Big news people: The 1.5 version patch for 'The Witcher' is out as of yesterday!
What does this has to do with Fallout you may ask?
Well it does, albeit indirectly, because it got me thinking ? about how awesome a game the Witcher is, and how fresh an approach it has on the old established RPG gameplay and how Fallout could benefit from a fresh approach?
and after I decided I did enough thinking for a day it got me posting.

So I was thinking about the skill system and I ask this: what is that people like so much about the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system? I don't know about you, but as far as I'm concerned it's the Perks! Honestly what would S.P.E.C.I.A.L. be without the Perks? It would be just a common generic uninspired system with attributes and skills. It seems that 99% of the RPGs out there have attributes and skills and percentages etc? but not so much the Witcher: The Witcher, you see, has perks. And only perks! Sure it still has attributes like strength, intelligence etc. but the way to raise them is by using perks. Every time you level up you get a number of 'coins' that you can use to buy said perks: and you can choose to improve one of your attributes, one of your sword skills or one of your spells or even to buy a completely different ability. It's main problem is that the choices are fairly limited (for an RPG) and it kind of encourages a more 'jack of all trades character' ? but add choices and that will stop being an issue.

I'll give examples about how I was thinking it could work:
Let's say the game awards you with xp like normal. And lets forget about levels for a while and say that there are no skillpoints to distribute but there's only that xp ? which you use to buy Perks. So when you get enough xp you get to buy you very first perk (yay!) and you get choices:
1. You may choose to buy a perk that increases your perception ? which will make you better with all ranged weapons, with small increases in damage as well as your chance to hit.
2. You may instead choose to specialize and buy a perk that will better your use of small guns ? giving you a larger increase in damage and chance to hit when using small guns than the perception upgrade.
3. You may choose to specialize even more by buying a perk that will give you better damage with small guns ? thus increasing it substantially ? or similarly you could buy a perk that substantially increases only your chance to hit with small guns.

Moreover: Higher level perks could have larger requirements for balance (ex. you can't increase your chance to hit more than a certain point unless you increase your perception first)

More: Auto-exclusive perks could effectively simulate the good old Traits. For example you could need to buy a perk to use VATS ? and the game could give a choice between buying either the VATS perk, or the Finesse perk (with the bonus it gave FO1&2) but if you get one, you can never get the other.

Why I think this would work? Well it's because it seems like a simple way that can potentially offer maximum customizability. For instance: you could focus on buying all perks that increase your chance to hit, you ability to sneak, your chance to cause a critical hit and the damage of a critical hit ? effectively making a hardcoe stealthy sniper who has trouble killing enemies face to face (due to low damage bonus) but relies instead on killing with the first hit.

You may argue that you could do something like that with the present skill system anyway ? but honestly, these 100 points per skill don't work too well on FO3. Obvious examples are the science and lockpicking skills, that only make any difference when you increase them by 25 ? effectively meaning that a character with 49 lockpicking skill is no better at picking locks than a character with a skill of 25, which is pointless. Better to lose the 100 points in lockpicking and only keep 4 perks for the same result.

Thus ends the longest post I have ever made in a message board.
I hope you had as much fun reading it as I had writing it.

I want the SPECIAL system back into Fallout myself, ths crappy spinoffs SPECIAL is not SPECIAL(lacks traiths and proper stats along with the actuall perk system, along the fact that skills do not work at all),

@OP: I agree. I came up with something similiar some time ago - just doing away with Skills and Attributes entirely, and instead making it all about Perks. I think it makes sense. Personally, I think my own "problem" with Fallout 3 was not so much that they changed the SPECIAL system, but that they were trying to shove a round peg into a square hole and alter the vestiges of the system to try and make it do something it wasn't originally meant to. Just having only Perks would allow full customizeability without requiring players to run into some kind of arbitrary cieling to keep some measure of uniqueness to the characters.

Plus, like you said - Science and Lockpicking, at least, would work exactly the same if it was represented as 4 levels of Perks, already.

But that's not it at all.. S.P.E.C.I.A.L. is GURPS reworked; Originally it was called A.C.E.L.I.P.S.

It's virtue is the balance it can provide (but it's strengths really hinge on aspects that Bethesda mostly removed from the series in FO3 ~they could just as well have not called it Special, and or used any system they pleased after that point as Special is now hamstrung in the current game).

