Taskmaster system
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Apprentice
Member # 7135
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written Tuesday, May 16 2006 03:45
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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 |
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...b10010b...
Member # 869
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written Tuesday, May 16 2006 03:57
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The system you propose is not enormously likely to be implemented in SW games; Jeff doesn't want to change his games in too drastic or fundamental a way for fear of alienating his market. <plug type=shameless>Several members of the community think learn-by-doing is a neat idea, which is why we're implementing it as one of the default features in a currently-in-development RPG design engine called Pygmalion.</plug> [ Tuesday, May 16, 2006 04:00: Message edited by: Thuryl ] -------------------- The Empire Always Loses: This Time For Sure! Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00 |
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Law Bringer
Member # 2984
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written Tuesday, May 16 2006 04:05
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I agree completely. The current system means that there is basically a "lip" - before which it is hard to survive, and after which gathering experience becomes easier and easier relative to the tactical difficulty. Once you get the Knowledge Brew recipe, you are basically a god in training. The only way to counter this effect in the Blades games is to come up with "handicaps" for the players or to beef up the monsters beyond all reason for high-level parties. One game that employs a sophisticated weapon system is ADOM (presumably other rogue-likes too), where a weapon can only be trained through use, not by alloting skill points. Unfortunately, it would be a very significant change from the way the games work now, and I'm not sure if Jeff will change the engine so drastically. How does A4 handle skills, by the way? I think there might have been a difference to the older Avernums, but I can't remember exactly... Edit: I type too slowly. [ Tuesday, May 16, 2006 04:22: Message edited by: Henry Anthony Wilcox ] -------------------- Encyclopaedia Ermariana • Forum Archives • Forum Statistics • RSS [Topic / Forum] My Blog • Polaris • I eat novels for breakfast. Polaris is dead, long live Polaris. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Posts: 8752 | Registered: Wednesday, May 14 2003 07:00 |
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Raven v. Writing Desk
Member # 261
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written Tuesday, May 16 2006 04:31
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SAngband is an example of a roguelike that handles all skills through a combination of learning-by-doing and Avernumesque skill points. I'm not sure how you are suggesting FFX and X-II are very different from Avernum. You don't advance the skills you use -- you are asked to choose which skills you want to advance, just like Avernum. The difference is that you basically have packets of skills which also lead to different advancement options later on. So it's just like Avernum, but less flexible for the player. Moreover, while learning-by-doing makes a lot of sense in theory, it doesn't fit the standard of convenient realism employed in computer RPGs. That is to say, in RPGs you control every move of your character in critical situations, i.e., in battle, but you are not expecting to sit there for 8 hours and watch your character sleep. If a character spends an afternoon learning how to cast a difficult mage spell, you don't watch every minute of it. You read a little text message about it. Training, similarly, does not just happen in battle. Obviously, a certain amount of learning under pressure is good, but there's also something to be said for practice and endless repetition, especially with a skill like archery. I'd rather just assume that my characters are practicing on their own to improve their skills, rather than have to click a thousand times to make my archer better. Computer RPGs with learning-by-doing have historically tended to end up being pretty unbalanced and result in players spending long periods of time fighting weak enemies (or nothing at all) and repeatedly doing weird things like attacking themselves in order to better their skills. The best example is probably Final Fantasy 2 (the actual 2, which was not originally released in America). The Secret of Mana games also come to mind. -------------------- Slarty vs. Desk • Desk vs. Slarty • Timeline of Ermarian • G4 Strategy Central Posts: 3560 | Registered: Wednesday, November 7 2001 08:00 |
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Law Bringer
Member # 2984
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written Tuesday, May 16 2006 04:43
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In that case, the weird behavior is an exploit, and the loophole should probably be closed - for example by giving you no experience for fighting yourself (or making it impossible entirely), or for fighting opponents who are far weaker than you. Spiderweb games do that since Avernum (iirc), but there is nothing that prevents "learn-by-doing" games to do so as well. Of course, closing all those loopholes takes a lot of thought and familiarity with player behavior. -------------------- Encyclopaedia Ermariana • Forum Archives • Forum Statistics • RSS [Topic / Forum] My Blog • Polaris • I eat novels for breakfast. Polaris is dead, long live Polaris. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Posts: 8752 | Registered: Wednesday, May 14 2003 07:00 |
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Raven v. Writing Desk
Member # 261
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written Tuesday, May 16 2006 05:00
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And that's the point: the loopholes are hard to close. Often, closing one cuts off some other, legitimate source of training. Jeff will never do this, and I'm quite happy that way. -------------------- Slarty vs. Desk • Desk vs. Slarty • Timeline of Ermarian • G4 Strategy Central Posts: 3560 | Registered: Wednesday, November 7 2001 08:00 |
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BANNED
