Mod: Levelling Just Happens

Not about OpenMW? Just about Morrowind in general? Have some random babble? Kindly direct it here.
Chris
Posts: 1625
Joined: 04 Sep 2011, 08:33

Re: Mod: Levelling Just Happens

Post by Chris »

Greywander wrote:Part of the point of this mod, as well as the mod that inspired it, Galsiah's Character Development (GCD), is that your initial choices will still matter endgame.
I've honestly never liked that about RPGs, and is the biggest hurdle to ever get into one. You're asked to make choices that affect the entire game before you even know what those choices will mean in the context of gameplay. That's a critical component since the player is going to be exposed to gameplay 99% of the time.

Choices should matter, but A) the player should have a reasonable enough amount of information to pick one in confidence and be able to stand by it, regardless of what it leads to, and B) it should have reasonable in-world consequences, rather than gamey artificially-inflated consequences (i.e. you picked this skill at the start of the game, therefore it will always be treated differently no matter what you may do, vs. you picked this skill at the start of the game, therefore it starts higher but otherwise behaves like any other skill).

IMO, it should be possible to start with a character that's good at one skillset, than over the course of their adventures decides to switch into a different skillset instead. Just because you're decent at something when you start your adventuring career doesn't mean that's what you're eventually going to master in. I mean, it's not like a person that gets out of school with a major in business can't go on to excel at game development or something. :P

Skyrim is the first TES game where I didn't feel need to restart a billion times before getting a character I was comfortable playing, because of the flexible leveling system. If there was something I thought I'd like and use but end up not, I could just stop using it and use something else, rather than having be stuck with it because I picked it at the start. Ironically, it was also the first TES game that didn't encourage characters to become Master of Everything, despite such a flexible leveling system. Sure, you could max out all skills to 100, but you only have enough perk points to fill out a couple skills, so all the rest would be lacking without those perks (well, in theory..). And since getting the most out of a skill required filling it with perks, it encouraged specialization rather than generalization.

Having skills atrophy through neglect is another way to solve the Master of Everything problem, since it means any skills you're not using will go down while the ones you are using go up. This still leaves the player with a choice, but rather than a static once-at-the-start choice like MW and Ob attempted (and failed), it's an organic continual choice. You can choose to start leveling and get better at other skills at any time, but the consequence is that the skills you've been using will go down. If you're good at Long Blade but then decide to focus on Short Blade, for example, Short Blade will raise while Long Blade goes down, thus the next time you get a nice Long Blade weapon you won't be as good with it anymore. So you retain a choice, but there's always a consequence for picking it.
User avatar
psi29a
Posts: 5355
Joined: 29 Sep 2011, 10:13
Location: Belgium
Gitlab profile: https://gitlab.com/psi29a/
Contact:

Re: Mod: Levelling Just Happens

Post by psi29a »

This was the reason why I loved UO so much, least used skills decayed over time. You can only ever be good in what you specialized in, you can't be master of everything.
Klepto
Posts: 19
Joined: 16 Apr 2015, 03:56

Re: Mod: Levelling Just Happens

Post by Klepto »

Thanks for the input!

I agree that something needs done with neglect, and more generally with balancing. Right now there seems to be a show-stopper bug where not everything is initialised on game load. I'm new to Morrowind scripting (although not to scripting in general), so it may be that I'm misunderstanding something, if so I'd like to know what.

Currently the mod consists of one big script that is started as a Tribunal start script. I've done this to avoid having silly amounts of global variables, to make the timing easier to handle, and because there are limits on how local variables can be accessed from other scripts. As I understand it local variables should be preserved over save-load provided the script isn't actually stopped at any point. What is actually happening is some variables are preserved and some are not.

Last night I rewrote the whole thing to change all variables that need to persist into global variables, to start the main script from the start script rather than _being_ the start script, and to initialise any local variables each game load. It runs, but not without problems, not least because it appears impossible to stop a start script. It also fails to detect loading of the game using the start script method shown in Morrowind Scripting for Dummies. ScriptRunning always returns 0 for a start script, even if it is running.

