If Dr Strench was Zap and Tactian was Hmm then what stat favors the Nulifier route?
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Tactician: Hmmm and Shhh.
Dr Stench: Zap and Thud.
Zenith: Pow and Whoosh.
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Just out of curiosity how would that work?
Tactician: Hmmm would be for the battle computer that Eric suggested and I’m guessing Shhh would be for some kind of invisibility device.
Dr Stench: Zap would be for the weapons and Thud would be for the armor.
Zentih: [spoiler]If I remember correctly, this route would probably involve an experiment. Pow and Thud would determine how well your body handled the experiment.
As for the actual power itself, I’d say that Pow is how strong the Nullify effect would be and Whoosh os how fast it will be. [/spoiler]
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Sounds positively splendid
So acrobat+tactician would basically be Batman depending on how much shhh and hmm increase?
This is awesome!
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Out of curiosity how powerful is Stoics shield? For example if she was teleported 10,000 ft in the air would the impact kill her?
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Maybe? The shield isn’t a cushion–like, put a guy in an impenetrable metal box and drop him from that height and he’d still die. Like, hit her with a baseball bat whatever, but if she gets going too fast and stops too quick she’ll still have things like organs rattling around, brain knocking around inside the skull, internal shit could potentially still go wrong and it wouldn’t necessarily be the blow from the ground but the sudden halt, which the shield (based on what we’ve seen) wouldn’t do anything against
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Don’t get too excited!! The MC will get all new stats not dependent on the MC’s old archetype. But I would anticipate the stats for the new archetypes would give you some across-the-board bumps anyway. Like for example,
I could see a Dr. Stench with stats like: Pow: 20 (because of armored hands), Zap: 50, Whoosh: 10, Thud: 40, Hmmm: 20 (based on simple tactical components) and Shhh: 40 (because of gas clouds) (This is just off the top of my head)(basically I’m saying that unless I give the MC some decent stat bumps, much much much more than they could accomplish by just “training” they would still die instantly when confronting villains like Monstrosity X who might have stats like: Pow: 90, Zap: 80 (fear ability), Whoosh: 20, Thud: 95, Hmmm: 20, Shhh: 20
And yes in the Speckverse, abilities are capped at 99 even though that may not totally jive with Mega Cat’s Zenith Scale, which is NOT the Gospel, BTW
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Does that mean wiping the current stats? Like, to get to the example stats you said will like, the stats the MC has already trained for and built up and whatnot get just straight up replaced, or will you just give big stat boosts to the stats that lean towards the route the MC took?
And on a related note, one project I’d like to do if I can get the CCH Kickstarter Compendium thing going later this year is to provide stats for most of the characters so maybe with 2 10-sided dice, it would be possible to do some simple RPG mechanics, since abilities scale from 1 to 100…wait, I’d have to cap them at 99 to allow for a tiny sliver of failure.
Like Part 1 Crook might be:
Pow: 10
Zap: 15 (knives)
Whoosh: 25 (porting)
Thud: 10
Hmmm: 15
Shhh: 20 (porting)
(again, just off the top of my head)
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Probably wiping, just to make it easier for me. But wiping in a positive way, meaning that your stats would all go up to set levels that far exceed your old levels no matter what. Hopefully people will be happy enough with much higher stats (yay I am amped!) and won’t complain about little things like “Hey I should have slightly higher Whoosh than other Dr. Stench MCs because I was an acrobat!”
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My concern is more that it could make beefing up old stats feel kind of pointless? Like, if I worked hard on my soldier thud stat and then the default thud is kind of low, I might feel a bit cheated. And looking through the code on the Wyvern fight, what stats get checked aren’t dependent on what class you’re playing, so they could all potentially come into play–as well as changing the way I have to think about fights depending on the route I take.
I mean, whatever way you go I’m sure it’ll be fine, and if all the stats are pretty high anyway it probably won’t matter much, but people who got used to fighting in a certain way and then chose a path not based on it’s favored stats might end up sort of flailing in later fight scenes trying to get used to leaning on different skills
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Hey that’s even better!
I have a fetish for numbers and stats but more than that I feel like it’ll be better to have some kind of “prestige” class.
@HomingPidgeon It’s not pointless as it basically decides how your MC fight. For example, if you choose to boost only your secondary stats (for example shh and whoosh for Sharpshooter) you are less specialized. That means you sacrify your ability to make good shots in a certain situation to be able to sneak around faster.
Fixed stats would also be good for the majority of people who are playing once, and take the “wrong” option. If you take the Dr. Stench path with a detective you have neither the toughness nor the aim to use it perfectly. By making classes with predetermined stats, you’re going around this problem.
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Just bumping up all the stats would solve that issue too, as well as leaving room for the person to still play with their old class in mind. If I got my thud really high and my other stats low, if all the stats get raised up and now my pow is really high and my thud is also really high, it would let me still make use of my toughness (being able to block an attack instead of dodging) and let me use my new route abilities when they come up.
Since most people are only playing once, they also aren’t here listening to us all talk about which class is best with which route–and they aren’t going into the first game choosing a class knowing which route will work best with it. A lot of people have asked about getting a power in the next book, and probably not all of them are playing the “right” class for it. Again, I know that Eric has said a lot that nobody will “fail” at the game and he wants it to be satisfying to everyone so my concern isn’t that this will go wrong and the game will become terrible, just that if the stats get wiped it might make people have a hard time adapting to a new playing style they hadn’t necessarily planned on
Sometimes, this option just doesn’t allow the flexibility needed in the future. In this particular case, a retcon of the mechanics I feel is warranted to allow @Eric_Moser the ability to evolve the story into the third installment (and perhaps later)
One of the hardest things to do as a developer is to balance mechanics for the long run - unless you keep the future firmly in mind while making the various systems you may find yourself out-growing what you built. Nothing against Eric’s skill in book one but I think his ideas have expanded and become more complicated with where he wants to take this story and as a result a retcon of the mechanics is understandable.
