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12-03-2004, 06:28 AM

Have you considered implementing Flaws? Where flaws give you vulnerabilities but taking them allows you to spend more points on talents. They'd be optional but might be a nice addition.

For example, you might have a flaw like Fire vulnerability (player receives a +25% damage from fire attacks), and picking it costs you -10 points or -1 options, which has the effect of giving you 10 more points or 1 more option to pick. It would allows greater customization and gives those Gods with more talents some interesting Achille's heels.

I think point choice systems are the way to go, regardles of whether or not they are exposed directly to the players. If you can assign a 'reasonable' point value to a feature, skill, talent, flaw, stat, action, then it follows that one can calculate the difficulty of a related action, scenario, dungeon, area, new ability, or reward. It would make the design and analysis of features much easie as one might then be able automatically calculate a point value for a spell, item, area or critter submitted by a builder or player. And from that determine where or whether it's suitable for entry into the game, or the cost and duration of its creation for player driven items.

One could then design races by adding up all it's point values for extra skill, talents, stat bonuses, and charge the player N amount of points for choosing it.

Skill or talent packages or groups are another good feature. I think some of that was in Rom or Smaug. The primary game design benefit is an easier character creation process. The mistake I think some games made was in pricing them on a discount. Anway I ramble... ;-)

Balancing a game could be done by sampling player selection and preferences in creation or training, by observation, and corrected by tweaking the point values of the features. If point value dependencies are kept, the entire chain of dependencies of risk and reward could be updated instantly.

Obviously some features can't be balanced in this way and were probably misdesigned, misapplied or not well thought from the beginning and would have to be nerfed or removed. Nevertheless tracking those for the purposes of analysis of potential new features, as to not repeat them would be useful.

I wrote a rather lengthy piece on Mud Feature Analysis years ago. I'll have to dredge that up and post again. IIRC it was a higher level look at features in relation to gaming styles rather than the low level mechanics of assign point values.

12-03-2004, 06:28 AM	#2
Posts: n/a	Have you considered implementing Flaws? Where flaws give you vulnerabilities but taking them allows you to spend more points on talents. They'd be optional but might be a nice addition. For example, you might have a flaw like Fire vulnerability (player receives a +25% damage from fire attacks), and picking it costs you -10 points or -1 options, which has the effect of giving you 10 more points or 1 more option to pick. It would allows greater customization and gives those Gods with more talents some interesting Achille's heels. I think point choice systems are the way to go, regardles of whether or not they are exposed directly to the players. If you can assign a 'reasonable' point value to a feature, skill, talent, flaw, stat, action, then it follows that one can calculate the difficulty of a related action, scenario, dungeon, area, new ability, or reward. It would make the design and analysis of features much easie as one might then be able automatically calculate a point value for a spell, item, area or critter submitted by a builder or player. And from that determine where or whether it's suitable for entry into the game, or the cost and duration of its creation for player driven items. One could then design races by adding up all it's point values for extra skill, talents, stat bonuses, and charge the player N amount of points for choosing it. Skill or talent packages or groups are another good feature. I think some of that was in Rom or Smaug. The primary game design benefit is an easier character creation process. The mistake I think some games made was in pricing them on a discount. Anway I ramble... ;-) Balancing a game could be done by sampling player selection and preferences in creation or training, by observation, and corrected by tweaking the point values of the features. If point value dependencies are kept, the entire chain of dependencies of risk and reward could be updated instantly. Obviously some features can't be balanced in this way and were probably misdesigned, misapplied or not well thought from the beginning and would have to be nerfed or removed. Nevertheless tracking those for the purposes of analysis of potential new features, as to not repeat them would be useful. I wrote a rather lengthy piece on Mud Feature Analysis years ago. I'll have to dredge that up and post again. IIRC it was a higher level look at features in relation to gaming styles rather than the low level mechanics of assign point values.