Response to Brokkr

The reason I am asking.

If your character is 18, that strength might end up reaching very good/extremely good at some point.

If you're 26-27 and miscreant, then these stats are fine.


If you're a 25 and you're fighter. Yes, life will be difficult for you and you 'will' get your ass kicked a lot more often. In my opinion though, the stats you mentioned. Not low enough for me to abandon the storyline I ment to create with that character. Having said that, if you rate the level of caution between 1 and 10, when it concerns interaction with other people. Whether it be trusting easily, or allowed yourself to be irked by other people with detrimental consequences. My caution level would be about 3.


Also. I dont think it is codedly possible to be 25, a fighter, and get above average strength.

Nothing mitigates it. You can delve into different styles of combat that have less emphasis on strength, like archery, but you've always got that "your melee sucks" badge of shame. It won't get in the way of your roleplay but it will absolutely determine what options you have available to you in the upper tiers of the game, i.e. PvP, plots, battles, etc. If you're content to run around and kill mid-sized animals forever, those stats won't hinder you much. If part of your character concept is that you can hold your own and fight it out when someone demands your lunch money, those stats will get you nowhere. It all depends on your vision for the character.

Contrary to what some people insist on ("just use heramide in every fight!!"), having bad strength is a massive drawback for any combat character. When you're sporting average strength, most of your hits will do less than ten damage. The number of times you have to hit a human character to defeat them is so high that it becomes almost impossible to win a fight against anyone. You can be a rugged 10-day desert elf, and if you attack some guy, he has at least thirty seconds to type 'flee' even if he's losing the skill fight. You pretty much can't kill someone when most of your hits do 1-6 damage. And when people find out that that's the kind of damage you do, they will remember it and treat you accordingly next time they meet you. I've seen it play out that way dozens of times.

Archery has its uses but faces the same issue as low-strength melee combat: if the other guy is in a losing position, he's just gonna fuck off. Even master archery is not intensely deadly unless you highroll and land two critical neck shots in a row, which is so improbable that it's not worth counting on. People have these skewed ideas about what wins in PvP, and most of the time, those ideas are wildly impractical in reality. They've just heard stories about desert elves shooting people to death but haven't seen that for every dude who gets shot to death, there's twenty dudes who took one arrow to the thigh and wandered off with a shrug. Look for Sirra's ranger guide to see what he, arguably one of the most effective rangers ever, did to win: run into the room and fucking charge the opponent, then rip them apart in melee. Because he had high strength.

"Useful and competitive" is very subjective. Useful to whom? Competitive against whom? If being useful means providing your clan with fresh meat, you can do that playing a one-armed 80 year old. And if playing a one-armed 80 year old is your idea of fun, the world is your oyster. But when that day comes where some shithead dwarf who hasn't heard of punctuation rides up on you and thinks it'll be fun to kill you, you better have the stats to fight back or that's the end of your dream concept. Or if your gets hired to assassinate that grammatically challenged dwarf who killed your cousin, you're very unlikely to succeed without good stats.

That's why stats matter. It's not necessarily because you need to ride around and be Conan all day, it's because it really sucks ass to invest weeks and months of your life in a character concept only to lose pathetically because of stats, which is very much a thing that happens. The difference between average and max strength is a "time to kill" of 30+ seconds or just a few combat rounds. There are roles you can play where it doesn't really matter, but there are also roles that basically cannot be done without a beefy character that can end a fight quickly. This isn't exclusive to PvP, either--try killing a dujat if you have to hit it thirty times. A carru can be a nightmare or a breeze depending on whether you have to fight it for a minute or ten seconds. That's almost entirely down to strength.

I think you're reading too much into this.

The way that I read his statement,


Tier 1: You're too low in strength to wound anything. You're character is a special kind of worthless.

Tier 2: You're strong enough to punch through most armor, if even superficially. So theoretically there's no reason you're character *can't* solo a Gaj, even if with great difficulty, provided you twink hard enough and a few other conditions are satisfied. You'll be tempted to debate me on this, but Delerak could do it.

Tier 3: You have at least one extra point of strength, meaning that you're effectively doing more than double damage, as others have pointed out based upon results and analysis. Suddenly soloing the Gaj becomes much, much easier.

Tier 4: You have actual good strength and have an easy route to becoming a bad-ass. Obviously, more strength is nearly always better. This Tier will invite the most scrutiny, because it's four or five point continuum of awesomeness with plenty of gradient but no clear demarc. As stated, more is usually better.

So what he was saying was that for most intents and purposes, you just want to get into at least Tier 2. He was kind of paying lip service to the fact that yes, one out of six fighter-type characters have strength that is too low for them to fulfill any semblance of their character concept.

I also think that recently supplied data has effectively upended your stance that strength is everything, while nominally validating your opinion that low strength characters are better suicided.

As with most of your take on the game, your particular vantage seems to be a fairly niche edge case of the high-end, twink-based PVP game. These types are statistically overrepresented on your board, although I'll point out that I don't exactly resent the society of your little fellowship here.

