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[pspeed]

For me, this is potentially a pretty sensitive topic just because it so closely intertwines with things I have really strong opinions about (no XP, no 'levels', etc.).  However, I've come to the point where no "ahah" moments are popping up anymore so I decided to see if my gracious community has any sparks to provide.

I hesitated to put this thread together because asking for input is always a scary thing for me.  So I will say in advance, if I don't use your idea it is not necessarily a reflection on the idea itself but because I'm trying to puzzle it into 50 other dependent things.  It is certainly not a reflection on you personally.  I'm very picky and I know almost instantly what I hate even if I haven't figured out what I like yet.

That being said... here's where I am...

What we are talking about are the traditional character attributes of RPGs but done Mythruna-style.  I want to try to work on the networking piece over the holidays and to do that, I've setup a dependency for myself to have the basic character creator in place.  So it's worth thinking about character attributes now because things have a way of getting cemented early.

Constraints:
As much as possible, I want to incorporate the player's own 'skill' into the game.  So right off the bat this means there won't be raw "Intelligence" and "Wisdom" like in classic RPGs.  Your ability to solve some puzzle is not going to be based on a dice roll.  You either know stuff or you don't.

Where character attributes come into play is where I can't rely on the player's skills or where it's entirely a function of the in-game body.  "Strength" would be the most prime example of both of these.  I have no way of detecting how hard you are pressing a mouse button and even if I did, your interaction with the world is done through your avatar's body.  If he's a small weakling, he's not going to be able to move a boulder no matter how hard you push a button.

So, in a nutshell: "Strength" YES   "Intelligence" NO

The other thing I know is that character creation will be a set of balances and tradeoffs.  In the current mock-up UI design (in my notes), you are given a certain number of green crystals to place on a board (probably star shaped where points represent attributes).  If you put a crystal in the middle then it affects all stats a little bit.  If you put a crystal at the tip of a point, it will have a large impact on just that stat.  In the crooks of the star, it may affect more than one attribute in some 'medium' way.  For example, "Strength" might be next to "Endurance" and placing crystals between them will affect both of them at the same time, but less so than if you put a crystal right on one or the other.  If you put it between strength and the middle then it might affect mostly strength but also the two stats to either side.

Here is a "just created right now in five minutes" mock-up to use as illustration of what I describe above.  It's just an example... there will probably be more points on the star, etc. but I wanted a visual:


The basic idea is that it takes significantly more 'character building' to be a 100% well-rounded individual.  Or if you want to be a tank, you can plop all of your stones into strength and endurance or whatever... you have the choice.

Note also: there will be ways to augment these stats once in game by acquiring different magic devices for your character... there's a limit to how many of these you can use, too, though.

Things I think are True

I think you will be able to put crystals towards customizing your appearance and I think you will be able to put them towards the attribute star.  In the final mix, I envision giving you a frumpy random character and you can choose to spend crystals upgrading what they look like.  Some stats may modify appearance too but in general, a crystal will give you additional flexibility on some axis of appearance (height, physique, hair style, whatever).

I also think "magic power" is different than "magic sense".  Power may be closely related to strength or endurance.  It represents a practice at channeling energies.  Essentially, it's a multiplier of your life force, ie: your health.  Using magic wounds you but it's based on a power-related modifier.  At full health, a high power character can burn more magic energy for longer before the health drain becomes significant.

This is different than "magic sense" which is an innate ability to 'sense' the energies of the world.  In some cases, this will show up as intuition.  In some cases it will show up as an increased ability to detect minerals or whatever.  All of the "intuitive" skills like tracking, persuasion, prospecting, or whatever will get an extra bump from these magic senses (which is probably a separate star).  Also, this may make your character more sensitive to receive energies, ie: suck them up from the world to use them... but you'd have to have the power stat to manage it or it could kill you quickly.

In my minds eye, I kind of see power and health being somehow derived from other stats.  So overall max health might be the average of endurance and constitution and power is something like the min of those or something.  Exceptionally high strength may improve health and lower magic power.  I don't know, really.

I see "magic sense" as potentially growing when you are balancing your character, ie: the more stones you put right in the middle, the higher your overall "magic sense" will be.  Heavily specialized characters will not have spent as much time developing their magic sense.  I may also just use a completely separate star for magic sense.  So you could choose to put a crystal towards stats, towards magic sense, or towards appearance.

Potential Attributes

Here are some attributes that I've already thought of potentially using.  All subject to change, of course.

Strength: how much weight you can move.  How much you can carry before being encumbered.  How 'heavy' your sword/axe/whatever will feel in your hand when you are wielding it.  How 'heavy' a bow you can use and how quickly you can draw it back, and so on.