Perks are cool ~ Perks should be treated like Wasabi!
Perks in Fallout 3 are like eating Wasabi with bits of rice and fish in it ~and not the other way around.
(Need I describe it as, "overpowering"?)

Perks are cheats with no downside ~they deliberately cheat the system for the player's benefit... Things like altering the UI to color code the PC to NPC responses, or to add combat mechanics info to what the PC can perceive about NPC's; and skill bonuses and abilities not available to anyone else ~ especially combat specific cheats like extra AP's... which has a tremendous effect on all PC combat in the game.

Traits are absent from FO3, but really altered aspects of the game if you took one (or two). Traits are sorely missed (by me at least).

Perks in Fallout 3 are insignificant :shrug: ~trivialized don't you think? They screw up Special by allowing stat increases every level for one thing...

Special is now meaningless and moot. Its like a chainsaw with a broken chain and no teeth ~hell of a noise maker, but basically useless.

I want the original S.P.E.C.I.A.L. back. After playing the originals, yeah I like some things better.

Well, obviously, if we went this way, it wouldn't be called SPECIAL anymore. (I think you could argue that FO3's system is SPECIAL in name only, to begin with - there being more to a system than just a clever arrangement of Attributes that spell a word, after all.)

When I came up with a similar idea not too long ago, the idea was that obviously what I'd most prefer to see was a more traditional working of the original system, that allowed to work like it was supposed to, and didn't have these balancing and levelling problems that are particular to Fallout 3 - which resulted in a system that's more unwieldly than it needs to be. Chances are that's not going to happen, though. It would be nice, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

The "Perk" system would be kind of the lesser of two evils, though; if we're going to be pragmatic about it. If it was all Perks (and if picked some Perks at character creation instead of spending skill points, then you could add Traits back in, obviously,) then you'd have much more customization available, and wouldn't be constantly bumping into this cieling to halt character advancement in an attempt to keep some individuality to the characters you make. If all your XP went to was selecting Perks, then there'd be no reason for a level cap - you could just keep going indefinately - especially is successive DLC added more Perks to choose from.

It wouldn't be SPECIAL, sure. But for the game that Bethesda is really trying to make, I think it would work better than what we currently have.

(And it's also worth noting that in a system like this - "Perk" would have a broader definition than it's current one - as they'd be used to replace skill increases, then they would longer unanimously fall under the concept of "cheats" like they currently do.)

I would say that there is functionally no difference between FO1 style traits and TES4 style birth signs ~and it was already in the engine.
I truly believe it was just another case of "don't burden the player!". Perks AND traits would confuse (like multiple ammo types for the pistol).

The reasoning is actually sound, but the context is insane ~this is supposed to be Fallout. Chucking player choices like armor piercing or hollow point is effectively equivalent to chucking paths and possible outcomes; and that's basically making the RPG version of a rail shooter.

I agree. (Aren't we supposed to be arguing about something here? )

Hitchiker's Guide (somewhere in there)

• "Why is life like standing upside down on your head in a pile of Dingo's kidneys"...
  
• "I dunno... Why is life like standing upside down in a pile of Dingo's kidneys?"
  
• ", I don't know either".

:rofl:

A nice little add-on to the original S.P.E.C.I.A.L would be an ability to get perks from different quests and from joining factions.
Also traits!

I very much hope that Josh Sawyer will bring back traits for New Vegas.

I know roughly the history and the significance of SPECIAL.
My problem is that... well... it doesn't work too well - not as it is in FO3 but not in FO1&2 either...

HERESY!!

ok, ok bear with me here for a minute.
Consider the science skill in FO2 for example. What did it really do?
You could raise it up to 120something to get the good robobrain and then I understand you could raise it to 170something to get a few more nessages from the enclave computer... other than that it was rarely used and even then it provided small optional bonuses.
Now compare it to small guns...

Now the way I see it, there are two possible solutions to balance things: either adjust the game to the skill ( i.e. add a whole lot of computers to hack etc. to make it a valid alternative, if not for small guns at least for speech) or adjust the skill to the game (as suggested in first post )...