This type of issue happens to all of us - if you want an example in the AAA game market, look no further then Blizzard’s WoW franchise.
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Maybe I’m misunderstanding something? (And this is a genuine question, not trying to be sarcastic or judgmental or anything, I feel like you’re reading the situation differently than I am and if I’m reading something incorrectly then I want to be corrected.)
I don’t understand how a stat board wipe would allow for more flexibility? Like, in the first game you can do fine even if you don’t train your “main” stats, and I really liked that. But then just having set in stone new stats for each route after a game (potentially two) of developing your character’s strengths isn’t really a mechanic retcon, it’s a character skill reset, which–and maybe I’m wrong, I’m not the one coding or writing the game–feels like it wouldn’t really add flexibility, but unnecessary rigidity. Especially for the people who aren’t keeping up with these developments and won’t know exactly what class goes with what route (or RPers who don’t pick classes and routes based on stats so much as the character their developing) who might end up pushed into a character build they weren’t expecting or won’t enjoy. And if they’re attached to the stats they’ve built up themselves, there isn’t really a route that’s just “beef up everything about myself” (understandably, since that’s vague and uninteresting), they have to pick one of the three, that don’t spell out within the text that they’re coming with a stat reset or what that stat reset will be. It’s better than picking a new build blind, but not by all that much, and not clear that they’re going to end up picking a new build.
Again, I don’t think this would break the game or kill my enjoyment or anything, but I do think it just seems kind of frustrating and takes away some of the meaning of the character you’ve built up and worked on before the end of the route.
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I think we are approaching the issue from different perspectives more then misreading or “reading things wrong”. For the most part, we are closer in agreement then it may seem at first read.
Eric said that no matter the route we choose, we will be able to succeed - so the concern about being pushed into a build that wouldn’t be enjoyed should be moot.
Yet, I completely understand the optics of what you are saying - the whole frustration aspect of the reader. I’ve been arguing with developers for years in many games regarding mechanic changes just for the sake of it.
The attachment to the old is unfortunate but it is something I’ve yet to see an ideal solution to. And this leads me to the following:
From the perspective of the developer, the rigidity becomes much harder to break and the more you feel tied to faulty or just outgrown mechanics the longer you avoid evolving them. There are changes you can make to the old structure and on the face of it, and in isolation, they may seem to work but when you make the changes live, you see unintended consequences and things change in areas that then call for more adjustments … and it becomes a self-feeding feedback cycle.
In my humble opinion - and it is that of a person looking from the outside but one that is informed and educated in developing mechanics that last years of gammeplay - I think the structure presented in installment one has been exploited as far as it can be without causing more issues then solving.
Again, this is purely from a developer perspective -
From a reader’s perspective, I totally get you. As a reader, wishing for the power of flight in installment one and then ending up with some “nulifier power” in installment 3 is a total disappointment and is totally letting the purist fan down.
From a developer’s perspective, realizing you just quadrupled your writing and double-downed your coding, staying with the original powers of flight, lasers, invisibility, etc is huge and if you can find a way to streamline development and writing, you want to do so.
In this particular case, I see the developer’s perspective outweighing the reader’s. For various reasons.
Again, no disrespect intended to you, Eric or any other individual here and as I said, I am an outsider to Eric’s project so I may be off-kilter and if I am, I’m sure I’ll be trounced on soon enough.
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I see your perspective and see where you’re coming from–my issue is that from my understanding of the code and mechanics, I don’t see how resetting the stats would simplify the process. Maybe you’re right, I’m not a coder or a writer and there might be something I’m missing that would make a stat reset the best course of action.
I think I’ve stated my perspective overall as a reader pretty clearly, so won’t just rehash what I’ve already argued, but do want to respond to something specifically–
Success and enjoyment are not synonymous. I assume going through installment 3 relying on stats that weren’t boosted to the level of other stats will end up something like the Wyvern fight–where what you’re doing fails, and you get hurt, but through circumstances you end up more or less alright and more or less winning anyway. So, I’m not thinking that I’ll be forced into using stats I didn’t mean to get in order to get a good ending–I know that isn’t a concern, and I know that Eric wants everyone to get the kind of ending they hoped for with his game. But I feel like by resetting stats, knocking out any development the player worked with, it could remove some of the satisfaction of the fight scenes, if you’re failing all the stat checks. Or, if the stat checks are low enough that no matter what you do you’ll succeed, or just removing stat checks altogether–well, I wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with that since I’mm not much of a meta gamer, but it might make stats themselves feel unnecessary, or remove enjoyment for the people who do take satisfaction from making a character that gets through stat checks.
that’s a bit of a text wall, so tl;dr getting to a good ending doesn’t necessarily mean that the player will enjoy the process of getting there
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I got an idea. What if the stench armor is like customizable as in you can put enhancements on the armor like you can put your equipment from your previous archetype on the armor like the thermal goggles for hmm stat or the wrist launcher
for whoosh stat. That would be awesome (P.S. I’m new here and sorry for my english)