Endurance: how long you can experience fatigue before detrimental effects occur.  Also how quickly you regain fatigue points... how long you can hold your breath, etc.  May also control how long you can aim a pulled bow before getting too shaky to shoot.

Luck: in any case where there's a "dice roll", this will juice your dice a little bit.  This is for those cases where something could go either way and so a random roll has to be made.  For example, causing sparks to start a fire, interactions with NPCs, etc.  We all know characters in stories that just seem to have an extra amount of luck.  For them, the fire always seems to light right the first time and they always seem to have the best hand of cards.  If they say something iffy to the bar tender it always seems to be interpreted in the best light, etc..  (Luck may turn out to be what you get when you don't specialize a 'magic sense', ie: high luck is reserved for extremely balanced characters)

Lore: how much you already know about this particular world.  I don't know how exactly this will factor in, but I imagine it to be that someone with high lore might already know where major cities are and some of the towns, etc..  If you go to a heavily populated place then you might already know where the blacksmith is, and so on.  A lot of this depends on how much "knowledge" the game has in the first place.  A high lore skill may also give you more conversation options when talking to NPCs... especially when combined with "spirit magic sense" which would give you conversational intuition.

Dexterity: I was kind of on the fence about this one since I want to provide player control as much as possible... but, dexterity will do things like give you extra 'stick' on icy surfaces.  If you are climbing a wall and your grip slips then you might have a chance to regrab.  Dexterity may also factor into archery and may let your sword/axe/whatever be more controllable or give you faster return to a given stance.

Constitution: I'm really iffy about this one.  This would be the best indicator of "overall health" and control how fast you bounce back from wounds or poisons, etc..  It might also give you some dice-juice on avoiding poison or disease completely (so would luck).  This is different then endurance.  Endurance controls how long you can hold the heavy rock before falling over exhausted.  Constitution controls how much that act would damage your health and how quickly you'd recover your health (versus fatigue).


Magic Sense

I don't want to go too deeply into this as it largely depends on what elemental magic energies I end up with.  Air sense would help you sense weather.  Earth sense would help you find minerals or know locations underground.  Spirit sense may give you insight into what an NPC is thinking through additional conversation trees.  Life sense may improve hunting/tracking and aid in befriending animals or sensing danger.

...and so on.  It's essentially compartmented intuition.


Anyway, I got a lot more out above than I thought I would when I started it.  My notes and thinking were pretty thready so far but just writing this has helped a lot.

I still don't have a clear picture in my mind of how the star will be arranged and whether or not there are some attributes that I'm missing.

So what do you guys think?

[tmosconi]

I like the idea of your star system, but I would like you to consider more than one star.  What I mean is maybe a star representing Physical attributes, such as Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Constitution, and a non-Physical (call it Mental I suppose) that would be things like Tenacity, Persistence, Luck, etc)

In real-life, there are a few rare individuals that seem maxed out in everything, but I feel, in general, you will often see a person tend towards the physical or the mental side, (or maybe a balance of both), but not maxed out in both.

So, in game, you can make the Jock, or the Nerd, or a balance of both.

OK, so how to implement this? 

Well, lets just say you come up with 5 points on both stars, each point representing a different physical attribute on the Physical star and mental attributes on the Mental star.  You also have a dot/node you can drag around each star, one for each attribute.  They all start dead center.

Behind the scenes, you would give max and min values to all the attributes (which could possibly be exceeded once you are in the game based on rewards/achievements/equipment, but I am talking about max/min at character creation only).  Let's say that each point you can drag is worth from 0 to 20, and each attribute can be maxed at 100.

So, in my example, leaving all 5 dead center, would make a character that has 20 points in each of the 5 attributes, and is very balanced.  As you drag the points out towards the tips of your star, you are both adding and subtracting points in each attribute.  Drag all 5 to the tip of the Strength point, and you have a character that can move mountains, but he is a klutz, gets easily fatigued, blah blah blah.

So, now we have each star working independently, so I now propose a slider between the two stars.  This would be a percentage slider.  If left in the middle, each star gets an equal weight, or a multiplier of 1.  As you drag the slider towards the Physical star, that multiplier increases by 1%, or .01, to a max of 2, and decreases the Mental multiplier in the same fashion.

So, move the slider all the way to the Physical side, and the Physical attributes double in value while the Mental attributes all get halved. So, using the max of 20 per node, and 100 per attribute, well, you have may have doubled your Physical side to 40 per node and a possible 200 in a single attribute, you have also just nerfed your Mental side to a max of 10 per node and 50 per attribute.

