29 September 2008
The Joy of Numbers.
)Published on September 29th, 2008 @ 05:19:33 am, using 1261 words, 244 views
Well, I had a fun weekend. I spent it doing a bit of game design, a certain type of design I find deeply, deeply satisfying. This statement qualifies me for geek of the year, you see, what I was doing was “fiddling with the numbers".
Which is another way of saying I was playing with the underlying equations driving the skill system. Fiddling with ratios, balancing skills against another, working out how a change will affect a certain build of character vs other builds of character.
There is nothing “shiny” about this process. No cool screenshots to be had. It’s pure number manipulation. In fact, at least 50% of it happens in MS Exel. You write up an equation, say for the increasing costs of purchasing skills at higher levels, pump in the numbers, see what pops out.
If you like what you’re seeing you then put that into the engine, so you can test the whole system with these changes. Ok, so you’ve changed how agility affects ranged combat. But does this make ranged combatant builds too powerful against other builds? Too expensive?
I essentially sit there, running numbers and going through the character creation screen, for hours. I shit you not. And I’m feeling warm and fuzzy while doing it. Happy. Geek of the year, indeed. I’m one of those people who likes really crunchy stat systems in RPGs, I can sit in a character creation screen for ages agonizing over my choices. I love it. And that’s someone elses game. With my own game I can directly manipulate the guts of the engine. Stat based bliss! 
Of course, extensive playtesting is required to really nail it. But you can get part of the way there simply through crunching numbers.
You might be wondering “why do this now?". Well, the underlying character system has been revamped considerably over the last few months, and I needed to sit down and properly balance all the changes.
Let me discuss the changes a bit :
- Removal of mana. No mana anymore. Actions use stamina, casting spells included. This provides a natural balance since swinging heavy weapons and wearing heavy armor drains stamina, the same resource you use to cast magic. Which explains why mages don’t like heavy armor quite logically.
- Moving away from character “levels” to a large degree. I used to do the Dungeons and Dragons thing, where going up levels gave you more hit points and a bunch of skill points to spend. No more. The game still tracks your level based on how much experience you have earned, as a relative measure, but it has little effect beyond that. There is one thing I’m tying to it, but I’ll discuss that later. Most of the system doesn’t care about level.
- Directly spending experience on character development. Like I said, you used to level and gain skill points to spend. No more. Now it works like Vampire:Bloodlines. You spend your gained experience directly on skills and traits whenever you have enough to buy the skill you want. You want to purchase an expensive trait, save up for it.
- An extra attribute was added : Willpower. Mage types had no attribute tradeoffs during character creation. It was all about Intelligence. Willpower was added to add another dimension, a choice. Intelligence is essentially mental Agility, Willpower is mental Strength or Toughness. It ties into hitpoints, stamina points, mental resistance and the power of your spells. The system is better now that there is more than 1 attribute for mages to focus on.
- Build point system. I’ll elaborate further, let’s just say character creation works more like Shadowrun than DnD now. There are more interesting choices and trade-offs during character creation, which makes the whole thing more enjoyable, IMO.
- Less is more. By which I mean I decided that fewer skill levels are better. More distinct differences per level. I don’t know about other people but personally I don’t like systems like the Elder Scrolls, where skills rank 1-100 and every so often you allocate a percentage point or two. Ugh. So what difference is there between 57% and 59% again? None really noticeable to the player.
The mainline skills in SoW used to be ranked from 1-20, with the game intended for 30 levels of play during which you could get a couple of skills to 20, a couple midteens and a few in the single digits. Now, mainline skills rank 1-10, some rank 1-5 and a few rank 1-3. Each level you put into a skill feels like a real difference, a solid thwack of extra capability for your character. You are no longer getting all those levels during level-up but I think each micro-step increase will feel more solid now.
This also helps prevent skill inflation. What do I mean by that? Most will have played a DnD game, say NWN. Now think back to the skills. Say you chose Persuasion. Think about how that played out. You put the maximum number of points into it per level right, just to stay even with the ever increasing difficulty of the game checks. By end game, an “easy” check is 16, because you’re expected to have rank 20 if you were actually focusing on it. Any skills you don’t put points into every level become useless. You put 5 points into intimidate? Well, that might have made a difference in level 3 but now that you’re level 20 it’s useless. Basically, it’s all or nothing.
Well, with only 10 ranks, you can put easy checks in throughout the game, at rank 3-4, and reasonably expect that a character who isn’t totally focused on a skill might make the check. You don’t have to put points into a skill continuously just to stay on an even keel with the difficulty checks.
This of course means fewer level ups during the game. You aren’t constantly going to be getting the “ding"! feeling. I’m thinking 20 levels, but I might drop it as low as 10, depends, the character level isn’t as meangingful as the skill increases. We’ll see. But I dunno, sometimes I think that going overboard with constant level ups detracts from just enjoying the roleplay. You’re constantly chasing the next “ding".
It certainly worked in Vampire:Bloodlines, hell, they had only 5 skill ranks for most skills. And each level up of a skill felt really rewarding. I think it’s a good change.
- Derived stats layer. I’ll talk about this more later. But basically, your attributes determine your derived stats, and your derived stats are added to your skills to get your capabilities. But the nice thing is that most derived stats pull from 2 or more attributes. Meaning that you have to play more of a balancing game, it’s harder to focus on just two stats and have everything else be “dump stats". For example, Attack Rating is drawn from Agility and Perception. You can’t max it without maxing both those stats, but, if you do that, can you also max Endurance to make the stereotypical warrior? No.
So yes. Many, many changes have been made since last I showed screens of the character system, so lots of tweaking and recalculating was needed, and I’m not completely finished. I’m not quite sure Agility is properly balanced, it might still be a little too useful, a little bit too much of a no-brainer to focus on. But I like this final iteration a lot, it’s turned out nicely.
Once the tweaking is done I need to fix up the gui art so I can show some screens of that again without burning out your eye sockets with the horrible prototype art. 
Gareth out.
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