Min-Maxxing & Exploits

[Michi]

Hi,

I would really like to see Book II deal with some of the very exploitable issues as well as curbing the ability to min-max to the extreme.

Exploits like raising mercantile to the point that I can buy an item from a shop and then sell it back for more than I paid, needs to be fixed.

Min-maxxing is all about the way books and trainers work. Right now, the game allows too easy a path for creating a 0-skill character, scumming shopsfor skill books + trainers training to level 8 for low costs, relatively.

I would like to see the mechanics of books and trainers to change such that there is no advantage to 'holding back' using skill points, and that when I find a skill book or trainer for a skill it will be as useful if I have 0 in the skill or 20.

Michi

[Antigrav]

I think the trainer setup could really use a change. It's already been discussed elsewhere on the forum, but the most appealing solution to me would be to make trainers add skill whatever your current level, good for four increases or so. If they teach you the skill from scratch, then they would only be good for raising you one more level, for example.

If your character is already very proficient in a skill, you could suppose the trainer is passing along some of the finer points, much as reading a book opens the character's eyes to some of the different varieties of locks and traps or new approaches to swinging blunt instruments at things.

[BasiliskWrangler]

I've read a lot of different suggestions. If I could get a unified agreed-upon solution to making trainers and min-maxing better for Book III, I will certainly implement those changes.

[xolotl]

I personally still fail to see what the big deal is about this kind of thing. It's a single-player game; you can play it however you want. I admit that I've done a couple of runthroughs where I've "exploited" some of the behavior or trainers and books, etc, to create an über-character of sorts, but I honestly have more fun when I just play the game and not worry about that kind of thing. It's the same thing as people complaining in Book 1 about how you can save/reload to get different loot from chests - if that bothers you, then don't do it. No matter what BW does to balance the skills further, there is always going to be some way to exploit the engine, and I doubt it's worth too much time to go chasing after every corner case.

That said, clearly I'm not emotionally attached to how books+trainers work currently, and if they do end up changing in Book 3, I'm not going to be complaining then either (not that my own experience is a metric for how the game should work or anything, of course).

[Antigrav]

... I honestly have more fun when I just play the game and not worry about that kind of thing.

But I think that's the point. Most people want to just play the game, and not have to resort to spoilers or multiple replays in order to simply develop that first competent character capable of taking on the challenges in Eschalon. Skill points can seem like a very precious resource when you're balancing armor, cartography, lock picking, foraging, a couple of weapon skills, and later alchemy, all of which are considered the basic necessities for most characters before class-style specialization.

The idea is to have less, "Oh, this character is terrible. What am I going to do, meditate my way through the Taurax? BUHLEETED!"

[SpottedShroom]

The idea is to have less, "Oh, this character is terrible. What am I going to do, meditate my way through the Taurax? BUHLEETED!"

How does removing "exploits" or changing trainer behavior fix this? Is the idea is to make trainers and books good enough to save a poor character build?

I think trainers and skill books are fine as-is. As I detailed elsewhere, I would like to see skills, abilities, and spells be balanced a bit better, but that's not about removing exploits as much as trying to give people fewer poor choices to make.

[BasiliskWrangler]

The idea is to have less, "Oh, this character is terrible. What am I going to do, meditate my way through the Taurax? BUHLEETED!"

How does removing "exploits" or changing trainer behavior fix this? Is the idea is to make trainers and books good enough to save a poor character build?

I think trainers and skill books are fine as-is. As I detailed elsewhere, I would like to see skills, abilities, and spells be balanced a bit better, but that's not about removing exploits as much as trying to give people fewer poor choices to make.

This is why making an RPG system that is truly fun is incredibly hard to do!!

- We want a system that doesn't hold the player's hand, yet also doesn't allow the player to make too many bad choices, while developing their character.
- We want a system that limits min-maxing, yet can allow players to make unique characters that feel truly different from game to game.
- We want a system without exploits, yet still allow creative people to come up with unique solutions for making their dream character from all the available options.

So, how do we achieve all these goals without breaking the old-school nature of Eschalon?

[Michi]

Good points, of course, BW.

I don't have a magic answer, but having played every cRPG since Akallabeth on my Apple][+ I do have a few ideas.

