Angband 3.5-dev

[Djabanete]

Originally Posted by d_m

Respecs do have this property but have another important one--they reassure the player that skill choices, etc. can be reconsidered.

It's much better to be able to assure the player that their skill choices are worthwhile or at least defensible.

It's unavoidable that some skills will be better than others, but in the ideal skill system, rational but suboptimal choices should still give you a chance to win. Experimenting with your build is fun. I'd go so far as to say that ideally (in my mind), what skills you choose should not significantly impact your chances to win, but should significantly impact the way you must play the game thereafter. Each choice should be transparent, be at least somewhat worthwhile, and should have a big impact on subsequent strategy.

I suppose I'm not strongly against respecs in principle, but if they're just a way for players to recover from horribly wrong choices that nobody should take, then they're just a band-aid for a design flaw.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I would love a skill system where the skill tree was procedurally generated in each game. There could be hundreds of skills in the game, but only 15 or so would be available to the player to choose from in each game.

EDIT: Hey, that's almost exactly how the board game Agricola handles skills!

[Djabanete]

I haven't played Agricola, but that does sound like Dominion, which I like a lot.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Originally Posted by Djabanete

It's unavoidable that some skills will be better than others, but in the ideal skill system, rational but suboptimal choices should still give you a chance to win. Experimenting with your build is fun. I'd go so far as to say that ideally (in my mind), what skills you choose should not significantly impact your chances to win, but should significantly impact the way you must play the game thereafter. Each choice should be transparent, be at least somewhat worthwhile, and should have a big impact on subsequent strategy.

That's exactly how I think about the six primal statistics!

[Cold_Heart]

+1 to procedurally-generated skills
+1 to making charisma useful
+1 to some or another form of crafting

[Mikko Lehtinen]

One way to do skills -- I'd rather call them specialties since Angband already has skills -- in Angband would be this. This is just brainstorming.

- They would be similar to Oangband specialties.
- There specialities would be learned in-game, preferably somewhere in dungeon, for example after freeing a prisoner or studying an ancient tome.
- You would need to succeed in a stat or skill roll to learn a specialty, and there would be only one chance. Not learning a specialty wouldn't matter that much because you could only learn a limited number of specialties anyway.

Another possibility: All specialties would be tied to a stat. As your Charisma score gets higher, your Intimidate specialty gets stronger. This would ensure that stats and equipment choices continue to be important.

[Djabanete]

I do like it when randomness and choice both play a role in character development. In Heroes of Might and Magic, whenever a hero levels up, you're given a choice between two randomly chosen skills. (Well... they're chosen from a pool that are appropriate for your hero's profession.) You get to make the strategic choices, but sometimes the game moves you a direction you're not familiar with. Something like that would be fun... you rescue a prisoner and he agrees to teach you your choice from among 3 specialties.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Originally Posted by Djabanete

I do like it when randomness and choice both play a role in character development. In Heroes of Might and Magic, whenever a hero levels up, you're given a choice between two randomly chosen skills.

I like! Actually HoMM skill advancement has been popping in my mind often when I think about *band development.

Let's see... Every ten character levels or so you meet a "guru" who offers a teach you one specialty out of a list of three. Usually you need to succeed in an ability check to learn a specialty, and if you fail, you may choose another one on the list. One of the specialties on the list would always be "easy", with no ability check required.

[half]

Originally Posted by Derakon

A strong investment in crafting skills will also let you access high-level gear earlier than you "should" be able to get it -- but you've attained that skill in crafting at the cost of skill in other areas, and eventually that high-level gear will drop for non-crafting players anyway. In short, crafting smooths out the difficulty curve.

Crafting in Sil is like this except that it doesn't require any ingredients, which is better in some ways, worse in others. Actually, there is one ingredient (mithril) which works well for flavour and a bit of interest in melting down a few mithril items to get enough mithril to make a mithril corslet for example. I think this is enough ingredient related crafting without making the game into a scavenger hunt.

Diablo 2 is a bit problematic in my view

I completely agree with this analysis.

[Nick]

Originally Posted by Mikko Lehtinen

One way to do skills -- I'd rather call them specialties since Angband already has skills -- in Angband would be this. This is just brainstorming.

- They would be similar to Oangband specialties.
- There specialities would be learned in-game, preferably somewhere in dungeon, for example after freeing a prisoner or studying an ancient tome.

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