I understand that the vast majority of people would wish the former without even seriously considering the later.
But I think sometimes the alternative should be considered.

And BTW keep in mind that I talk about a quantity of choices capable of catering for a large variety of different builds, I'm not saying 'perks are awesome so keep what perks we have and get rid of everything else' - I'm talking about using the general idea of 'perk' to the entire character system effectively toning down the overused percentages a bit while adding some more variety and and amplifying the effects of player's choice of character development. - as such I really don't get the 'rail shooter' coment (I think actually think you completely misunderstood the concept Gizmo - I naturally expected negative comments but 'rail shooter'? was the Wicher a rail shooter? was Arcanum -that did use a similar system- a rail shooter?)

About making science more useful: How about Energyweapons having scienceskill requirements accordingly to their size and effectiviness?

We're off on the wrong foot, as you have also misunderstood mine and seem to have not caught my meaning where I mentioned the term "Rail Shooter"

~As for the percentages... I consider them underused not overused. (and nearly pointless in FO3).

*IMO all of the skills were useful in FO even (and especially) firstaid/doctor as separate skills.
As for science or even Traps... They are options to develop. When you single out the things you see possible with a skill, you don't consider the flip ~being that you cannot do those things without developing the skill. Without it, you cannot get the best robo-brain, cannot fix the auto-doc, If you do not raise the skill you should miss out of things not meant for you (this build, this time)... If the skill had to be completely maxxed for just a single event in the game... you won't ever see it without maxxing the skill (and that's how it should be).
Is it worth it(?), depends on the player. If its not worth it to you , you never max the skill ~and you never get those results. :shrug:

This is a nasty trend in modern games, and I think its born of wide spread entitlement issues in the mass public (this is not directed at you or anyone else specific... its a perception, perhaps even a fear). They make games [now] such that no one can reasonably "miss out" on any aspect of it ~at all (because they might feel cheated and/or resentful. Others can have it... "Why they can't they when they paid for it too?").

What I mean, is that player A gets the prize one way, and player B gets the prize a different way, and C, and D, and E... ~but they all get the prize (be it a gun, a gadget, an event). Games these days "spill it all" to all comers, and as a side effect keep nothing in reserve... (and I can understand to a point... They may well only get one play from the customer; but that's a depressing reason to cripple a good game IMO)

I agree with that. It seems as another good example of the good old ‘choice and consequences’ subject’ – choice: your tagged skills ~ consequences: results that you don’t get with those skills tagged.
Nevertheless there exists a problem that you might not have considered, especially if you’re a firm supporter of ‘choice and consequences’ gameplay (which I am too, don't get me wrong ): the new player does not initially have enough indication of what the consequences of his choice of skill might be.

Example: When I first played FO1 I thought that science would be a skill of crucial importance (I even thought it would be the equivalent to a high fantasy RPG’s magic skills ).
Here’s its in-game description:
I though that’s great, it covers all that potentially useful stuff! + the image shows the vault boy as a chemist mixing some liquids!
My first bad surprise though came right just after I started the game – in the cave outside the vault - I examined these bones that lie there and I got no conclusive info about them. Now I know that’s too trivial (though I didn’t know that at the time) but still I got somewhat disappointed- how come my character, who apparently knows about biology, can’t determine if these bones are animal? Why can’t he give me any more info about the rocks even though he apparently knows geology?

As I said that’s trivial of course – and I do know that now – but back then I figured that maybe by examining the bones I could get some idea of what kind of creatures are around these areas - or how did they die? Is what killed them liable to kill me too? So should I look out for it?

After playing for a while I realized that biology, physics and geology (and chemistry as hinted in the skills image) weren’t used anywhere in the game. The skill is only used to hack into some few computers and that’s it. To make matters a bit worse, the developers had apparently decided that some of the computers were important enough for any character to operate, so they added a whole bunch of books that raised my science skill, effectively making it an even less important skill to tag.

So essentially the use of the skill system is severely limited by what the game allows you to do with its skills. A system like SPECIAL could be used to its full potential in a free pnp game where the imaginative players are allowed to improvise – or perhaps in an ideally dynamic (a-life?) cRPG world (that I hope to see some day) that could respond to anything the player might choose to do. As it stands now though, it’s very unpleasantly constrained.