Having explained all that, this type of system is only going to work if you ensure there are elements in the game that will use all the attributes in a balanced way.  As soon a s the community senses that the Mental side is not as important as the Physical side, the slider will always be dragged to the Physical side.  As soon as the community discovers the importance of Luck, maybe the reverse happens.

So, the mechanism for assigning points is only really going to be as good as the mechanism for applying these attributes in game, and therefore it makes it difficult to nail anything down specifically without knowing what you ultimately have in mind for game play.

So, Conan the Barbarian may have his nodes dragged closer to Strength and Constitution, with a slider all the way left, where as Gandalf the Grey may be something opposite.

If nothing else, maybe this gives some ideas of things to use, or dismiss.

[BigredRm]

You sir need no help. This was a great map of your thoughts on attributes.  I would only say a few things. You may consider dexterity in the sense of performing the action at the optimal time. Like having rhythm In  a battle vs button mashing, or jumping at the best time in a chase/escape. Stamina could be influenced by how fast and long you can hit keys. I like the idea of having separate stars for body and spirit attributes. I think it would be neat to borrow some design from paganism and some of the other occult symbols for the crystals and the spirit stuff. Invoking spirits or elements could be a neat multiplier of some skills. All of that aside what you already have here sounds like a great virtual world guideline. Hail creator, and be mindfull of vr support in the future as it will come.

[InShadow]

Have you seen this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_%28role-playing_games%29
I probably like the storyteller system the best, so I will follow its system for my suggestion.
So you have actually 3x3 matrix. One dimension are groups (physical, mental, social), the other are categories (power, finesse/speed, resistance/inertia).
Usually in my ideas I only go with 2x3 and leave out social group of attributes, since for classical RPG fighting it is not really necessary, but in your case I think it would be maybe nice to consider it. I also don't like suggested names so much, so I usually go with:
- Strength
- Dexterity
- Endurance

- Intelligence
- Wits
- Willpower

But my case is definitely different than yours. It also depends if the character will be able to advance in these attributes or not. We all know that you can train for days and your muscular mass can increase, consequently your strength is bigger. All is probably true for all those other attributes. If you go with static attributes, probably different names would be more appropriate.
I agree with you that player's skill should have bigger impact on gameplay than attributes. In any case, I don't see the problem in the first three: Strength, Dexterity, Endurance (same as Constitution maybe, but Constitution you are born with and you cannot affect it later imo). These are all physical attributes of the character that you cannot really impact with your input, as you already said (except maybe with decisions of what your character do/train?). Intelligence is maybe good for signifying how strong your char's spells are, or how difficult spells he can learn (depending again on the implementation of spell learning). The name is probably bad, but you are searching for something similar as I can understand from your post (maybe Mentality?). Wits is probably also not good for you, it depends on the player how well he is able to trick/deceive others. In my case it is mostly meant for casting speed, evasion, accuracy calculations (maybe Wisdom would be better name), but most of this doesn't apply to you. The last one is Willpower, usually used for magic resistance. Again, debatable if it would be good to use it in your case.
I certainly wouldn't go with luck. It is unfair, you are born with it, you cannot train it, it is just there to annoy the others who have it low.
Your Lore attribute I would put under Wisdom or some other Magic category attribute.
Also all the senses that you mentioned, I would add this as a passive/active skills that you can learn (by meditating or whatever). If you will have skills of course ...
I wouldn't live nothing to exclusive race/attribute selection at the beginning. I would rather have it that the player can improve his character by playing than leave him locked in chosen mindset from the time when he created it.

I know that probably my suggestion is not the best for your case, but I must admit that I like it best, because you have the same number of attributes for each of your attribute groups. So you can strive and make all attribute numbers worth the same. In opposite case, whoever is playing fighter will have his attribute points worth less if he has three attributes to fill instead of 2 if he was playing mage. Depends again on how you implement all this.

Note that I come from Lineage2, Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim, DAO backgrounds, so my opinion is heavily biased.

I congratulate you on your work on Mythruna and JME3 community.
Keep it up and have fun!

[pspeed]

First, let me say that it's great that this thread has been so well received so far.  I'll try to respond as much as possible to everyone's points... but I'll do that as a separate response(s).

[pspeed]

Thanks for taking the time to respond in such detail.  I will try to respond to all of your points by quoting specific subsets.  Let me know if I miss something significant in the editing process.