...so I'm confused. Early versions just used global variables for everything, moving them into local variables was part of the tidying before release, I may have to revert to the old ugly way. It's worth saying that in time the scripting engine in OpenMW will be enhanced with things like namespaces and these problems will go away, but I won't wait that long to make it work.

Neglect. Some really good suggestions have been posted above. I really like the idea of neglect but I agree that it shouldn't be so arbitrary, that you should be able to mold your character semi-permenantly through the skills they use. I want to be careful to preserve neglect as a soft cap on level/attributes/skills, which means it's going to thwart you one way or another.

How about this: the neglect threshold for all skills is set to initial value plus a configurable number, say 40. Nothing happens until a skill passes the neglect threshold. Skills suffer neglect when over the threshold in much the same way as they do now, but as long as the skill is over the threshold it raises the threshold at a slower rate than the skill is decreasing. When a skill's threshold is raised all other skills' thresholds are lowered so the sum of all skill thresholds remains the same.

It was always intended that neglect would start early, but wouldn't become an issue until higher skill levels. I like the idea that you can push a skill higher than what would normally be it's maximum in the short term, the above mechanic would preserve that. The fact that the sum of all thresholds remains constant means that the soft cap can be configured with a single global variable, although there will likely be others for configuring other aspects of the system.

Attributes. On startup LJH watches the CharGenState variable to tell when character generation is complete, at which point it springs into action. It runs through all the starting skills and calculates the resultant attribute values (except luck) based solely on the LJH mechanic, it then adds kpt_ljh_iSKillFloor to each of these. The global variable kpt_ljh_fSkillInfluence controls how much skills influence starting attributes, if it is 0 then you will start with the vanilla Morrowind attributes, if it is 1 then you will start with the calculated attributes. The default is 0.5, so half and half.

This means that the +10 from specialization is really +5 with the default settings, at some point I should really account for this when merging the two sets of attributes so the +10 is still a +10. There are bigger things to fix first, this will most likely be done at the same time as the import of existing characters.

Attributes may well need some balancing, those are useful numbers, thanks. The way to do that would be to alter the primary/secondary/tertiary attributes for each skill in a more balanced way. I'm not sure it's a huge issue, levelling all stats to 100 isn't something that should be able to happen, with natural levelling a mage will look like a mage, a fighter will look like a fighter, and a thief will look like a thief.

I should be using the same formula as vanilla for calculating health, and I've not altered maximum magicka in any way, that's still handled by the engine. I agree the regen rates are very slow and should be raised a bit. I wanted to make them barely perceptible by default, and they need to be a lower rate than you get when sleeping otherwise there's no point in sleeping. At some point there will be a menu that will allow the player to select presets at character generation, regen rates will be part of that.
User avatar
Okulo
Posts: 672
Joined: 05 Feb 2012, 16:11

Re: Mod: Levelling Just Happens

Post by Okulo »

Don't forget what the starting stats mean from an RPG point of view. One of the (many) reasons I cannot possibly count Skyrim as an RPG is because when I create a character, she is bland. She has no background except the one I have in my head. In Morrowind, your starting stats reflect your past and your personality. The character you create has history. She has been trained in something, be it in by a teacher or by experience. People are the sum of their past experience - nowhere is this staple of roleplaying reflected better than in one's starting stats.
Chris
Posts: 1625
Joined: 04 Sep 2011, 08:33

Re: Mod: Levelling Just Happens

Post by Chris »

Okulo wrote:Don't forget what the starting stats mean from an RPG point of view. One of the (many) reasons I cannot possibly count Skyrim as an RPG is because when I create a character, she is bland. She has no background except the one I have in my head.
The background in your head is what makes your character a character, rather than just someone who uses specific skills. "Good with short blades and medium armor, bad at magic" is not a character. "An ex-legionnaire who was caught smuggling moon sugar and skooma, was jailed for years, until he was mysteriously released in Vvardenfell and decided to start clean" is a character. Sure, this character might have reason to be good with short blades and medium armor, but he might also have reason to not be and need to retrain his skills.