Eventually I got increasingly unhappy with my character could do in the game so I eventually decided to restart with a new one. (Thankfully I liked the game enough to do that – for instance when I got unhappy with my character in Oblivion, mostly because of the newly introduced in TES spell limits, I just stopped playing altogether.)

Essentially what I’m saying is that it’s not as simple as you present it: When I played FO2 I spent on average 2 hours a day on it – it took me about 2 months to finish it, and even though I liked it, I did not intend to go through it again straight away and spend another 2 months just to get the best robobrain or whatever else I might have missed. Replayability is a great thing but honestly, if a single playthrough of a game can keep me interested for 2 months, I’d feel greedy if I demanded more! If it does give me more then that’s great! It’s a great game we’re talking about! But it’s just not something that I’ll request.

So what I essentially ask for here, is a skill system that will not request me to specialize early in the game but it will require me to do so later, once I have a good idea of what the consequences of my decisions will be.

And it’s like that: Say you have 5 levels of science instead of 100-300 (not so much so that it will be extremely easy for any character to get – but to signify the amount of use and its overall importance in the game) but each of those 5 points would have increasingly more requirements, for instance one more point of intelligence for each - i.e. you can have science 1 only if you have int of 5 and then you can increase science to 2 only if your int is 6 etc. So any character can potentially get the first science point but even say the last point requires two int points, so to be a top scientist you need int of 10 – but raising your int to 10 means that you would need to sacrifice something else. + you may increase your int to get more lever of some other skill (like say lockpicking) and then decide to add science as well later – effectively creating an overall ‘intelligent’ character that just doesn’t have enough ‘points’ to spent on weapon skills. I also suggested that instead of having a fixed number of 'skill points' or 'perks' per level you 'buy' your skills with the xp you have acquired and more advanced skills should require more xp (which is pretty much what happens anyway - you 'buy' levels that give you skill points with xp and higher levels require more xp - main difference is that, with the current system, increasing your lowest skills is effectively a lot more expensive in high levels)

It’s pretty much the same principle (and it’s used and it works) with the main difference that the amount of the skill’s increases (or variation or specializations) will reflect its degree of use in the game while maintaining a high level of customization. But it will allow for more 'generic' characters at the beginning that will specialize, but only after the player eventually understands the limitations of what they can do in this particular game - thus not requiring me to restart because I'm not happy with my early 'blind' choices.
(Not to mention that such approach will actually make the game's limitations feel far less severe)

And after all, I think that CRPGs have gone a long way so it’s far easier now for them to be independent from their tabletop roots.





Edit: sh.. that's a long post! RPGs start getting to me it seems... I wanted to start playing Arcanum properly, but it now seems I need a break from all that -- I've still got Syberia installed and waiting for me, so maybe this is a good time to stop all the monster slaying and go for some unwinding with far simpler gameplay mechanics and (what I'm told is) a deep story instead.

:facepalm:


A "skill" system I really liked is the one from Gothic - where it is easy to amass many XP early, but to gain skills one needs to a) find trainers and B) pay them an amount of gold and/or c) do a quest for them ~which is not so easy.



Syberia's story shines because it is simple, but also unique & enigmatic. It doesn't need any of the clich?d fantasy tripe like The Longest Journey or Myst to deliver.

I haven't played Gothic but that description reminded me a lot of Might & Magic (which I did like and I think it's a shame that it didn't manage to develop further)


Come on... In The Longest Journey the clich? was the whole point (you know fantasy clich? & cyberpunk clich? combined ) & I read the Myst novel before I played the actual game, have you read it? I was a lot younger and I don't remember it too well anymore but back then I thought it was anything but clich?.

At certain moment of FO2 the character itself isnt also superpowered in an unbalanced way?

Which is why we were hoping the sequel would have done a better job in this regard - considering that it's been a problem since Fallout 1.

Pah, who wants or expects a sequel to improve upon things!

The 'evolving dificult' system of Oblivion was one atempt Bethesda done to deal with the overpowering that is present on all games. If you played enough you should know, its almost all hated by the TES community. Usually dificult mods do nicely to both TES and FO3.

Yeah, I wasn't fond of that in Oblivion, either. To their credit, I actually quite approve of how they did it with Fallout 3 - with different regions having varying difficulty with their enemies, and other places where they're levelled to their character. I thought that was a good compromise.

