"Character skills" vs. "Lawful combat" duality

[Frances]

Time for the discussion thread of the week, woo!

There's an interesting duality we've been dealing with since the inception of the server. While we are a roleplaying community, a lot the mechanics we're playing with are still videogame-combat-based. And, among other things, they don't have any stats. This creates two interesting and opposed situations:

 

• -Every character is equal through gameplay
  
  
  
  -Not every character is equal through roleplay

 

Let me give a very simple example. You have Joe McJohn, 42, lifelong mechanic. One day, Joe's station is attacked by Nick McRaider, a dangerous syndicate criminal. There are various events that can stem from this conflict situation. Joe might surrender to Nick McRaider, or cower in fear in his presence while trying to hide in an unused locker. After all, Nick McRaider presents a threat for inexperienced Joe, and survival instinct dictates that Joe should try to preserve his life.

There is, however, a chain of events that may ensue, which could possibly result in controversy. Let's say that, after carefully evaluating his options, Joe determine that the course of action most likely to result in his survival is for him to hide in a locker with a trusty combination wrench, and ambush Nick McRaider by giving him a swift whack on the noggin. After all, if a raider is attacking his space station, chances are pretty high he'll be killed if he does nothing, and the ensuing ERT-Syndicate firefights aren't the best at minimizing civilian casualties. And it's just one raider - not like he's doing something idiotic, right?

Let's see how the duality comes in practice:

 

• -As all characters are equal through gameplay, Joe is given a fair chance to have a go at Nick McRaider. All he has going in his favor are his wits, and whatever equipment he may scrounge up in his workplace. By opposition, Nick McRaider is equipped with potentially deadly weapons (and a suit of armor) cementing his status as a dangerous criminal.
  
  
  
  -As all characters are not equal through roleplay, though, Joe might not be the most apt at delivering effective CQC strikes and overpowering an armed and armored opponent. Who knows, though, maybe Nick McRaider's no trained commando, either.

 

So, the question is, situations like these, bad or not? Should all players be allowed to dish it out with equal lack of restraint using the combat engine? If not, why, and what countermeasures do we wish to enforce?

[canon35]

Stats. Actual. Stats.

[Frances]

Stats. Actual. Stats.

Hm.

In my opinion, the problem with actual stats is that they take all the fun out of being robust. Rather than being rewarded for coming up with obscure combat strategies and being on point with your mechanics, you can simply make a superbuffed character which guarantees you a win without effort

The counterpoint to that is that a player with decent combat skills can absolutely wreck face on anything. (But do we want to punish for that? And what situations should enable feasts of robustness, and which should forbid them?

[canon35]

Stats you can't control. Preset depending on job. If you're a cargo tech, you're not good with your fists. If you're a security officer, you're well-trained. With a decent combat system implemented, it could allow people to get around the stat divide. We could have things like strength, intelligence, dexterity, etc.

[Lady_of_Ravens]

I see two problems here. First, it would only effect combat (unless we're adding stat-related modifiers to every role's job), and second, it would force characters to change fairly intrinsic physical features if they're played in different rounds.

What might work is a perk type system where you get to pick one or two special thing about your character during setup that could make them faster, or more durable, or able to carry more (third and fourth pocket slots!), or whatever. That way characters who aren't combat-oriented would be less likely to have increased hit damage or know how to do a vulcan nerve pinch... but then again we might end up with a medbay full of lesbian ninjas.

That said, this doesn't seem especially necessary... unless maybe it's meant to give antags an advantage over your average toolbox swinger. These days antags need all the advantages they can get.

[Frances]

Stats you can't control. Preset depending on job. If you're a cargo tech, you're not good with your fists. If you're a security officer, you're well-trained. With a decent combat system implemented, it could allow people to get around the stat divide. We could have things like strength, intelligence, dexterity, etc.

But a stat system set around jobs doesn't help realism either

Wasn't the main attraction of a stat system the ability to set stats that actually reflected your character's abilities? So you wouldn't have to be afraid of admins for going all out against trained soldiers and being "robust", if your character felt it was his/her duty to do so without being particularly capable?