Staff seems to obsess over your particular archetype as well. Much of their effort seems to be to "correct" perceived imbalances in the high end PVP game, that wouldn't otherwise germanely affect rank and file players.

For no special reason, I believe that I've come up with a solution to the stat system. I'm not actually recommending this system. Any suggestions are bound to become quickly political, and it's probably far easier for me to twink the existing system rather than retwink an improved system.


First Step - When you chose a character's race, certain racial minimums are applied. I believe that this is the defacto way things currently work (ignore dice rolls for the moment). Perhaps, but only perhaps, dwarves should start with lower than humans, and humans should start lower than elves. Keep in mind that your character will end up with very few of these actual stats. I'll do a couple of sample cases below. So for two character types let's have Frodo, who wants to make an explorer type and Bilbo, who wants to make a combat archer.

Frodo the Dwarf: strength - poor, agility - poor, endurance - poor, wisdom - poor
Bilbo the Human: strength - below average, agility - below average, endurance - below average, wisdom - below average

Second Step - An algorithm is applied that temporarily lowers one of your stats at random to poor. For people who hate random, it will be the easiest thing to fix. Mostly this just assures that "poors" will still exist, except for people who really really hate them. Let's suppose that Bilbo rolls agility and Frodo's roll doesn't matter, because dwarves already start at poor. So far we have:

Frodo the Dwarf: strength - poor, agility - poor, endurance - poor, wisdom - poor
Bilbo the Human: strength - below average, agility - poor, endurance - below average, wisdom - below average


Third Step - You chose your class. For one or two stats, the class system now completely replaces your artificially low previous stat for your classes key stats (defined by a template) with class minimums. Let's suppose just for the sake of argument, that Frodo choses to be be a Fighter (maybe Strength - good?) and Bilbo choses to be a stalker (str - above avg, agi - above avg ?). Keep in mind we have sixteen, count 'em, sixteen base classes so there are a lot of possibilities here. So far all of this happens behind the scenes, albeit with some transparency. All the player did was chose a race and class, something that they had to do anyway. Now we're at:

Frodo the Dwarven Fighter: strength - good, agility - poor, endurance - poor, wisdom - poor
Bilbo the Human Scout: strength - above average, agility - above average, endurance - below average, wisdom - below average

Fourth Step: You get to chose your primary stat! Regardless of what this stat was up to this point, it gets replace with a very good. All characters will be very good at something! Let's suppose that Frodo knows that he'll need a lot of endurance, and Bilbo will want to get some decent agility for all of those bow shots. Finally the players will get to see their build:

Frodo the Dwarven Fighter: strength - good, agility - poor, endurance - very good, wisdom - poor
Bilbo the Human Scout: strength - above average, agility - very good, endurance - below average, wisdom - below average

Fifth Step: Now is where I think a new step should come in. Players should next have an option to chop two points off of one of their stats, and use it to add a single point to one of their other stats. Changes could not raise a stat above it's racial maximum, meaning that additional points would be lost, nor would they drop somebody below their racial minimum. For the sake of example, maybe Frodo wants to buff up his strength at the cost of agility (basically a no-brainer) and Bilbo opts to boost his endurance at the cost of wisdom.

Frodo the Dwarven Fighter: strength - very good, agility - poor, endurance - very good, wisdom - poor
Bilbo the Human Scout: strength - above average, agility - very good, endurance - average, wisdom - poor

Sixth Step: Finally a randomization algorithm comes in and gives one out of four characters an AI, also chosen randomly. Out of those characters who get one AI, one out of four (e.g. one out of sixteen total characters) will get an additional AI, and that one out of four of those lucky guys will (e.g. one out of sixty-four total) will get a third AI, all randomly assigned. Perhaps Bilbo gets a lucky roll and his wisdom is randomly chosen as AI, while Frodo does not get a lucky roll. Our final results:

Frodo the Dwarven Fighter: strength - very good, agility - poor, endurance - very good, wisdom - poor
Bilbo the Human Scout: strength - above average, agility - very good, endurance - average, wisdom - absolutely incredible


Looking back at what I wrote, I think that maybe the racial minimums should have started higher, but clearly both of those characters are completely playable. Obviously for the dwarf to have rolled an AI strength (as one out of sixteen will) would have been helpful, but twinks will always suicide until they get what they want, as they probably should.

I have a separate idea, but don't feel like doing a separate write up, so what I think would really fix all of this would be if all players could always boost one character, one stat point per month up to a maximum of extremely good (for normal stats) and exceptional (for their chosen primary stat). That's the really boost that we all need. Few players really are all that worried if their stats are on the weak side, as long as they have the capability to fix it over a short period of time.  I don't think you should have to send in role play logs or anything.  We're all adults (or mature teen agers, in the case of our high school friends), so if your character is doing push-ups, he's doing push-ups.  

I left the age system alone because I don't really think that it adds much to the game and didn't have any good ideas to improve it.  

