I had fun with all the Fallouts. But in Fallout 3, all my characters seem to end up the same as a result of limited usefulness of some attributes, skills, and perks. The rule set MUST be revised, and YES it did have problems in the original Fallouts as well. They have made some steps in the right direction, but more needs to be done.


I think there are three key issues that need to be tackled regarding the Rule set.
1-Rework SPECIAL and Derived stats. Remove at LEAST special bobbleheads.

2-Revise Skill system. This includes determining caps, skill points per level, available points and usefulness of skills.

3-Revise leveling and Perk system. Heighten the cap, or make it harder to reach. Make perks more meaningful.



#1- Each SPECIAL stat needs to have significant meaning. Honestly I feel like I could get by with a 1 on all my stats. Part of this problem is the derived stat formulas.
You simply start with too much free carry weight, health, action points, skill points per level. Lower these so they are derived more linearly from SPECIAL.The biggest losers in SPECIAL are Perception, END, and CHA, but they all need work. Perception REALLY should be tied to effective range of weapons. CHA is going to be hard to figure out, I kinda felt that it wasn't that important in Fallout 1 and 2 either. Bobble heads for special need to be removed, I don't like feeling gimped or building my character based on something like this. You can keep stat boost in, like bioenhancers for "THOSE", but make them very rare.

Side note: Also, making the numbers for Health and action points proportionately larger doesn't make them better, it makes them WORSE. It unnecessarily complicates the system.

The problem is, some attributes grant better bonuses than others, namely carry weight(STR), action points(AGI), critical chance (LUCK), and skill points(INT)... These are the priority attributes... the others are just to flavor. A player should have as much motivation to put his CHA at 9 and his INT at 1 as he does to put CHA1 INT9....

There has to be some form of opportunity cost, based on how you want to play the game.

Bottom line:Make all stats meaningful, fix derived stats. Lower skill points given.

#2- Revise the skill system. I think they've made a step in the right direction with combining some skills, but they didn't balance the way to master them. Either change the skill cap and skill checks, or rework distribution of skill points. I personally like them being balanced around 100, and as much fun as it was getting your first aid skill to 300, it was pointless! Make each skill at least potentially useful! Barter was trash, I was rolling in caps EVERY game. This brings us back to Tag skills. If they are balanced around 100, getting twice the skill points for tagged skills is ridiculous. This is where my system of bonus perks for tagged skills come in, lending a unique flavor to each character, and lending reason to tagging skills aside from a one time bonus. Mastering 5 skills should be HARD or IMPOSSIBLE unless you take a lot of skill perks. I think being a generalist character SHOULD be an option, but it shouldn't be so powerful. It seemed every character I made simply ended up the same because of necessity of certain skills. I maybe took a few novelty perks to make my character feel specialized, but the min/maxer inside of me hated it.

See http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=960703 for original thread.

This system essentially means characters get certain bonuses to their tagged skills at 25,50,75,100 a la oblivion. I know people hate "making this more like oblivion", but its a stronger combination than the current system. Keep in mind ONLY Your tagged skills get these bonuses, and I thought it was an interesting system, is something BETHESDA is comfortable with, and can really help make Tags important, while giving some of those under powered, but well thought out perks a home. IE Infiltrator perk at Lockpick 50. Also... Bring back outdoorsman =)!

Bottom line: Make all skills useful, and make them a little more character defining. It shouldn't be easy to master multiple skills. Make TAG skills mean something.

#3 Revise leveling system and perks. Remove or heighten the level cap, and make it difficult to get there. No brainer. I also think perks should be lowered to once every 2 levels if NOT 3. While it was fun picking perks every level, there just weren't enough useful ones to go around, and it felt mundane after a while. Put a LOT of thought into each perk, make some difficult to get, requirement wise. You should NEVER be able to get every useful perk in one, or even 2 playthroughs. There were some perks like "contract killer," that brought some interesting ideas, but were ultimately underpowered. If it opened a unique quest chain with the Talon Company with interesting rewards, and had some other bonuses, etc. it could have been good. There some good ideas out there, but they lack proper implementation. If all perks are equal, some will get left in the dust by the role the character is playing, but THATS THE POINT!

Bottom line: Make reaching the level cap feel like an accomplishment. Make non-combat perks more applicable, and make all perks of similar levels equally balanced. BECAUSE bethesda threw "traits," (which by definition help define a character) into the perks, they need to make the perks more character defining by use of requirements and usefulness.

1) Agreed. The starting numbers for all the SPECIAL secondary statistics ensured that SPECIAL's impact on the game was dramatically lessened. Returning to the old equations for secondary statistics would be a good idea, although I'm not against boosting hitpoints, since the different perspective and realtime environment adds a small measure of difficultly not present in the first games.