I like the idea of your star system, but I would like you to consider more than one star.  What I mean is maybe a star representing Physical attributes, such as Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Constitution, and a non-Physical (call it Mental I suppose) that would be things like Tenacity, Persistence, Luck, etc)

I agree with your ideas in principle and this is where I started.  It was when mapping out specific traits that I started to see relationships between them.  For example, a strong character with high endurance is probably also pretty healthy.

And where the classic models break down are exactly where your "mental" part starts to cause me grief in implementation.  For example, tenacity and persistence are player traits in my model.  I cannot conceive of a significant in-game effect for either of those.  Also, there is the trap of similarity... because tenacity and persistence seem like almost the same thing to me.

I'm not meaning to pick on your suggested traits as I know they were just examples.  Just pointing out the issues on that path as I have a whole list of considered and rejected stats just like that.

It was only when I started backing up from what I can actually use in game that I came up with the somewhat tenuous list that I've included already.

In real-life, there are a few rare individuals that seem maxed out in everything, but I feel, in general, you will often see a person tend towards the physical or the mental side, (or maybe a balance of both), but not maxed out in both.

So, in game, you can make the Jock, or the Nerd, or a balance of both.

Yeah, though the presumption is that since you are actually a super-being from another universe that even the nerds have some physical prowess.  Still, even in my approach, you could dump all of your crystals on the 'magic sense' star and/or lore and be a relative weakling while instead possessing a near-super-human ability to already know things about places you've never or to sense changes in the weather, etc..

But as mentioned, strong characters are more likely to have better health and endurance... but by the same token, a particularly strong character would have trouble maintaining a high dexterity.  It takes a great deal of training to be both super strong and super agile.  I don't think we see too many gymnasts who can also lift Olympic level free-weights for example.  Yet most gymnasts are also pretty strong relative to the average person.

OK, so how to implement this? 

(snipped really excellent and detailed description of a slider based system)

So, Conan the Barbarian may have his nodes dragged closer to Strength and Constitution, with a slider all the way left, where as Gandalf the Grey may be something opposite.

The slider system very closely resembles my original design.  I struggled with this for a long time because on the one hand it's a good approach and many games have done it or similar.  On the other hand, I've found nearly every one of those games to be kind of frustrating when I drag one slider and somehow other sliders move and now I can't get those values back.  And the more complicated the interaction becomes the more frustrating that whole dragging and erasing other values thing becomes.

Placing crystals was my answer to the issues with the sliders.  It may have its own flaws.  I don't know because I've never seen it done before.  But the intended affect is essentially the same... hopefully it gives the player a little more control and a little more visual feedback on why placing a crystal affects the things it does (I intend for them to glow and light up the board in their area of effect).

The other nice thing about it is that it better fits the user interface metaphor.  Sliders are necessary and I can't get around using them but a slider in the page of a book is still a little weird.  Placing little crystals on the page or on a stone block has a more appropriate look and feel to me.

You mentioned having separate stars and I think that's a good thing to keep in mind.  We see that already by the end of my first post I was splitting things out into different stars.  In the thought on where/how to fit in something like "lore", I will make sure to remember this.

[FutureB]

I dont have much to say but i do think levels could differentiate new players from old players. iv played alot of league of legends and all the characters you play as are exactly the same but your personal level changes as you get further into the game so your fighting and working with people at a more similar skill as yourself.

Also with the star had you thought about using something similar to your map generation circle and having a few rings and  then you can aline them in a center to top way or something showing which skills you want the most?

Other than that it sounds great paul,  keep it up bud.

[pspeed]

Have you seen this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_%28role-playing_games%29

I'm familiar with a lot of the systems but I'd not looked through the actual link before and somehow missed it in my research.  So thanks for that.  I've book marked it to keep it handy.

I probably like the storyteller system the best, so I will follow its system for my suggestion.
So you have actually 3x3 matrix. One dimension are groups (physical, mental, social), the other are categories (power, finesse/speed, resistance/inertia).

Speed!  I totally forgot speed.  And it's my last name and everything.  Sheesh.

Usually in my ideas I only go with 2x3 and leave out social group of attributes, since for classical RPG fighting it is not really necessary, but in your case I think it would be maybe nice to consider it. I also don't like suggested names so much, so I usually go with:
- Strength
- Dexterity
- Endurance

- Intelligence
- Wits
- Willpower

But my case is definitely different than yours. It also depends if the character will be able to advance in these attributes or not. We all know that you can train for days and your muscular mass can increase, consequently your strength is bigger. All is probably true for all those other attributes. If you go with static attributes, probably different names would be more appropriate.