Firstly, I would suggest that skills that are so fundamental that everyone needs them are almost pointless, since there is no real choice but to invest in them. Cartography comes to mind. Everyone needs a mini-map. Forcing people to burn skill points there doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Next, take something like lockpicking. Go ahead and try and convince an old-school player that he doesn't really have to open every chest in the game. Oh, right. Now, you do provide tedious ways for mages and fighters who don't want to invest in lockpicking a way to get open locked items, but it is so tedious, that it borders on not really being an option. The option should be less efficient than a thief who invest on lockpicking, but perhaps by not so many orders of magnitude.

But the killer is combat... very hard to find a way to create multiple viable ways of killing stuff.

Regardless, I think your fundamental challenge of how to create a fun RPG system is greatly impeded by the fact that you want it to be a solo char. A solo char is, by nature, going to need to be a bit of a jack-of-all trades, unless you are really building your game with having multiple playthoughs be mandatory to see a good percentage of the content you are creating.

The fact is, though, the way the old "old school" games (Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Ultima 5-7, Might and Magic, Magic Candle, etc) solved this problem was by having a party. A party dynamic allows for much greater variety in how you tackle the game.

Some people will go with the classic, 2 fighters, 1 thief, 1 mage, 1 cleric kind of deal. Someone else though might go for 4 mages and a thief, with one mage focusing on alchemy for healing potions.

Yet another may go for no magic users at all, and use archers for ranged damage, and again resort to alchemy or first aid for healing.

The old school games that built solo players (Ultima 1-3, 8 & 9, Ultima Underworld, Arena, etc) all understood that by nature you need a jack-of-all trades, thus limiting the options that players could truly choose. All they could do is, in effect, create the illusion of choice.

I know you aren't planning on making a party based game quite yet, but I think that heavy investment in mechanics for a single char game will have a limited ROI due to the need to have a bunch of critical skills, and so the issue boils down to "am I going to do most of my damage via magic, melee or ranged".... but all utility skills are going to be necessary no matter what.

[SpottedShroom]

This is why making an RPG system that is truly fun is incredibly hard to do!! :)

- We want a system that doesn't hold the player's hand, yet also doesn't allow the player to make too many bad choices, while developing their character.
- We want a system that limits min-maxing, yet can allow players to make unique characters that feel truly different from game to game.
- We want a system without exploits, yet still allow creative people to come up with unique solutions for making their dream character from all the available options.

Don't worry, you're doing quite well at all of those points. I suppose the bigger question in light of Book III planning is, how do you improve without risking messing up what you already have?

I'm personally hoping for the kind of incremental changes we saw between Books I and II, and I think most of my requests fall into that category. When you go to develop Something Involving Flying Saucers: Book I, that'll be the time to go nuts and try lots of new, different, and risky stuff.

[IJBall]

Don't worry, you're doing quite well at all of those points. I suppose the bigger question in light of Book III planning is, how do you improve without risking messing up what you already have?

I'm personally hoping for the kind of incremental changes we saw between Books I and II, and I think most of my requests fall into that category. When you go to develop Something Involving Flying Saucers: Book I, that'll be the time to go nuts and try lots of new, different, and risky stuff.

I totally agree with all of this.

I think most of the "game-play elements" were 'firmed up' in Book II - most of the issues related to game-play stuff now is basically just "fine-tuning" (e.g. "fixing" Armor, so that having Levels in Armor is actually worth tangible benefits; etc...).

Mostly, what I want out of Book III is what I'd called further "GUI" improvements (e.g. more Hotkeys, improved spell/Spellbook and Alchemy mixer interfaces, etc.), along with some 'odds & ends' like an expanded Bestiary (Dragons!, either Thieves or Gremlins who pick-pocket/steal from you!, etc.) and maybe some fine-tuning of existing Skills and 1 or 2 new ones (e.g. Fletching (or something like it - maybe tied into Forage(?...)), Thieving/Pick-Pocketing Skill for Rogues! ).

[Randomizer]

The easiest fix for trainers is to allow for them to increase your skill up to a fixed number of times, but this can happen at any time. If you have already invested skill points and/or books for a skill then it just costs more for the increase than for an untrained character. As long as there is an advantage to having more of a skill than it will be worth training in it.

For players that put points to something like cartography at the start then they haven't wasted more than the extra 2 skill points for the first level. This will cap the damage for not waiting.

[MyGameCompany]

This is why making an RPG system that is truly fun is incredibly hard to do!!

For the record, I'm pretty happy with the way skills work in Book 2. My only recommendation would be to add trainers so that all of the skills have some sort of training available. Right now, some skills don't have trainers.

