Skills, glorious skills!

I’ve been thinking about skills. The post below is cut and pasted from what I wrote at the rpgcodex.

The three main skills are mind, body, and focus. Each has 10 different levels it can be raised to, with some levels bringing additional “perks” (not Fallout perks), but mostly just increasing your chances at performing an action successfully. They also tie into each other, which is an idea I’ve wanted from the very start (ex. Body + Focus = Coercion).

The whole skills helping skills system is a central focus of Hare and tough to balance out. Obviously, 8 focus and 1 body shouldn’t net you the same level of coercion as 4 focus and 5 body. However, I really want to avoid creating a situation where you’re micro managing your stats, because it would take away from what this game is really about.

*intermission*

Just taking a breather before things really get wild.

*end intermission*

Welcome back.

Most of the game is based on percentages. Now, keep in mind that these are not normal percentages. If you fail to pick a lock the game doesn’t persuade you to reload. Instead, you are forced to find an alternate, yet interesting, route. There is no level grinding to raise these percentages, such as success at picking locks. Instead, there are experience points.

Let me elaborate. These are not your normal every day experience points. In fact, you don’t need to raise a single level in anything to finish the game. It will be extremely fucking difficult, but you can go through the entire game with both skills at level 1. This is because the world is filled with hundreds of skill checks, and you can’t join any job outside of migrant farming without some skill. Jobs are a huge part, and so is travel (migrant farming is the slowest form of travel). If, however, you want to make the game more interesting, and pursue some unique challenges outside of “how can I avoid dying?”, then you’ll want to seek out EXP.

EXP is hidden.

That’s right. EXP is hidden. You don’t magically get it for talking to someone or delivering a box. You have to solve puzzles and find the right connections to increase your skills.

That’s another reason why stat balancing is particularly difficult. How much experience should be awarded? How much should be required to raise a level? How should the areas and quests be balanced to make use of this?

Anyways, I’ve rambled. Back to coercion and that mess. The simplest method (note I didn’t say “best”) would be to base your success on your lowest sill. For a wonderful example, let’s look at… coercion. 8 focus and 1 body gives you the percentage for coercion success that 1 focus and 1 body would. 4 focus and 5 body would give you the percentage that 4 focus and 4 body would. Of course, the problem there is that coercion would obviously be more influenced by focus than body, and the game would be forcing you to develop both sills equally, which would suck and completely ruin all my intentions of c&c.

One way through this problem would be that each “sub skill” has it’s own requirements. In the coercion example, focus could count for double when calculating. However, as you can probably surmise, doing it like this would easily lead to percentages way over 100. So, I thought, focus could still count double, but each point would be worth 0.5 instead of 1 in the behind-the-scenes calculation. That, however, would make the chance of success way too low. So, I’ll add on 25% to each.

Example (Coercion):
10F + 10B = (10.0 + 5.0)/2.0 = (7.50 + 2.5) x 0.10 = 100.00%
8F + 1B = (8.0 + 0.5)/2.0 = (4.25 + 2.5) x 0.10 = 67.50%
1F + 8B = (1.0 + 4.0)/2.0 = (2.50 + 2.5) x 0.10 = 50.00%
4F + 5B = (4.0 + 2.5)/2.0 = (3.25 + 2.5) x 0.10 = 57.50%
5F + 4B = (5.0 + 2.0)/2.0 = (3.50 + 2.5) x 0.10 = 60.00%

As you can see, 8F and 1B will net you a 17% greater chance than vice versa, but you are still rewarded for developing your body skill so damn high instead of being severely punished for not developing your focus skill (which would totally ignore the fact that body is an important part of this coercion sub-skill). Meanwhile, keeping both F and B around the same number (4 and 5) will lead to only a moderate difference.

The problem with using percentages, of course, is that someone could just have bad luck and no matter how much they raise their skills, they always get the bad roll of the die. In that regard, I think there should be some kind of check to determine whether your last chance was successful or not, and then add on a random percentage to your next chance that increases it.

Example:
You have 4F and 5B. Your chance at coercion is 57.50%. You attempt to coerce, and you fail. A ten-sided die is rolled (all done behind the scenes of course, so you can’t actually see a skill increase on your character sheet after a failed attempt) and it lands on 6. On your next attempt, you will have a 63.5% chance. If you succeed, your chance will drop back to your regular 57.5% If you fail, the dice is rolled again. Of course, if you have a perfect 10 in each, your chance is 100 and will never fail. If you have 9’s in each, then if you miss the first attempt, you can be pretty damn sure you’ll get the next one.