Mythruna is taking a different approach.  I think you are new to these forums so you probably haven't seen my "kill 400 badgers" rants about XP-based systems.  If you want detailed background then you can search for the word "badgers" and you'll probably find it.  It's a reference to the fact that killing a badger was 40 XP in Neverwinter Nights yet they were relatively simple to kill.  So if you found a place to farm badgers then you ended up spending a lot of time there killing badgers.

The same issues can be seen in Skyrim where if you run around the city jumping all day you build up your agility and athleticism.  I ran and jumped constantly everywhere I went.

These systems are both tedious and trivially easy to exploit.

Mythruna will have none of that.  There will be no "do this 100 times to get better at it".  There will be no "XP", no self-learned "skill levels", etc... And believe me, it's such a common trope that it's hard not to accidentally design those things in.

But it frees up a lot of things.  The XP problem in CRPGs is so pervasive and it really causes 10 problems for every one that it solves.

Here is an initially innocent logical path:
Q: "How come I have to pay 500 gold to buy a sword?"
A: "To encourage you to buy player-crafter equipment!"
Q: "Well, why can't the players just sell their crafted equipment to the stores at the going rate?"
A: "Well... umm... because if some other player has been out killing 40 goblins and brings in a bunch of maces we don't want them getting rich..."
Q: "Wait, why were they killing 40 goblins and 'holy crap' where did all of those goblins come from?"

...they were farming XP.

Or... more likely:
Q: "Well, why can't the players just sell their crafted equipment to the stores at the going rate?"
A: "Well, because they have to make 100 bows just to get good at to make the next best bow... and we can't have them getting rich off of that..."

And more over, the whole idea of sitting there "click" -> bow, "click" -> failed, "click" -> bow is so boringly tedious.  Making a bow is no fun.

Q:"Why do you spend so much time click-making bows?"
A:"because I want to get better at it."
Q:"Why?"
A:"so I can make better bows"
Q:"So you can click-make 500 of those, too?"

This is not playing a game, it's factory labor in disguise.

Plus the whole idea that I'm spontaneously going to know how to make a compound bow after making 1000 recurve bows is kind of ridiculous on face value.

Normal RPGs need to use this concept as a way to make you feel like you are having fun when they have limited content to deliver.  My world is endless.  My content is endless.  Presuming that I can make content randomly generate in interesting ways then I think finding the town that has the guy who can teach you how to make a compound bow, or the trader who can sell you the pulleys, or learning how to make the pulleys, etc... these are all opportunities for adventure.

If making a bow takes player crafting, time, and real effort, a single bow means so much more.  If you carve that bow yourself and maybe learn that if you make the ends thinner then it makes the bow lighter without affecting the utility of it, etc... then you are a real in-game craftsmen.  

On the other side of it, it totally limits possibilities for real adventure.  Again, this XP problem is so pervasive that I don't even think games realize the issues it causes.

For example, you could never setup a system where if you killed all of the rabbits then the wolves start hunting towns people.  Well, you could but you'd have to code it specifically.  Why?  Because rabbits and wolves spawn randomly based on how recently that area has been farmed.  There would be an essentially infinite number or rabbits and wolves... there would never be a scarcity.  If instead, you actually keep track of a fixed population of wolves and rabbits... it would be possible to kill all of the rabbits.  Now this wolf population is starving.  Umm... I'd stay out of those woods, if I were you.

Or lets say you burn that woods to the ground.  All of it.  Just a smoldering pile of ashy stumps now.  In a classic RPG, those trees will probably spawn back in a few minutes.  And if now then how silly will it look that the badgers keep spawning there.  Moreover, if instead this event has real impact then the rodent population now needs to move into the town.  The town wood cutter is now out of work, etc..

These simple relationships on their own are a lot easier to code and track than it would be to try and simulate those effects on top of an XP-ruined system.

Sorry... I guess I reranted.  This was not meant as an attack against anyone.  These are just strong feelings I have on the subject because essentially Mythruna is one big experiment to show a different way that RPGs can be done.  And it's interesting that in the past three years, I see other RPGs start to do similar things with respect to leveling and XP.  A good sign.

I agree with you that player's skill should have bigger impact on gameplay than attributes. In any case, I don't see the problem in the first three: Strength, Dexterity, Endurance (same as Constitution maybe, but Constitution you are born with and you cannot affect it later imo). These are all physical attributes of the character that you cannot really impact with your input, as you already said (except maybe with decisions of what your character do/train?). Intelligence is maybe good for signifying how strong your char's spells are, or how difficult spells

There are no spells in Mythruna in the classic "black box magic paper I read" sense.  Magic will be based on manipulating elemental forces through a sort of crystal-based electronics.  So if your player knows how to cast "fireball" it's because he's built a wand that can channel the right energies in the right form to shoot a ball of fire or because he managed to embed that component right in his body.