Member # 4
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written Tuesday, May 16 2006 05:05
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quote:... ... Boobies. -------------------- * Posts: 6936 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00 |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Tuesday, May 16 2006 09:21
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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. Avernum's system is much simpler, much less frustrating to the player, and in the end should result in the same thing. If your character picks locks, you will assign points to lock picking anyway. If he swings swords, you'll be putting points into sword swinging. It's easier for the programmer and the end user. —Alorael, who is not a fan of tedium. Practicing your skills on every enemy you come across to stay ahead of the competition is tedious. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
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Nuke and Pave
Member # 24
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written Tuesday, May 16 2006 10:11
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The problem with this system (which is the system of choice in MMORPGs) is the mind-numbingly boring gameplay that results as you train your skills killing that re-spawning goblin again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and zzzzzzz You could remove this problem in single player games by limiting the number of enemies, traps, and other sources of experience available (no re-spawns, or city resets at all). However, that leaves you with the same system as Avernum (you chose how to allocate limited experience) with much less flexibility for the player: In current system you get experience in any way you want, then allocate skill points. In learn-by-doing system with limited experience, you have to decide which skill to allocate the experience to by picking a method you use to kill the enemy. 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". (The reason I stopped playing Runescape.) [ Tuesday, May 16, 2006 10:22: Message edited by: Zeviz ] -------------------- Be careful with a word, as you would with a sword, For it too has the power to kill. However well placed word, unlike a well placed sword, Can also have the power to heal. Posts: 2649 | Registered: Wednesday, October 3 2001 07:00 |
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Lifecrafter
Member # 6700
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written Tuesday, May 16 2006 14:08
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ESIV: Oblivion uses the learning-by-doing theory, balancing the learning curve in three ways: allowing the player to choose certain skills that the character has aptitude for (allowing certain skills to take different SP rates), generating base stats that can only be trained in when levels are gained, and allowing for the leveling up of enemies. Granted that it is more an FPS than an RPG, which makes the dragon/rat evasiveness thing easier to deal with, but removes any "traditional" puzzle or turn-based element. Incidentally, the first time I saw my roommate play Oblivion, the words that seemed to best describe it were, "AverForge. on crack. with a budget." Which, of course, led to a discussion of how Jeff has been using things the my roommate found amazing (such as dialogue. and traps. and item-based special calls) since E1. Of course, my roommate was too intoxicated by the graphics to pay attention. -------------------- The Silent Assassin recently discovered ebay. There may be hope for the structural integrity of the Bunker yet. Who am I kidding? I'm either gonna die or go bankrupt. -------------------- -Lenar Labs What's Your Destiny? Ushmushmeifa: Lenar's power is almighty and ineffable. All hail lord Noric, god of... well, something important, I'm sure. Posts: 735 | Registered: Monday, January 16 2006 08:00 |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Tuesday, May 16 2006 14:38
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There are any number of ways to tweak the balance on learning by doing so that it isn't mind-numbingly boring, but that still doesn't address the two questions that should come first: what's wrong with Avernum's system, and why is this taskmaster system better? I still think Avernum's style is my favorite, in part because of my compulsive optimization and exploration. I fail to see what a system that amounts to the computer allocating your skills based on what it thinks you like doing provides in terms of enjoyment. —Alorael, who has noticed that he in fact vastly prefers games with no change in stats at all to games with a great deal of difficult, micromanagement-requiring change. To some extent it is the designer's responsibility to make the challenge balanced: not too hard and not too easy. As long as it's balanced (and sufficiently varied) and you can pick your play style at some point, is there a need for advancement? Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
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Board Administrator
Member # 1
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written Tuesday, May 16 2006 14:56
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I have played games with this sort of system for years and years (the first was Dungeon Master, the most recent was Oblivion). It's an OK system, but I find it to be unsatisfying. The main reason is that I always find I have to spend time "grinding" the skills I need to bring up (i.e. casting minor heal on myself 500 times). And I think it's more mentally peaceful to concentrate on one big xp bar than 500 little xp bars. Now off to launch World of Warcraft and spend a lot of non-fun time hitting mice with my mace to get my 2-handed blunt skill up. - Jeff Vogel -------------------- Official Board Admin spidweb@spiderwebsoftware.com Posts: 960 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00 |
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Raven v. Writing Desk
Member # 261
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written Tuesday, May 16 2006 14:57
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quote:Quoted for wisdom. -------------------- Slarty vs. Desk • Desk vs. Slarty • Timeline of Ermarian • G4 Strategy Central Posts: 3560 | Registered: Wednesday, November 7 2001 08:00 |
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...b10010b...