2) Somewhat disagreed. Bethesda helped make the Int stat less impacting by reducing the max skill points and raising the min skill points per level. I don't think there's anything wrong with simply reintroducing the old equation, which instead of a 11-20 ranage, it would be a 7-25 range, but you need to have skills capped beyond 100.

Also, I think they should look at having the skill NOT determine damage, just to hit. The exception would be unarmed, which you are able to unlock more powerful strikes.

3) Actually, this is a pretty straight forward fix, and there are already mods coming out that corrects this. The problem was you levelled far too fast in the game. To fix that, all you really need to do is reintroduce the old xp table, which starts at 1000 for level 2, 3000 for level 3, 6000 for level 4, and so on.

And the Perk rate really bothered me. They gave us 3 times the number of perks we could have. No thanks please.


For me, if those three elements are put back in, I'd love the game. Simply love it. Now, I know some folks raise the point that they need to keep the system simplified. Since most of what's mentioned here is governed solely by equations, my response is: give us both. A hardcoe mode that alters the equations so they are more akin to the originals. That way, you keep both sides happy. If folks want to stick with the simple system, fine. But for those of us who prefer the old, it's tossing us a bone.

Taking this from a post I made in another thread (I think it was your other one...)

I think there's likely a way to "fix" some of the problems with Fallout 3's system without doing a whole lot of work or changing things drastically from their current position. It wouldn't be a perfect win for some of us hardliners, but I think some sort of compromise is also a bit more realistic if we're looking at a Fallout 4.

Skills: There's lots you can do to the current system - but I think the simplest solution that (at least I feel) would go a way towards reaching a good compromise that all the types of gamers would find enjoyable would be to just raise the skill cap to 200. Even if that's the only change made, it would have a really nice impact on the balancing of the skills. Players who wanted to generalize and master a majority of the skills with one character would still be able to do so, and those who wanted to specialize a bit more would have somewhere else for their extra skill points to go to.

You wouldn't even need to make any changes in the values of the skills as they stand, just add greater success chances for skills over 100. (This could also be incrementally smaller advantages past 100 as well.) A good anology is if we look at competitive sports. A good pool player that can put can make a shot pretty much every time is someone with 100 in that skill. But when you get into the pro/ competitive level, it's less about whether or not you can make those shots, but how in well you make it. (At a competitive level, for example, it's less about whether you can get a ball in a certain pocket, but doing it in such a way that the cue ball comes to rest exactly in the right spot for your next shot.) Levels past 100 are sort of the same thing - especially if we can add raising say, damage rates, depending on not only whether you made that shot but by what margin you succeeded, then having a skill above 100 would be pretty useful.

And 100 is still a very good value. Players who simply wanted to get to that level in a variety of skills would still have a very good character. They just wouldn't be as good in some areas as in others that had focused on a select few skills. I'd see that as a win/win for everyone, and it wouldn't be making the game any more complicated to understand.

You could tack on a bunch of extra stuff (bonuses for having a skill tagged, having tag skills raise at 2 per point, making raising a skill past 100 cost double, etc.) But that would just be extra. I'd like it just fine with just raising the cap.

Attributes: A number of ways to go about this. It seems like one they want to do with the Fallout series is not penalize players for low Attribute scores. I think I'd personally feel better about this if they changed some of the meanings behind what these values represent. For example, instead of 5 supposedly representing an average value - it would work just as well if you had a range of 0-10 for each Attribute, with 0 representing the average human. Levels above zero would be more about adding extra benefits in regard to that Attribute. More than worrying about what you wanted to sacrifice in exchange for high values in other areas, it would be about deciding where you want your strengths to lie.

You could keep everything exactly the same, and just make that change, basically 0 would now be equal to a 5 in the current system, and getting higher would be in incremental steps equivalent to the current system. One thing I think would be interesting, though, would be to start the player out with fewer points to spend at character creation. If you had 20 points instead of 40, for example. If all you're getting is further advantages, then less points at the beginning wouldn't unbalance the game anyway. This would also open up more chances to find Attribute - raising stuff throughout the rest of the game without worrying about overpowering characters. (At 20 for the beginning, you could even allow the player to spend one Attribute point per level - so by the end of the game you'd end up with the equivalent of a 40-point character in the current system.) You could also limit Attributes to 5 at character creation, requiring more improvements through the game to get higher than that and make sure a character doesn't start out too high to make use of any Attribute-boosting things they'd find during the game.

Or, if we're going with 200 for skills, maybe 0-10 seems a bit out of place. To make the numbers "feel" a bit more equivalent, you could have Attributes range 1-20. In that sense, 5 would be average like it is now, and lower than that would be considered weaker. Rather than worrying about penalties for low Attribute scores below 5, it would be more a matter of just how low that Attribute is compared to the max. It would work somewhat similar to what I oultlined in the skill section: 10 would be "Master" status with higher than that being more about just how succesful you are in your success checks than it is about a simple pass/fail. Again - not any more complicated than the current system, and not a huge step away from what's already going on. And like skills, if all you did was change Attribute ranges to 1-20 and kept literally everything the same - character who wanted to generalize could still seek out a number of Attributes to level 10, but more specialized-intensive players would have something more to focus on.