And I think the main argument brought against that is that even if we tried to enforce a honesty system, too many people would play John Cena on the station simply to win fights.

 

That said, this doesn't seem especially necessary... unless maybe it's meant to give antags an advantage over your average toolbox swinger. These days antags need all the advantages they can get.

All I can say is that "regular antags get hardcoded bonuses" seems like a risky design decision. Save for powerantag roundtypes (vampires, lings and wizards, which have only 1-3 antagonists), the entire antag-vs-crew system is balanced around items, that you can lose, gain, steal, make, etc.

[Xelnagahunter]

Stats you can't control. Preset depending on job. If you're a cargo tech, you're not good with your fists. If you're a security officer, you're well-trained. With a decent combat system implemented, it could allow people to get around the stat divide. We could have things like strength, intelligence, dexterity, etc.

I dislike this. I'm down with a stats system as I'm fairly unrobust and would like a fighting chance at playing in security roles, but nothing forced by job. What if I'm a 10 year sec officer who just finished appropriate schooling to become a lab assistant, I suddenly lose my 10 years of combat training? Nope. 110% against that idea.

[Lady_of_Ravens]

All I can say is that "regular antags get hardcoded bonuses" seems like a risky design decision. Save for powerantag roundtypes (vampires, lings and wizards, which have only 1-3 antagonists), the entire antag-vs-crew system is balanced around items, that you can lose, gain, steal, make, etc.

 

Yeah, and the crew can make/retain items a lot better. That said, none of these "perks" should be especially powerful, so giving nuke-ops and traitors 3 instead of 2 wouldn't be such a big deal. Stuff like +5% combat damage or an extra pocket slot or a slightly increased movement speed, or the ability to double the speed at which you get out of cuffs. There would need to be very non-combat ones, too, though... like quicker timers on surgery, reduced movement penalty when wearing heavy gear (like bio suits), and other useful stuff.

Probably more of a bother than it's worth, but something to consider none the less.

[jackfractal]

Adding a stats system would be... I'm not going to say impossible but I will say 'extraordinarily challenging' given the state of the code.

SS13 doesn't really map the concepts 'you can do this, but this other person can do it better' with any elegance. You would have to rebuild a lot of interactions.

That being said, I think trying to solve this problem is worthwhile one, but one that needs to be approached with deliberation.

One of the key pillars that makes SS13 work in how directly player knowledge maps to in-game power. An antagonist who regularly plays security is dangerous, but an antagonist who regularly plays security but also knows how to hack, wear a space suit, make thermite, and use a medkit is a lot more dangerous.

Breaking that link, even on a 'high-rp' server might do some weird stuff to the game.

[Frances]

Well, maybe rather than mechanics, I'd like to start by focusing on which direction we want to take, first.

Because I've seen all sorts of things, from "anybody can fight anybody and the most robust person/antag with the actual gun will win" to "if you're not on sec and you try to fight antags to be a hero you will be banned".

[Hackie]

I guess we should mention Lifeweb, despite the reputation around the game and the kind of stigma it has, their team is really developing some cool stuff for the Byond engine.

You have 4 stats:

STR: How hard you can hit and how much you can carry.

HT: How much punishment you can take.

DEX: How fast your reflexes are, and how good you can hit people.

INT: How brainy you are.

In the end, these stats can be easily manipulated through occult rituals, narcotics or just training for the round. But they don't particularly matter, I've once slaughtered an entire team of well trained, and well equipped players with my bare hands, wits and abysmal stats and skills in Lifeweb. If we don't make throw in some RNGesus to the mix it removes a sense of uncertainty and danger with every conflict along the way. During that scenario if anyone got a lucky hit, sliced an artery or tendon I was boned. I didn't have the medical skills to treat the wound, nor the contacts to really help me.