Presuming I can get that magic system working.  At any rate, acquired magic ability will be based on items you pick up and not on any innate training.  That all leads to more adventure and questing... and that's what it's really all about.

he can learn (depending again on the implementation of spell learning). The name is probably bad, but you are searching for something similar as I can understand from your post (maybe Mentality?). Wits is probably also not good for you, it depends on the player how well he is able to trick/deceive others. In my case it is mostly meant for casting speed, evasion, accuracy calculations (maybe Wisdom would be better name), but most of this doesn't apply to you. The last one is Willpower, usually used for magic resistance. Again, debatable if it would be good to use it in your case.
I certainly wouldn't go with luck. It is unfair, you are born with it, you cannot train it, it is just there to annoy the others who have it low.

Yes, but you choose it at the expense of something else.  In real life, people with luck do actually have a skill it's just not an obvious one.  They instinctively know when to choose the right card because their brains have mapped out the game on an intuitive level.  They know how to read a situation and they've built up a set of odd skills that all when taken together make it look like luck.  These are all things that are extremely hard to program.

Also, dice rolls are inherently unfair to begin with.  The game is already cheating you out of repeatability.  I see it as completely fair to let you "cheat" that system a little at the expense of something else.

Really, it's no different than strength.  "It's just there to annoy the others who have it low."

From a party adventure perspective, I think you really need this attribute, too.  "We like to travel with Jim.  He's not the best in a fight or doesn't cook the best but when the chips are down things just seem to go better with him around."  Cool stories have characters like that.

Also, the games I've played with a luck attribute seemed to be the most fun.

Your Lore attribute I would put under Wisdom or some other Magic category attribute.

You are transplanted to one of an infinite number of worlds, each infinitely different.  Your character is essentially constructed for you for this world and so may have some prior knowledge of this specific world and how it's setup.  This is lore.

Up until the point where you took control of him, did he spend all of his life lifting weights in a single village or did he travel the whole world as a merchant?  When you look at a map is it blank because you've never been anywhere?  Or when you look at a map does it already have dots for the towns and cities with many of the major cities already named?  When you are talking to an NPC and he mentions going to the blacksmith in "Town X" does your character already know to ask whether he means John or Agnus?

These things are important because in my mind if you always plop into the world as a newly formed 'babe' with absolutely no knowledge then there are a whole variety of characters and stories that are unachievable.

Personally, I'm going to have fun trying to play a character where I've dumped all of my crystals into Lore, Luck, and Magic Sense.

Also all the senses that you mentioned, I would add this as a passive/active skills that you can learn (by meditating or whatever). If you will have skills of course ...
I wouldn't live nothing to exclusive race/attribute selection at the beginning. I would rather have it that the player can improve his character by playing than leave him locked in chosen mindset from the time when he created it.

Attributes will be upgradeable later but not through "sitting or clicking".

I know that probably my suggestion is not the best for your case, but I must admit that I like it best, because you have the same number of attributes for each of your attribute groups. So you can strive and make all attribute numbers worth the same. In opposite case, whoever is playing fighter will have his attribute points worth less if he has three attributes to fill instead of 2 if he was playing mage. Depends again on how you implement all this.

Note that I come from Lineage2, Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim, DAO backgrounds, so my opinion is heavily biased.

I congratulate you on your work on Mythruna and JME3 community.
Keep it up and have fun!

Thanks.  And thanks for your input.  It's very inspiring to discuss different systems.

I too have background playing some of those games and heavily in the D&D and Runequest systems for pencil and paper role playing.  I even designed a few of my own systems "back in the day" and they were heavily RuneQuest based.  In many ways, it was so superior to D&D... more fun to DM and more fun to play.  I take a lot from that... because at every level it was a much simpler system.  Instead of one monolithic "rule system" there were lots of logical subsets that made sense in context with one another and combined for some really excellent game play.

It was effectively no harder to run the battles.  You never had to once look up THAC0, everything made sense to everyone playing, and yet the battles ended up being extremely detailed.  It wasn't just a clash for 1 minute and "you took 5 pts of damage, he took 2" it was "you took 2 pts of damage to your leg and collapsed and then took an additional 3 points to your arm but you managed to sweep his leg in the process and now you are both on the ground."  It was uncanny how often the dice rolls just fit the battle, too.  One player in a game I was running had gained the ability to control a lion and could ride it around like a mount.  During a battle the lion got injured and rolled over pinning his right leg to the ground.  Even though the hit locations were entirely based on dice rolls (and then it's up to me the DM to explain how that happens), the dice rolls were putting all of his damage on the left side that was exposed to attack.