My motive for designing this was that I've observed that when people complain about random results, they complain mostly about dice rolls.  But random playing card results seems OK with that type of player.  This system was inspired to be closer to what card-based results would be.  Obviously I'm not attached to the whole random thing at all and point-based system might be fine.

can you link to the exact post that shows a single point of strength means you're now doing double damage? because this post
has a bigger gap and doesn't show that.




again, not sure what has reversed the argument and i need direct evidence to back it up beyond someone saying 'i think x works like this' without any code or parses to back it up.. i've posted snippets of code in this thread that show the importance of todam and the crazy scaling it gives.



it's not based on pvp, although that's what most people are interested in the applications of it.

strength is an overrepresented, poorly scaled skill that applies to all facets. most classes can do just fine with shitty endurance, wisdom, and agility. with strength, they will absolutely suffer: merchants unable to pick up objects will be unable to craft (maybe this was changed?), sneaky types will have a far lower weight limit before they take stealth penalties, etc.

in pve, having a shitty strength is indirectly linked to shitty defense. you need strength to equip heavy armor, and you need strength to be able to stay under encumbrance limits without getting penalized.

i don't agree with your tier list, but i don't feel like it's worth arguing over so instead i'll go back to the original message. at the end of the day, you will be sinking hundreds to thousands of hours into a character. why would anyone bother putting in the time and effort to develop one that was rolled to be tiers 1-3, when they could spend a few hours trying to roll one that was so much better?

In fairness to the game, it's not a completely trivial fix. The problem isn't just that the bonuses from higher strength are too big, it's that base damage is so poor. If weapons did about twice as much damage as they currently do, strength wouldn't have been such a big deal; but fixing this means adjusting every weapon in the database. The problem isn't necessarily that 19 strength gives +4 damage, it's the fact that a typical sword does 1d8 damage, which means +4 doubles your average hit. Melee damage without EG+ strength is a joke. I don't think you could just shift the scale downwards a bit and completely fix this problem. It would take fundamental redesigns so that you do meaningful damage without strength.

If we changed it so that +2 damage kicks in at 19 and +3 at 21, we just create the opposite situation where strength isn't worth focusing on. Then we can complain that there's no reason to prioritize anything but agility because of all the other bonuses it gives. One thing I would do, however, is make the strength bonus apply after location modifiers, just as it applies after backstab multipliers and such. That means your +4 damage doesn't become like +10 when you hit the neck. These are the hits that kill. You don't kill someone with twelve hits to the legs and body, you kill someone with three consecutive hits to the head that happen too fast for them to react. If strength didn't count for so much there, it would go a long way towards mitigating its importance.

As much as I love a good fight, I think I'll post a solution that would kill Arm if they implemented it because the staff are the ones deciding how to implement it. This is split into two parts because this isn't something that can be solved in chargen alone.

Chargen:

1. Get rid of random rolls for stats. Everyone begins their chargen average at everything for their race, with modifiers for age to represent experience.
2. Make age always benefit stats that costs whatever those staff-pleasuring points are called these days; higher age always raises your stat pool, old age is not available without spec apping to avoid funky stat calculations. Bonuses will be based on your guild choices.
3. Severely limit starting age now that stats are tied to it.
4. Allow players to shift points around by some amount that won't break the game. Maybe let them trade starting stat points for more starting resources.

Gameplay:

• All skill gains permanently increase some stats by a fraction of a point. For fuck's sake don't use floats because you idiots will lose stat gains to rounding errors considering how small we all know you'd make them.
• The stat bonuses should make sense in regards to the skill. Weapon use should raise strength and agility, but strength should go up more than agility. Backstab should raise agility and wisdom, but agility more than wisdom. Generally, any skill that could justify even getting a quantum of a gain should get one.
• All in-game events that affect your character should also permanently increase your stats. Using up your stamina could begin increasing your endurance slightly as you pass 50% and a little more after 75%. Eating until full would increase everything a tiny bit, and if it wasn't shit like raw meat or travel cakes, it would be a less tiny bit.
• Look through the code and get rid of strength bonuses to things that
  1. are supposed to be accuracy multipliers (use wisdom and/or agility as appropriate) and
  2. things that make no sense like archery (use bow strength, not player strength)

This would be relatively simple but tedious to implement. It would absolve the staff from admitting strength has been broken for years, which for those of you wondering, is the reason it's still broken. This would be sellable as a flashy new system that's more granular and realistic, kind of like the utterly pointless new guilds. It would make rolling a character that can flatten long-lived PCs right out of chargen extremely rare. It would make suiciding characters pointless because you know from the start you can work your way to the stats you need for your character concept.

There would be a small learning curve, as players would have to stop assuming they're either going to burst into the game fully able to reach their goal with 2 days of grinding or doomed by the RNG to go hunting without buying a weapon. It might even help with clan enrollment if the staff could get over themselves and add objects in the game players can solo with to improve themselves.

Oh, and it would kill the game. Staff would also have a learning curve now that they're figuring out stats on the basis that most of what a character has when they mature will be what the player earned rather than rolled. I think we all know the staff would set everything so low (gains and starting points) for you unwashed masses that characters Arm would be totally unplayable for the unannointed.