In order to serve the purpose this system was originally put in place for, it has to have preset skills in order to mitigate power gaming. What do we do about our master hand-to-hand combat engineer who took Judo classes or something. Your character's background should fit into the mold of the role. Yes, it would be somewhat difficult to explain from an IC standpoint why your character just became a lot more stupid, weak and wimpy than he was yesterday but I believe we can suspend our disbelief for this little point.

EDIT: We're just talking theory, anything in this thread is really just wishmaking.

Edited November 18, 2015 by Guest

[LetzShake]

I don't agree with stats being implemented. Because combat experience is a thing but when it comes down to it, when it's human against human a guy with a toolbox and the element of surprise beats a dude with a gun sometimes. Not always. Unpredictability is good. I don't think people should seek out fights, but I don't thing antags should be able to get complacent that everyone is gonna submit to them because sometimes someone is gonna fight back. Humans are humans, and the physical differences are still limited.

And I don't think people fight back all that often, I think we're in a good place, as that goes. It's about picking your spot, if it makes sense for your character to fight back. I think having a full gambit of potential responses to antag situations is a good thing for roleplay and for realism.

[Frances]

Yeah, but if a person actually decides to go all out and fight, when should we punish them, and when should we not?

[LetzShake]

Yeah, but if a person actually decides to go all out and fight, when should we punish them, and when should we not?

I don't think there's a 'hard' answer for this, unfortunately. I think it's case by case. One certain situation is, if someone is pointing a gun at you, right now, that is a time you should not be fighting them. If you can duck behind a corner without getting hit, then maybe that's a reasonable thing to try but generally speaking if the armed person is focused on you, you should not do anything but what they say.

For me, as an RPer, my rules of 'engagement' are:

1. Is there a weapon (a GOOD one) within reach or on my person.

Toolboxes and fire extinguishers are iffy and depend on how the other person is armed. Something that's more likely to stun is fine. this also depends on the perceived physical strength of my character. If I was playing, say, Nehma, my research director, I would be less likely to attempt combat than Crystal, my tough, stout, fighty doctor. But again, it depends on what they're armed with, and what I'm armed with.

2. Could I realistically reach it without them noticing, or would I only succeed in grabbing it because of game mechanics?

This is important. Is the antags focus drawn elsewhere or would they, ICly, be looking straight at me. Could I make a move on them before the ycould react? How big is the weapon and where is it?

3. Am I likely going to die or be maimed if I start this fight?

Don't charge into certain death. Simple.

4. Am I likely going to die, be maimed, or suffer a fate worse than death if I don't start this fight?

If an antag is going to sell me as a sex slave, and they've got the handcuffs in their hands, and I will have no other chance to escape, maybe fuck it.

[DeezyJ]

I was thinking about it as well recently

And become paranoid about it

Now i think skillset you give to your character in setup window affects the chance to succeed (higher chance to push/disarm/weaken) in melee hand to hand combat for example when conditions are equal and the only difference is skills you have set in character window

And so on

Doing tests, maybe will notify about results

[Guest]

It's already been thought of. Lifeweb's an example of this system of stats already, but I'm not wishmaking, either.

Right, just to go over again, these are the statistics lifeweb uses for just about every world interaction.

ST: How much you can carry, how hard you can hit, how effective grapples and wrenching is.

HT: How resilient you are. Supposedly you sleep off wounds faster, and your metabolism works faster, too. Get drunk less (to a very minimal amount), drugs have slightly lesser negative effects. Governs stamina, as well.

INT: General intelligence. Governs the learning/advancement of skills, the ability to speak, craft and interact with objects in the world. Low INT has devastating returns. Lose the ability to interface with consoles (occasionally), attack logs and other action logs are jumbled up as "WHAT IS EVEN GOING ON?" to reflect the character's lack of depth perception and self-awareness. Also governs the various other types of Combat Intents. Having Low INT is VERY crippling.

DEX: Governs general agility, the ability to catch yourself after falls. Decreases the chance for critical failures for actions, increases the chance for critical successes. You also get up faster during failures.

You also have three combat-related skills. They are ranked Worthless, Unskilled, Skilled, Master, Legendary, Mythic.