I know the D&D systems have evolved a lot since then (the 90s) but at the time, you'd never have a D&D battle where the first round ended "...and so, you've been severed in half at the middle by the enemy's great sword".

[pspeed]

I dont have much to say but i do think levels could differentiate new players from old players. iv played alot of league of legends and all the characters you play as are exactly the same but your personal level changes as you get further into the game so your fighting and working with people at a more similar skill as yourself.

Also with the star had you thought about using something similar to your map generation circle and having a few rings and  then you can aline them in a center to top way or something showing which skills you want the most?

Other than that it sounds great paul,  keep it up bud.

Thanks.  You will improve your characters through what you do.  The "experienced" character will have been to more places and acquired more and better gear.  He will have picked up more magic augments, etc..

So if you've been playing for a while then you will be better than someone just starting out... or you basically haven't done anything in which case even in the XP system you wouldn't be any better either.

This is why I do seriously like the idea of somehow showing a player's 'age'.  Whether through hair growth, color, whatever.  If you are a newb and come across some character with a long white beard you should probably be afraid to mess with him.

[Moonkey]

I had trouble reading through all of the comments. Still reading.

[Teknonick]

I read everything, and I have one huge issue Paul: You are too smart for your own good. I will now have to say "Goodbye" to D&D, and I am afraid I will never play it as it will never look quiet as good

xD

Okay, my input! I like that slider suggestion by somedude in the comments.... But, what about ANOTHER star??? Let's start with this: You have The Star. On all the points there are "Physical, Mental, looks...." ETC. Your'll be sliding much smaller stars to each of those points, making one or the other better (Maybe looks should be completely separate, but IDK). You can 'zoom in' on a point... to reveal it's another star! Zooming in on Mental, you've got the good old basics "Wisdom, Intelligence, Spirit..." ETC, or whatever stats you're going to use. So, as to improve what the other guy had said (Or possibly girl ("There are no girls on the internet!" Lies )): Sliding those first blobs in the big star will multiply whatever in each section... drag them all to physical, you're going to get a 2x multiplier!!! but... a 1/2x multiplier negative for everything else.... You could always put up walls, so once you pull in two blobs to physical at the end, the third one you drag wont be able to be pulled to the end with the others.

Hope that all makes sense!

[pspeed]

I read everything, and I have one huge issue Paul: You are too smart for your own good. I will now have to say "Goodbye" to D&D, and I am afraid I will never play it as it will never look quiet as good

xD

Okay, my input! I like that slider suggestion by somedude in the comments.... But, what about ANOTHER star??? Let's start with this: You have The Star. On all the points there are "Physical, Mental, looks...." ETC. Your'll be sliding much smaller stars to each of those points, making one or the other better (Maybe looks should be completely separate, but IDK). You can 'zoom in' on a point... to reveal it's another star! Zooming in on Mental, you've got the good old basics "Wisdom, Intelligence, Spirit..." ETC, or whatever stats you're going to use. So, as to improve what the other guy had said (Or possibly girl ("There are no girls on the internet!" Lies )): Sliding those first blobs in the big star will multiply whatever in each section... drag them all to physical, you're going to get a 2x multiplier!!! but... a 1/2x multiplier negative for everything else.... You could always put up walls, so once you pull in two blobs to physical at the end, the third one you drag wont be able to be pulled to the end with the others.

Hope that all makes sense!

It does.  I still think the placing stones gives more control and more obvious "what's going on"... it's just a matter of coming up with a layout that works.  Which I'd have to do for sliders anyway.

So far for physical attributes, I have:
-endurance
-strength
-constitution
-speed
-dexterity

...which is a nice five point star and I can do something like put luck in the middle or whatever.  It's all still very fluid.

And my PS4 is coming tomorrow night so I may disappear for a while anyway.   Seriously, though, I want to hammer this out soon so I can start making the character creator next week sometime.

[Teknonick]

WAIT WAIT WAIT! Did you say WORK ON THE CHARACTER CREATOR NEXT WEEK!? Wow. I think it's safe to say you're now Two months an TWENTY SEVEN days away! WOO!!!!! Now it's only taking a few weeks for a day to go by, as opposed to several years xD.

I'm sooo glad to hear about that though... wait, why did I separate this from the other paragraph?

And this?

And this one even too?