[Antigrav]

The idea is to have less, "Oh, this character is terrible. What am I going to do, meditate my way through the Taurax? BUHLEETED!"

How does removing "exploits" or changing trainer behavior fix this? Is the idea is to make trainers and books good enough to save a poor character build?

I think trainers and skill books are fine as-is. As I detailed elsewhere, I would like to see skills, abilities, and spells be balanced a bit better, but that's not about removing exploits as much as trying to give people fewer poor choices to make.

This is why making an RPG system that is truly fun is incredibly hard to do!!

- We want a system that doesn't hold the player's hand, yet also doesn't allow the player to make too many bad choices, while developing their character.
- We want a system that limits min-maxing, yet can allow players to make unique characters that feel truly different from game to game.
- We want a system without exploits, yet still allow creative people to come up with unique solutions for making their dream character from all the available options.

So, how do we achieve all these goals without breaking the old-school nature of Eschalon?

I really don't see much min-maxing potential except for casters. It's easy to raise int/wis to the minimum necessary and afterward pump everything into perception for the most mana. Spells will then take care of everything.

Maybe min-maxing has other benefits I'm not aware of for Eschalon?

A possible solution to what I described could be more interdependency of stats. Mages with low concentration could have unacceptably high rates of spell fizzling for the more powerful spell ranks. For the more physical characters, how about changing speed to "agility" and having it determine hit chance as well as avoidance of physical blows as well as certain traps? Dexterity would then mainly affect delicate manual tasks like picking locks, disarming traps, mixing volatile concoctions and casting spells with your hands full.

It seems roguish characters currently have plenty of places to spread points around, if they're going to be in combat at all.

What say ye?

dexterity |dekˈsteritē|
noun
skill in performing tasks, esp. with the hands

[Michi]

Let me clarify my key points, because they all blurred together.

My single most important issue is allowing me to develop my character as I play without running into an "oh, crap" moment. An example of an "oh, crap" moment would be when I make it to the 3rd town and discover that I could have saved myself a bunch of precious skill points by waiting till I got there, and first bought 8 levels of the skill from a trainer, before investing.

So, IMO, trainers and books should provide the same level of skill improvement whether I use them at 0 skill or at 25 skill.

Other "oh, crap" moments come when I realize that investing 10 points in a skill is actually near worthless, since that skill isn't all that useful.

My next point was addressing the overall RPG system in Eschalon and looking at what creating a mage vs thief vs swordsman vs archer did for my playing experience and whether or not it was possible to enjoy 90% of the content of the game without becoming a jack-of-all-trades.

My assertion is that cRPGs that have a single char with no party will, by nature, drive the player to create an all-rounder, and thus, the RPG mechanic becomes somewhat shallow in it's ability to provide players with the ability to make meaningful choices in character development.

Furthermore, by creating a skill like Cartography which every player MUST invest in, (certainly on the first play through) essentially is a meaningless choice.

I agree with the posters that the existing RPG mechanic is fun, and that it would be a major overhaul to introduce a party mechanic and that can wait for the next series.

My final point was that really game breaking exploits should be prohibited. The high level Mercantile skill is an example of such a mechanic. The best you should ever be able to get to is buying and selling for the same price, but never buying for less and selling for more.

[MyGameCompany]

My next point was addressing the overall RPG system in Eschalon and looking at what creating a mage vs thief vs swordsman vs archer did for my playing experience and whether or not it was possible to enjoy 90% of the content of the game without becoming a jack-of-all-trades.

I think it's definitely possible. I just started playing through B2 as a pure mage, and I'm about 6 hours into it. I started with high Elemental and Meditation skills, with most attribute points pumped into Intelligence and Perception, and I've been doing pretty well. I haven't equipped a single weapon so far, nor do I plan to. I currently can't cast Lock Melt or Trap Kill at high enough levels to open all of the chests and doors that I come across, but that's ok - I can always come back later and mop up.

I previously played as a bow-wielding Rogue and was able to complete the game without needing magic or alchemy, and I only had minimal skill with a sword for those few baddies that got close enough to hit me. I could always find plenty of Cats Eyes and Predator Sight potions, so I traveled and fought in the dark. There wasn't any part of the game that was inaccessible to me.

I'll probably play as a fighter next time, and I would imagine that if I pump enough points into strength, bludgeoning weapons, and repair, that I'd be able to bash open any chest or door.

I think it's just a matter of how you build and play your specialized character. I don't think you're required to be a "jack of all trades" to be able to finish the whole game.