Melee: Governs how accurate and devastating your melee blows are. Governs parrying, feinting, etc, in smaller ways in combination with INT.

Ranged: Governs weapon stability and accuracy. Also governs the speed to aim at someone with a gun. Worthless-tier folks are better off using something else.

Bows: Doesn't really matter here, this isn't a post-apocalyptic feudal atmosphere.

There are also other skills that govern every other interaction with the world, objects, and people.

Surgery, crafting, cooking, survival, chemistry, general medicine, swimming, climbing, sprinting, 'partying' (governs how well you take drugs or alcohol), alchemy, masonry, forging, blacksmithing, and so on. It's huge and in-depth.

Worthless-tier skills are impossible to raise unless you have very high intelligence raised by taking mentats. Oh, did I also mention the four major stats can't be raised without the use of drugs or black magics, which in themselves have nasty sideeffects?

Buffout generally increases your ST, for example, but your INT sinks to critically low levels. Mentats increase your INT, but once it wears off you start suffering from withdrawal effects and your INT drops by quite a bit under its original value. Heroin makes you entirely insensitive to pain and emotion, but has a very low OD point. Higher doses makes you pretty much worthless in combat, you slip and critically fail consistently.

Attempting to min-max will usually lead to greater consequences that will effect you later on. Breaking game physics will lead to a much worse comeuppance than if you just accepted your fate as a normal, weak person who was killed by someone stronger than you.

[Guest]

Back on topic, most people aren't going to 'respect' roleplay if they think they can gain something in terms of gameplay.

Up to the mods to enforce standards, orrrr not. Us blue names can do nothing about the offenders.

[Guest]

Well, don't know about balance, but this could be as easily regulated as current character skills are, so it wouldn't be an issue.

[Skull132]

Yeah, but if a person actually decides to go all out and fight, when should we punish them, and when should we not?

 

The way it should be done, as of right meow, is that the decision to go out and fight is scrutinized. We don't scrutinize how effectively you fight (unless it's a very blatant case of shitty RP, like a weedy scientist using a sniperrifle for kek headshots at max range), but rather, your decision to fight.

I actually really like one thing about the present system: shit gets real hilarious when you have a character who, backstory wise, is supposed to be this badass, but you can't hold a dime in actual combat. And we can't really remove that element of the game. Even with a stats system, better players, who know more maneuvers in combat, such as the fact that stun is more poweful than lethal, or when to disarm over wailing on someone, will still be better. Even if their stats are worse.

We could just add modifiers to attacks, but even still, a good player would know how to bypass them. The lower your agility, the lower your chance to disarm? Welp, gotta make them stungloves, or use lockers now. I don't really know if it would solve anything, as opposed to just shifting the issue a little.

EDIT: what I mean. If skills were incorporated in a fashion where they would negate this effect, then they would be all-powerful. That is to say: skills would dictate who wins a fight, end of story. Which, in my opinion, is lame. Skills should be modifiers that make things easier, require less tries. At which point, a good player can still win, even if their skills are bad.

Also, as an addendum, I do not want to incorporate any skills into the game, other than combat based ones. Why? Because the project would be unrealistic. The amount of checks you would have to locate, figure out and write out, would be near infinite. So, only combat related stats, plz, which are controlled through like, a maximum of 20 procs.

[Guest]

Well, don't know about balance, but this could be as easily regulated as current character skills are, so it wouldn't be an issue.

 

The last time we had a discussion about balance, I closed out of that thread with an opinion that gameplay balance is hardly important, just that the game needs to be fun for anyone playing on the same spectrum.

However, creating a perfect imbalance is all about creating opportunities for people where you can completely dunk on them "unfairly", but the smart person who fell victim to that scenario can at the very least analyze what happened to them and take precautions to avoid getting dunked on in the future. To develop smarter strategies to avoid getting into that clusterfuck of a mess with that person again.