Member # 869
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written Tuesday, May 16 2006 15:25
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quote:I don't think any such balance exists, mainly because the ideal amount and type of challenge in a game is very much a matter of individual taste. Some players really love elaborate character optimisation, while others would rather just be given a set of already-statted-out characters to use and focus on using those characters in tactically interesting ways. I'd argue that the problem of grinding to learn skills is mostly a separate issue from the manner in which skills are learned. Plenty of skill-point-based or class-and-level-based systems allow and encourage grinding as well. -------------------- The Empire Always Loses: This Time For Sure! Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00 |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Tuesday, May 16 2006 17:02
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Grinding is just poor design (or good design that irritates anti-grinders). I just don't see how use-based skills are more appealing to the optimizers or non-optimizers than Avernum's skills by allocation. —Alorael, who is also convinced that higher difficulty is usually better delivered by crippling characters and not improving monsters. It's usually a matter of developing such powerful party members that they shred everything but the most ludicrously overpowered enemies. Take away a few key pieces of equipment and some skill points, though, and you can make players keep sweating to keep up. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
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Raven v. Writing Desk
Member # 261
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written Tuesday, May 16 2006 18:10
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*nod* Good game design is a matter of restraint. -------------------- Slarty vs. Desk • Desk vs. Slarty • Timeline of Ermarian • G4 Strategy Central Posts: 3560 | Registered: Wednesday, November 7 2001 08:00 |
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...b10010b...
Member # 869
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written Tuesday, May 16 2006 22:29
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quote: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. quote:Well, from one perspective, if you're doing 100 damage per hit to things that have 500 HP, that's exactly the same as doing 10 damage per hit to things that have 50 HP. So as long as all of your abilities are improving at exactly the same rate as all of your opponents' stats, the game stays equally balanced throughout. Likewise, doubling monster HP has exactly the same effect as halving the damage PCs can do. The trouble is that this trivial kind of balance only works well for very linear games, or games like FF8 which cheat by scaling monster stats on-the-fly based on the PCs' current stats (and if you do that too much, then you really may as well have no character advancement at all). Where neither of these conditions apply, you're quite right that making PCs scale in power to a lesser degree over the course of the game makes balancing easier. On the other hand, if a PC isn't much more powerful at the end of the game than at the start, that takes away a lot of the fun of character advancement. The scaling of character advancement should be determined in large part by setting, theme and intended atmosphere; the protagonist in a high fantasy game should be able to mow down hordes of orcs effortlessly by the end of the game, while the protagonist in a Lovecraftian horror game shouldn't be able to single-handedly take on Cthulhu, well, ever. [ Tuesday, May 16, 2006 23:18: Message edited by: Thuryl ] -------------------- The Empire Always Loses: This Time For Sure! Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00 |
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Agent
Member # 6581
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written Wednesday, May 17 2006 02:37
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I prefer the current EXP system. Is more equilibrate, IMHO. -------------------- Download Geneforge 4: Rebellion You have 6 posts. Nobody cares what you think. - Thuryl Wikipedia may be your friend, but UBB is not. - Dikiyoba Posts: 1310 | Registered: Tuesday, December 20 2005 08:00 |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 6908
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written Wednesday, May 17 2006 03:56
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Yes, it is. But sometimes I felt confused, adding more points to lockpicking to a hero I need to be a good lockpicker after a period, when everything he was doing was swinging his sword. Still, I like the idea that PC's have some "personal time", probably when they have a rest, and they continue training when you don't see it :) -------------------- 9 masks sing in a choir: Gnome Dwarf Slith Giant Troll Troglo Human Nephil Vahnatai "If the mask under mask to SE of mask to the left of mask and to the right of me is the mask below the mask to the right of mask to the right of mask below me is the same, then who am I?" radix: +2 nicothodes: +1 salmon:+1 Posts: 203 | Registered: Tuesday, March 14 2006 08:00 |
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Raven v. Writing Desk
Member # 261
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written Wednesday, May 17 2006 04:05
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quote:You're right that it's a matter of taste, but I didn't know that anyone actually enjoyed having to deal with that. In many of these situations, using the sub-optimal skill just seems absurd. If my archery skill is so low I can't hit things, wouldn't I be better served by shooting at trees for a while, rather than haphazardly firing at enemies in the middle of a heated battle -- something that is almost impossible to reconcile with any attempt at actual role-playing, and something that is likewise hard to justify if you just want to have fun roll-playing. What exactly is the allure? An interesting parallel situation crops up in the Exile trilogy and in other games where experience is divided based on who deals the death blow. Blessed melee fighters kill things faster than archers and in much greater quantity than spellcasters. So if you want all your characters to remain useful, and you also want a variety of characters, you have to go to ridiculous lengths to insure that the weaker fighters level up half as much as the stronger ones. This means dragging the battle out and generally exposing yourself to more attacks by the enemies. -------------------- Slarty vs. Desk • Desk vs. Slarty • Timeline of Ermarian • G4 Strategy Central Posts: 3560 | Registered: Wednesday, November 7 2001 08:00 |
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...b10010b...
