things more interesting to know that spending your last bit of gold on getting two levels of Melee might mean that later you're in trouble when you can't cast a certain spell. Or something.

I do understand that not everyone wants to play games like this, but why play a role-playing game at all if you aren't getting immersed in the story and the world in which you are exploring?

That's my view anyway. I realise there is less than zero chance of this getting implemented, but I think it's fun to discuss anyway! I had a glance at Pygmalion and it does look like fun, btw. :)
Posts: 7 | Registered: Tuesday, May 16 2006 07:00
Taskmaster system in General
PirateKing
Apprentice
Member # 7135
 written Monday, May 22 2006 07:55 Profile #22
Some great replies!

Sorry, I have been away for a few days. Will address some of the points when I have time later tonight.
Posts: 7 | Registered: Tuesday, May 16 2006 07:00
Taskmaster system in General
PirateKing
Apprentice
Member # 7135
 written Tuesday, May 16 2006 03:45 Profile #0
Hi all. I have been playing Spiderweb games for some years, and I just finished Avernum 4. Great fun, but quite a lot of weeks of my life I'll never get back. :)

Anyway, I was thinking about game mechanics. At the moment, all character advancement is done through the time-honoured tradition of experience points, levelling up and 'training' characters by assigning skill points. What I was wondering while trying to decide which points were assigned to what was: why does it need to be so blatant? Is there scope for a new system of advancement based on characters improving their skills as they use them more?

I'm quite a big RPG fan and I've played a few different ones. One of my favourites is Square-Enix's Final Fantasy series, specifically FFX and FFX-II. In the latter of these games, every time someone defeats an enemy they are given 'ability points' which automatically go towards advancing a skill. Characters grow organically depending on which skills they have selected to advance.

Similarly, I used to play the Discworld MUD during my undergraduate degree and was very impressed with the system they had for advancement. You could train yourself up to a certain point, but after this you had to get training from more advanced players or NPCs, or gain levels by using the abilities you wanted to advance: the 'taskmaster' system.

How would this work in the Avernum world? Let's use Bows as an example. At the moment you can only have discrete levels of Bow skills - 0 means you can't work out which end of the arrow to point at the enemy, 5 means you're vaguely competent, 10 means you're a hot shot. That's all well and good, and I want to keep the discrete levels, but what I'm proposing is that every time you fire a bow you get a little bit better. This doesn't manifest until you have reached the next level. Essentially it's like having 'experience points' for each characteristic.

This can be modified as you advance levels of course - and easier shots will mean less experience. The better you get, the harder it is to train to higher levels. This works the same for most characteristics. Tool Use, for example: disarming traps and picking locks gets you experience which goes towards gaining levels in that skill.

Well, anyway, this is a long first post! For all I know this has been discussed before. Feel free to pick holes by all means! I just think that it would make for a better gaming experience if you had slightly less direct control over character development and instead left it up to what your characters actually did. :)
Posts: 7 | Registered: Tuesday, May 16 2006 07:00