The adjustments made in the first two chapters are definitely an improvement, and much more fair, but unless I’m missing something, the checks from Chapter 3 onward don’t actually seem to have changed very much, if at all; they’re still asking for 50+ in skills and 80+ in personality stats, both of which still seem very high.
But regarding the first two chapters, I do have a bit of additional feedback from a more analytic design perspective, which is, depending your intent, perhaps a bit subjective. However, I think it will, at the very least, help you in figuring out exactly what you expect from the player and how to go about facilitating your chosen design philosophy.
Summary (warning: even longer than the last one somehow)
For the purposes of this analysis, I’m only going to focus on Chapters 1 and 2, since—as I mentioned—Chapter 3 and beyond seem about the same, and therefore can’t be judged on the same merits.
So, the way you’re handling stat boosts, you’ve got a couple of %+20s, and then a few %+10s—one to start out, and then some stat boosts sprinkled throughout the way. Since I’m focusing only on the first two chapters, I’m going to focus just on the initial stat boosts, the two %+20s and the one %+10.
Right off the bat, one thing I notice is that one of the two starting %+20s cannot boost the same stat as the %+10—what this tells me is that you want the player to diversify, put focus on at least two different stats. However, the way you’ve set up the stat distribution does not always facilitate this diversification, since certain approaches are clearly better than others.
Given the setup of your initial stat boosts, the following scenarios are possible:
- One stat receives two %+20s, bringing it to 36. Another stat receives the %+10, and is at 10.
- The player spreads the three stat boosts between three different stats, so two are at 20, and one is at 10.
- One stat receives one %+20 and one %+10, bringing it to 28. Another stat receives the remaining %+20, and is at 20.
In the first scenario, the player is primed to pass every skill check in the first two chapters for their primary skill. The problem, though, is that their secondary skill is now more or less useless until such time that another stat boost becomes available—as far as I can tell, there is only one skill check that passes when you have a value of 10 (Charlotte’s test, in which you can only use Chaleureuse or Thousand Faces), so a 10 in any other skill is functionally no different from 0. The player would feel, therefore, that they have wasted points on the latter skill, which I don’t think is the intent.
My personal feeling is that the solution is to include more low-level checks that would (in the early game, at least) require only 10, which will provide only paltry rewards, but still allow the player to feel good about having something they’re adequate at, but not proficient in. But if you’d rather have the player specialize so you can ramp up the difficulty later, there are solutions to that too (I’ll address that later on).
In the second scenario, the player has two skills they’re good, but not great at, which means they can pass mid-level stat checks without a problem, but will struggle with high-level checks later on. This is to be expected with a jack of all trades approach, and I think players can be reasonably expected to anticipate this when they choose that playstyle.
However, as with the previous scenario, this also sticks them with a useless tertiary stat stuck at 10. Again, I’d encourage you to give them something to use that skill on, even if it’s something very minor. I also worry that such a playstyle would be harshly punished in the mid to late game when even the player’s higher stats can’t keep up with the checks, which is why I’d personally encourage you to keep some low and mid-level checks even near the end, which may reward less, but still allow a player to feel like they’re capable of succeeding without too much specialization.
Finally, the third scenario, in which the player is allowed to take a more varied approach, splitting their attention between the two skills. This is objectively the best way to play, being a solid distribution of one primary stat and one secondary stat—in fact, given the two alternatives, I’d argue that this is the only good way to play, being that it’s the only way the player is allowed to make proper use of all the tools at their disposal.
Now, I’m not sure if that’s your intent—but if it is, my personal feeling is that you ought to make that more obvious, perhaps even cut out one of the stat boosts and just enforce the two-skill method, with one large boost and one smaller boost. In this case, you’d mostly remove the need to include low level skill checks, since the player ideally should only be juggling two stats that hover around the high to mid range. This might at times feel more restrictive and less interesting than a more versatile build, however (this coming from somebody who often likes to play jacks of all trades).
If you do decide to go this route, I’d also warn you that specialization could cause other problems with player experience, particularly with the way you’ve set things up, in which not all skills are available to use at all times. If a player chooses to invest in Duelist and Belletrist, they’re screwed during the information-gathering section of Chapter 2—this is where it would be useful to have a low-level skill check that they can pass if they have a 10 in one of the other skills, so they’re not locked into automatic failure for that section and instead get the chance to “scrape by” in their weaker areas, as it were.
Of course, you might also decide that a certain amount of failure is healthy for a player to experience at times, in which case you’ll have to balance that fine line between challenging and frustrating players. And as @rozane points out, you will need to make the expectation for failure more apparent to the player (I, too, was hoping to play as a more capable spy). But I’ll leave that up to you to decide.
TLDR: putting a %+10 into a skill without buffering it with a %+20 makes that skill almost entirely useless, and an objective waste of points unless you later invest more stat boosts into that skill (which would be wildly inefficient for other reasons). As such, the only effective way to play is to put your %+10 into a skill you’ve already put a %+20 into, which may not be your intent. Also a reminder to be mindful of the fact that there will be situations in which the player is unable to play to their strengths, given the choices available.
Hope this helps!