Oh, and I'm sure your'll get exactly what you're looking for :3. A lot of the things I've suggested (Or was going to) you've already thought over and are going to add it yourself. I can see anything cool about this system I might think of will already be thought of by you... dents seen, ironed out, and repaired!

Oh, and can we PLEEEEASE sell weaponry for full price to NPCs? I'm sick and tired of picking up every single weapon in Skyrim just to get two coins from each weapon.... Plus, with the way you're going on this, killing an armed enemy will be as rewarding as the loot... if you invested Strength to carry it!

[pspeed]

WAIT WAIT WAIT! Did you say WORK ON THE CHARACTER CREATOR NEXT WEEK!? Wow. I think it's safe to say you're now Two months an TWENTY SEVEN days away! WOO!!!!! Now it's only taking a few weeks for a day to go by, as opposed to several years xD.

I'm sooo glad to hear about that though... wait, why did I separate this from the other paragraph?

And this?

And this one even too?

Oh, and I'm sure your'll get exactly what you're looking for :3. A lot of the things I've suggested (Or was going to) you've already thought over and are going to add it yourself. I can see anything cool about this system I might think of will already be thought of by you... dents seen, ironed out, and repaired!

Oh, and can we PLEEEEASE sell weaponry for full price to NPCs? I'm sick and tired of picking up every single weapon in Skyrim just to get two coins from each weapon.... Plus, with the way you're going on this, killing an armed enemy will be as rewarding as the loot... if you invested Strength to carry it!

Yeah, that's the idea.  Stuff should be hard to kill... but if you just fought a goblin wearing leather and hitting you with a mace then when you search the body he should at least be wearing goblin-sized leather armor and a mace. :-/  Maybe damaged but still.

The biggest hurdle to getting _started_ networking is that currently the engine bootstrapping is a bit of a mess.  Going from choosing the world to play and launching the world is mostly "whatever worked at the time".  There are a lot of complicated systems in play since the new plug-in system and world services are very robust for add ons and so on.  So I need to fix a bunch of start up issues and I need to figure out how much of it to start up before you can actually create a character in the world.

So I need at least a minimal character creator.

This was also the piece completely missing in the last version.  You connected to a server and could create an account or play the game... there was no intermediate point where you created a character and the interaction necessary to have that happen 100% under server control was completely non-existent.

So in order to work on multiplayer over Christmas break, I need to have sorted out enough the character creator UI elements to get that piece working.

All of my free time this weekend and next week is going to go into getting all of the other little things I need ready to start that.  And getting anything else done that I can.  Tonight or tomorrow, I hope to start on getting the basic "Journal" interface up and running since that's where blueprints, properties, etc. will exist going forward.  And it will likely be the base UI for the character creator since I already use the "world book" metaphor for world selection.

Hopefully day job doesn't decide to creep into my free time next week.  I want to be able to hit the ground running on the 21st and not stop until 2014.

[ebag51]

I read everything, and I have one huge issue Paul: You are too smart for your own good. I will now have to say "Goodbye" to D&D, and I am afraid I will never play it as it will never look quiet as good

xD

Okay, my input! I like that slider suggestion by somedude in the comments.... But, what about ANOTHER star??? Let's start with this: You have The Star. On all the points there are "Physical, Mental, looks...." ETC. Your'll be sliding much smaller stars to each of those points, making one or the other better (Maybe looks should be completely separate, but IDK). You can 'zoom in' on a point... to reveal it's another star! Zooming in on Mental, you've got the good old basics "Wisdom, Intelligence, Spirit..." ETC, or whatever stats you're going to use. So, as to improve what the other guy had said (Or possibly girl ("There are no girls on the internet!" Lies )): Sliding those first blobs in the big star will multiply whatever in each section... drag them all to physical, you're going to get a 2x multiplier!!! but... a 1/2x multiplier negative for everything else.... You could always put up walls, so once you pull in two blobs to physical at the end, the third one you drag wont be able to be pulled to the end with the others.

Hope that all makes sense!

It does.  I still think the placing stones gives more control and more obvious "what's going on"... it's just a matter of coming up with a layout that works.  Which I'd have to do for sliders anyway.

So far for physical attributes, I have:
-endurance
-strength
-constitution
-speed
-dexterity

...which is a nice five point star and I can do something like put luck in the middle or whatever.  It's all still very fluid.

And my PS4 is coming tomorrow night so I may disappear for a while anyway.   Seriously, though, I want to hammer this out soon so I can start making the character creator next week sometime.

Paul at this rate you now have a very slim chance of hitting alpha by next summer btw your awesome