From an RPG point of view, your starting stats are simply what helps get you started. They have no intrinsic value except for how they compare to the challenges you'll face. The idea was that you'd create a character a certain way then play it that way, and you'd get punished if you try a different way. This is a hold-over from tabletop RPGs, where leveling is a much bigger deal and everything has more oversight from the GM, and is ultimately incongruent with the way TES works, which is that you get better at whatever you use.

But if you're prevented from using skills because you didn't pick it at the start, and they're thus too low to be effective, that's an obvious clash of principle. The vast majority of the time you'd have to use the skills you picked at the start anyway, so the status of those other skills is irrelevant. In the context of TES, it encourages metagaming to get a usable character, rather than playing a character naturally. It's "I gotta pick these skills so I can play a character like this" rather than "I wanna play a character like this, so they'll use whatever skills that entails."
User avatar
Okulo
Posts: 672
Joined: 05 Feb 2012, 16:11

Re: Mod: Levelling Just Happens

Post by Okulo »

Chris wrote:The background in your head is what makes your character a character, rather than just someone who uses specific skills. "Good with short blades and medium armor, bad at magic" is not a character. "An ex-legionnaire who was caught smuggling moon sugar and skooma, was jailed for years, until he was mysteriously released in Vvardenfell and decided to start clean" is a character.
Untrue. You are wrongly separating two sides of the same coin. As I explained earlier: everyone is the sum of their past experiences. Someone's background is what makes someone skillful in the first place, which is reflected in their statistics. To say otherwise is to imply that people pop out of thin air, and that is coming a very close to Last Thursdayism.
Chris wrote:From an RPG point of view, your starting stats are simply what helps get you started. They have no intrinsic value except for how they compare to the challenges you'll face. The idea was that you'd create a character a certain way then play it that way, and you'd get punished if you try a different way.
Gameplay-wise, perhaps. But from a roleplaying point of view, no. A mage is a mage not because they just happened to have poofed in existence this way for the sake of "punishment". A pure mage has become a pure mage because they (for example) have been taught that way all their lives.
Chris wrote:But if you're prevented from using skills because you didn't pick it at the start, and they're thus too low to be effective, that's an obvious clash of principle.
But nobody is preventing you from using those other skills. If I have trained all my life to be a sprinter, I can stop doing that and start studying chemistry. If you start the story at the point where you're still a sprinter, of course it's going to be more difficult to do chemistry than to sprint. But nothing is preventing you from learning. And the same goes with this system. The statistics you start the game with reflect the character's skills before you entered the character's life.
User avatar
Greywander
Posts: 119
Joined: 04 Dec 2014, 07:01

Re: Mod: Levelling Just Happens

Post by Greywander »

Actually, I get what Chris is saying. It's probably true that most of us here are experienced Morrowind players and can thus make informed skill choices, but that's no excuse for poor game design. I actually kind of like that Skyrim didn't make you agonize over character creation, and you would never be compelled to restart because you made bad choices. At the same time, though, there were downsides to doing it that way.

I think a good compromise is allowing the player to choose skills to start initially high, but then not distinguish them from your other skills otherwise. This allows the player to make a character that can at least kill bandits without too much trouble instead of having to grind up their skills on rats.

For neglect, there could be three different factors that would determine at what point neglect begins happening. One is a flat value, another is the initial skill level, and the third could be the highest attained skill level. By adjusting these parameters you could get the the gameplay style you wanted. That way, everyone is happy.

I wonder if it would be possible to set the parameters via an external file? I noticed during my testing that I had to reset the parameters with every new character. Alternatively, you could include three versions of the mod with pre-adjusted values: one where neglect begins at a set value for all skills, one where initial skill determines when neglect starts, and one where the highest skill level reached determines neglect.
User avatar
Okulo
Posts: 672
Joined: 05 Feb 2012, 16:11

Re: Mod: Levelling Just Happens

Post by Okulo »