This is sort of why habitual powergamers are actually hurting themselves than they are for other players. They pick a strategy out of the blue

(such as filling cleaner bottles with capascin) and use it repeatedly to dunk on other people. After a good deal of raging and crying, the victims get over it (ideally) and find a way around the powergamer's strategy and dunk on them for not diversifying.

You are not robust if you do not mix up your entourage of abilities every once in awhile. Robustness is not about making people suffer (it's a byproduct of robusting, either good or bad), it's about making things interesting.

I won't flatter myself in saying I know 300 ways to robust a spaceman starting only as an assistant. There are, however, a lot of ways you can take someone who is more equipped and supposedly more prepared than you by complete surprise to gain an advantage. This varies from job to job, and I'd argue chemistry is perhaps the most potent, due to the nature of how many ways you can fuck someone up in a single dosage.

But even the chemist has its weaknesses. As does the valid-hungry security officer, and the vigilante engineer, and the beat-em-up self-antagonizing medical doctor.

In Lifeweb, all that stats really do is just hammer into you that you're supposed to play your role, and your skills that you have merely make your job easier in a particular playstyle. Even then, there's multiple ways to go about being a town guard or a healer. People are different and so no two people can really duplicate the same experience.

Edit: And I also mean this very respectfully, but I believe it needs to be said. In terms of development, the community's wishes doesn't matter for dip if SoundScopes doesn't want it.

[Frances]

Edit: And I also mean this very respectfully, but I believe it needs to be said. In terms of development, the community's wishes doesn't matter for dip if SoundScopes doesn't want it.

I don't want to go too off-topic, but I felt like replying to that in particular because I disagree.

Well, maybe disagree isn't the right word. But as much as any development projects need to go through the headdev, the headdev isn't there to pick out specific ideas they like as much as keep the "crazy" out.

Scopes is one of the best devs I've seen, and in my short time interacting with various people who try to make videogames (and run projects in general), you can run into some pretty terrible people who aren't even aware they're being terrible. In comparison, Scopes is organized, level-headed, and has to manage the suggestions of 50+ people along with the help of a rare few coders. (The same really goes for Skull before him.) A lot of suggestions are too large-scale and vague to be implemented (it's really a matter of who wants to spend an insane amount of time coding and fixing all of one big idea, while making sure the community likes it enough), but of the rest of the suggestions, those that are good and easy to implement do make it whenever the manpower to execute them is found.

I might be getting my knickers in a twist over nothing, and I know for a fact you didn't mean anything bad through what you said, so disregard me if I'm ranting over nothing, but I think Scopes deserves credit. And I'll just be sad if no one acknowledges it.

[Skull132]

I used to have a, "n amount of crazy ventures per month" criteria.

Annnyways. I have an idea.

Instead of skills, why not make a system kind of working around this issue? This is resorting to some level of plagiarism, but fuck it, we'll give credit where it's due (Paradise and Jamini's motley band): implants.

Here's the idea. We give everyone an X amount of implant points, and have two categories of implants: general ones, and job specific ones. The combat oriented implants give you things like, make you harder to disarm, or make your punches a little stronger, etcetera. This would create a dynamic similar to skills, but I think it'd be less in the way of jutting into your face as this one thing, specifically created for combat. Thoughts?

[Guest]

No, absolutely, he deserves a lot of credit for his work. He's kept himself sane long enough to keep this server up and all. Hell, even when Skull was MIA for a few months and prepping to be conscripted before being turned away for medical reasons, he pretty much carried this server on its back for a few months.

What I said was merely a disgruntled gripe about development speed and a stagnation of content. Although, to be fair, we have no spriters, so nothing in terms of custom items or anything else that's "new and unique" ever gets done.

I should've added I did appreciate his hard work and all, but I dunno, I figured nobody would really respond to it.

And Skull just ninjaposted me. Ermmm, implants.

...Iiiii don't really know. Is there a Paradise PR that references the full extent of these implants? I'd like to know more about them.

[Skull132]

Honestly, I don't plan on porting the systems. Cause, too lazy, and I don't like being placed into a frame.

We should figure out what we want them to do for ourselves

[Alberyk]

What about martial arts?