So i was curious as to peoples opinion on a “Luck” game mechanic, or at least my version of it.
I’ll give a brief description of how it would work.
So lets say you have a stat, Intelligence, and another stat Luck.
So in a scenario, say your setting an ambush, you need to have 50 intelligence to succeed.
If you have 50 Int, and 50 Luck, you would succeed straight away as you meet the Int requirements.
However, in this particular situation, Luck can also play a part, maybe the enemy captain is having an off day, so if you have at least 40 Int, but less than 50 Int, you have a chance of your “Luck” being good, and you can succeed the check. The chance of the Luck being good would be based on your Luck score, so if you had 90 Luck you have a 90% chance of your Luck being good, or if you have 10 Luck you have a 10% chance.
Each time you use this “Luck” successfully your score decreased.
If you had less than 40 Int in this situation, it wouldn’t matter how much Luck you had, you would still always fail. For me this adds an element of chance to those situations where you just miss out. You are having a sword fight, but the other guy is just better than you, this means he will probably win, but maybe your just good enough that when he slips you get a killing blow in.
However it wouldn’t come into play if you were trying to lift a large rock. Either your body is able to lift it, or it cant, luck doesn’t really factor in.
So yeah, was wanting opinions. Basically, i don’t want people who have trained down a certain path to fail via chance, that would just annoy the reader, rather if you have just not quite trained enough, you still have a shot at succeeding.
Thoughts?
It’s a good idea and a good use of the luck stat. The 10% leeway seems about right. It would involve extra coding for each choice and as such, I’d recommend a sentence conveying that you succeeded due to luck - so the player knows that the luck stat is a useful one to have.
Yeah i figured id have some flavor text so the reader knows that they didn’t quite have enough ability to do something normally. That way they can also assume if it doesn’t have some allusion to luck then they can assume they had enough of that particular ability.
As i said, it wont be usable on every choice, but on some of them where i feel it is appropriate.
I was just a little hesitant as i know its been frowned upon before as people don’t want too much randomness in a game.
I think if you are going to have randomness determine an actual outcome of something with skills, this would definitely be the way to do it. That said, although I DO like randomness, it would be very easy to go overboard with this and screw it up. One question though: if you are going to decrease the luck every time it is used, is there ever going to be a way to move it back up?
The way I like randomness to work is in things such as determining the gender of a character met, or just randomizing the person someone meets when they first enter a tavern or something. Otherwise, I generally prefer it to be left entirely up to skills, but the way you have laid this out could work really well.
So i guess that is something that i would have to try and balance out. I would be decreasing the luck each time the reader has to rely on it, and i would offer a few ways to increase it again, but i don’t want them to be able to totally rely on it, the game is still, for the most part, based around having the correct skills.
I guess i have to find a way to make users “pay” or use up a choice to increase there luck, but i need to do that outside of the choices that let them level up core skills, as i assume very few people will choose to level up a “Luck” skill when they can increase core skills.
I will say that sometimes I have had problems with choice games not loading pages when I’ve been playing one for a while, so I have to restart them if they didn’t have a save and pick the same choices again; Randomness would make that a nightmare… On the other hand, I can see a use for it, so try a dice roll for the times when you want to do that. For insteance, if your luck is 30, then you roll a 1d100 and if you make it under 30, then you pass.