Greywander wrote:Actually, I get what Chris is saying. It's probably true that most of us here are experienced Morrowind players and can thus make informed skill choices, but that's no excuse for poor game design.
Ah! But you see, I reject the premise that having your background actually having an effect on your stats is poor game design. You actually expanded on that yourself:
Greywander wrote:I think a good compromise is allowing the player to choose skills to start initially high, but then not distinguish them from your other skills otherwise.
This seems to be exactly what this mod is trying to do. As Klepto said: "I really like the idea of neglect but I agree that it shouldn't be so arbitrary, that you should be able to mold your character semi-permenantly through the skills they use." Even Chris himself agreed with it when he said that "it should be possible to start with a character that's good at one skillset, than over the course of their adventures decides to switch into a different skillset instead." He came up with the idea that "a skill can be lowered through neglect to about 25% or so of the highest value its been (or 25, whichever's smaller)."

So you see, having a character's background actually be reflected in the character's starting stats is not bad game design - what's more, I wasn't even the one who said that these starting stats are limiting in the first place!
Chris
Posts: 1625
Joined: 04 Sep 2011, 08:33

Re: Mod: Levelling Just Happens

Post by Chris »

Okulo wrote:You are wrongly separating two sides of the same coin. As I explained earlier: everyone is the sum of their past experiences. Someone's background is what makes someone skillful in the first place, which is reflected in their statistics.
To a point. For one, not everyone is going to be very experienced in a set of skills, particularly if they're just starting out as an adventurer. Secondly, even if someone was somewhat experienced in their past, that doesn't mean they can't lose that experience and become rusty (this is the entire principle behind skill neglect, after all).

Personally, I've always found it odd that you start at level one with a set of skills that are almost at 50 (which is half way to mastery). Relatively speaking, a level one character should have no stand-out skills, compared to the likes of a seasoned level 15 character. Your average person is not going to be very effective with one particular type of armor (or lack thereof) or weapon compared to another. If you start at level one, IMO you should have an undefined skill set.

Your character wasn't born last Thursday, but neither have they been trained to be a grand master. At the start of the game, they're the weakest they can be (naturally speaking).
A pure mage has become a pure mage because they (for example) have been taught that way all their lives.
Right, a mage is someone learns and practices magic. The game starts you out at level one and puts the entire world at your feet, so it's up to the character to learn and practice magic. It's backwards to then say your character is already halfway to mastering some prechosen skills with the others being near unusable.
But nobody is preventing you from using those other skills.
The game is. If your skill with a particular weapon is low, you're going to fail to hit, and if your skill with (the lack of) armor is low, you're going to be hit. The game doesn't give you a chance to raise these skills in a fair and fun way because it's designed for you to use skills that are already in their 30s and 40s.
If I have trained all my life to be a sprinter, I can stop doing that and start studying chemistry. If you start the story at the point where you're still a sprinter, of course it's going to be more difficult to do chemistry than to sprint.
Keyword being if. You start the game as a nobody, not someone who's halfway to being a world-class sprinter.
Klepto
Posts: 19
Joined: 16 Apr 2015, 03:56

Re: Mod: Levelling Just Happens

Post by Klepto »

I forgot to answer the question about fortified stats. It's simple, LJH ignores them and works only with base stats. GCD has to take them into account because vanilla has no command to return the base value of a stat, those were the first things I added to the fork.

Interesting discussion regarding character class. I think one of the things I like so much about Morrowind is that it attempts to make a strong distinction between character and player. It's not enough for the player to know that if he makes the character do x it will improve y, what the character has experienced, their uniqueness, should and does have a large bearing. It's fine for a character to start out in one profession and switch, but they will never become as proficient as if they had studied the same thing their whole life. Similarly, they should never forget the things they have learned so completely that they become on a par with things never known. Whether these specialisations occurred before the character arrived in Morrowind or after should be irrelevant.

I'm trying to make a capped system that is plastic and malleable, so you can develop skills that you didn't start with, but you will never be a master of everything. As with all parts of the mod I'm aiming to increase depth and immersion while at the same time taking load off the player by automating things in a configurable way.

I'm halfway through another rewrite to hopefully fix the problems with saving and loading completely, with luck I'll have something uploaded tonight.
Post Reply