But that's just dealing with enemy levelling, though. I'm still not fond of the simplistic "difficulty" balancing I'm finding in a lot of RPGs these days. Where enemies are "harder" just because they take more shots to put down, etc. (For really what I thought was the most ludicrous example of this philosophy, I point to Mass Effect. Where on the highest unlockable difficulty, it was just silly - blasting enemies all across the landscape with the Mako's canon, watching them fly through the air. And then following them to the next hill and repeating until they finally die...) That's not difficult, it's just tedious. Fallout 3 isn't guilty of that to the same degree as Mass Effect was, but it's still basically the same concept: "More difficult means raising the enemies' hitpoints."

And like I said, that's only dealing with the enemies. Your character can still become "overpowered" (and I realize this is subjective,) in ways other than dealing with combat.

Imo it all depends on who's playing... for many people the purpose of RPGs is to make one's character become as most powerful as possible and those people would've preferred Morrowind where one becomes invincible very easily - but imo in that game it makes sense considering the PC is the Nerevarine (reincarnation of legendary hero)... if however one plays merely for the 'story' or prefers playing as diplomatic/scientific characters it wouldn't matter to these players at all how 'powerful' one becomes.

What I remember from Mass Effect it all boiled down to equipment -- gather enough cash to be able to acquire Spectre gear & Colossus armor and one became mostly invincible.

True, there's always going to be players who just want the "best" character possible (every tabletop game I've ever GMed, there's always been at least one these guys.) And I think it should be possible to min/max to a certain degree. What I would find ideal, however, is a system where in the natural course of just playing the game and not worrying about being Chuck Norris, you don't end up hitting some sort of advancement wall. What I enjoy is the advancement itself; I don't worry about how "great" my character is, I just like looking forward to the next level, or the next time I can spend some skill points, etc. Once that stops, it doesn't ruin the game - but I find it less compelling than it had been. KOTOR 2, for example, I found that I hit the level cap about 90% of the way through the game. That was fine, but once I got there I pretty much stopped doing any more sidequests and then kind of rushed through the remaining last portion of the game. Because I no longer had as much incentive to go off the beaten path - nothing I found there was going to be of much use at that point.

"Difficulty" is another subjective matter, though. Neither Fallout 3 or Mass Effect I found to be terribly difficult to get through, even on the more difficult settings. In both games, I eventually set the difficulty back to normal - not because it was too hard, just that I found it too tedious to kill the enemies. For me, it wasn't that they were too hard to kill, just that it took too long to kill them. That's really hard to get "right," though. Frankly, I'm not generally that worried about the "challenge" of a game. I know I'm going to get through it at some point anyway.

Here we goes, going off topic again, but i think this is the most interesting thing to discuss on this thread (well fell free to start another one on this subject or mods to lock anyway).

The dificult, ie, being hard to face enemies even at high levels is an issue on any game. After all, on any RPG your char evolves and gets more powerful.

Its interesting to have more dificult enemies, but there is also a sense of "empowerment" that should happen to the char, of he being more stronger.

What is bad is to have only very powerful enemies at end game, but having super powerful enemies at low levels is also bad, as you would die very often.

I relly dont know how it is handled by FO older games (please people tell me), but i think the system that was used on Oblivion (enemies get stronger as you level up *all enemies*) is not the best.
I recognize that a lot of people criticized Morrowind (im only talking of Beth games, sorry) system because it have an enemy level system linked to your level, but this is bad, as your reach some level and after this there is no more powerful enemies, the character can reach a big level, but, lets, say, the top enemies reach some limit.

One point i consider positive on having an "cap level" is that the game is prediticting more strong enemies until that level. Unfortunally for stronger gamers that dificult is very easy.

I consider the rules stabilished by OOO on Oblivion as good ( a mod for Oblivion), where there are fixed some very powerful enemies, some more medium enemies, and a lot of easy enemies. As you progress, you challenge the dificult, until you reach the top, but even the top, considering the game limitations, is HARD. This make the game hard, but with a sense of progression, like its worth to work on.

Unfortunally with FO3 the whole game is very easy, unless you hard mod it to heavy dificult.