Member # 869
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written Wednesday, May 17 2006 05:00
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quote:*shrug* I like games that sometimes force me to make difficult choices between good tactics and good strategy. I enjoy having to pay some kind of opportunity cost for every advantage my characters gain, and it doesn't bother me if the ingame mechanisms used to implement this are wildly unrealistic. I believe the phrase I used with Djur was "sexually aroused by elaborate character optimisation". And yes, it has already been brought to my attention that I am basically not very good at realistically roleplaying a character in CRPGs. In my defence, it's my view that CRPGs are basically not very good for roleplaying anyway. :P quote:Funny, I had the opposite problem; my mages always levelled up much faster than my fighters, at least at low levels. The effect you note is even more pronounced in certain strategy RPGs which hand you a large number of premade characters to choose from. Occasionally, such a game will throw you a very low-level character in the middle of the game, who will almost invariably become a complete badass if kept alive and levelled up sufficiently. The tradeoff, of course, is that if you want to bring out the character's full potential, you're stuck with a character who's worse than useless (having to be constantly nursed to keep him alive, taking kills that could be taken by other characters) for the first few battles he's in. This mechanic isn't fundamentally all that different from other situations which force you to make tradeoffs between short-term and long-term gain: do you use that healing potion now, or save it for the next battle when you might need it more, or sell it so you can afford a better weapon? It probably makes less sense in terms of game-world logic than the potion example, but making sense has never been the strong suit of RPG mechanics. And with this post I've probably revealed myself as some sort of dangerous lunatic whose tastes are so widely divergent from those of the rest of the community that I ought to be ignored when possible and shouted down when not. [ Wednesday, May 17, 2006 05:35: Message edited by: Thuryl ] -------------------- The Empire Always Loses: This Time For Sure! Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00 |
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Law Bringer
Member # 6785
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written Wednesday, May 17 2006 17:46
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There are always tradeoffs in games. I've read some FAQs for Elder Scroll games before Oblivion that hated the gain skill improvements by repetition. They had examples of stupid actions like hopping around to build up peripheral skills when traveling. You get used to the system and work out how to get around limitations. Posts: 4643 | Registered: Friday, February 10 2006 08:00 |
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Apprentice
Member # 7135
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written Monday, May 22 2006 07:55
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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 |
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Apprentice
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written Monday, May 22 2006 13:14
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quote: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: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: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 |
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Raven v. Writing Desk
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written Monday, May 22 2006 14:43
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quote:And Avernum doesn't already apply the law of diminishing returns? Let's count the ways in which it does. 1, doing the same thing earns drastically less experience at a higher level. 2, training the same skill costs more skill points when it's higher. 3, for many skills the actual return you get for one level of training decreases as your skill gets higher; for all skills, the proportional increase decreases as your skill gets higher. 4, the more armor or elemental protection you have, the less benefit you get from each additional piece of protection. quote:Getting immersed in the details is not the same thing as getting immersed in the story. Also, when those decisions cause you to do things that make no sense in the context of the story/world (i.e., training in archery by shooting at an enemy you'll never hit in the middle of a pitched battle), that has the effect of preventing me from getting immersed in the story/world. -------------------- Slarty vs. Desk • Desk vs. Slarty • Timeline of Ermarian • G4 Strategy Central Posts: 3560 | Registered: Wednesday, November 7 2001 08:00 |
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