And like skills, there's all sort of stuff you could add to that, but I think it might be a better base fit even if the numbers are the only thing that you end up changing. You could implement more uses to the Attributes (like in the old system) to a different range of numbers, etc, without requiring much of a worry about unbalancing.

Anyway, those are my ideas in coming up with something that's not a big departure from what we already have or changing the focus of the game, making things more complicated, etc. And assuming we're not going to just go back to the way it used to be before Fallout 3.

While I do agree that a big departure from the current system is less likely to succeed, there are some issues with your proposition. The skills would STILL have to be reworked in the way they function if they raised the cap. Some skills would have to be reworked because of this, and others need to be changed regardless. There is honestly not a functional use for the barter skill. Caps are never a problem. There is no drive to TAKE this skill.

As for attributes, there has to be SOME kind of penalty for having lower scores. Sure our character is going to be better than the average human, but with no sense of balance it loses its fun. Its not a matter of how our character compares to others in the world, its a matter of how powerful each attribute is compared to the others.

The problem is, some attributes grant better bonuses, while some really only grant skill bonuses, namely carry weight(STR), action points(AGI), critical chance (LUCK), and skill points(INT)... These are the priority attributes... the others are just to flavor. A player should have as much motivation to put his CHA at 9 and his INT at 1 as he does to put CHA1 INT9....

There has to be some form of opportunity cost, based on how you want to play the game.

Well, yeah. I'm just talking about at a minimum, though. I do agree some work needs to be done in the usefulness of many of these skills (Science being a one-trick pony, etc.) I'm just talking about balancing out how skills raise out. One thing I liked about having a higher skill cap in games like this is that I never really got all the way to 200 or 300 in any of these skills - it was just too much work. I like knowing that there's always room for my character to improve, even on their main skills. Raising up to 200 would achieve that. Obviously you'd have to add in incremental bonuses to things like that, and implement where it matters not only whether you made a skill roll, but in how successful you were in that roll. (Critical successes, and such. And this could work in regards to all skills, too.)

I was purposefully trying to not include stuff like that in my ideas, because I've found what I end up doing is spending more time talking about those minor points than the actual concept of the 200 point skill cap itself. (ie, if I'd said "Let's raise skills to 200 and have Science do a couple more things," I'd be defending the "Science" portion of the idea rather than the core concept.)

Hey, I like having the low INT dialogue choices and not being able to wield a minigun at low STR without investing some serious points into the skill to make up for the penalty. But if we're not going to get that, I think having to choose more between what you focus on would be a good compromise. If you get 20 points to spend in an Attribute range of 1-20, then your penalty for having a STR 15 would be that you wouldn't also be able to have 10's in all your other skills at the onset. If we can't have penalties, then I'd rather have some more emphasis on specialization.

And like the previous one - I'd also like to see 1-20 with a bit more use for all the Attributes (but even if we get that, it's unlikely there'll be penalties attached to any of those uses, either.) But if I start talking about that, then again the debate gets sidetracked onto those side issues instead of the main point I'm really trying to make. (Actually, sort of the opposite of what we're doing here - talking about whether to implement these things rather than how the core system would work... :vaultboy: )

Ah, I feel you there. Despite a lot of valid, thoughtful discussion, all posts get side tracked into details or other disputes.

I wanted to make a post dictating the 10 things I would do to make Fallout 4, but each requires too much detail to keep it on topic.

It's the sad truth about trying to use forums as a tool to communicate with the developers.


I totally agree that how you build your character should be focused on advantages and specialties, but the current system lends me to the same build everytime. If i want a speech character I STILL have CHA 1, because with INT 10, I can max speech, small guns, lockpick, medicine, science, explosives, energy weapons.... you get the point.

Generalists SHOULD exist, but that doesn't mean having 100 in lots of skills, it might mean having 60 in lots of skills.

Im all for having skills go to 200, and costing more to do so, so long as each skill will still serve a function at each level.



I really like your sigs btw =) everyone assumes because you find flaws you dont like a game, or because you enjoy a game, you think it has no flaws.

Hm. Well, they're likely going to increase the skill cap in Broken Steel, because I can't see how skills are going to work otherwise with those extra levels. A lot of people are able to legitimately get a lot of skills capped...heck, one skill can be brought nearly half way to cap with just three perks!

But raising the cap raises questions as to what happens to skills that do not scale with their skill level, specifically Lockpick and Science. There's not much for penalties in the game that would impact them enough to warrant more then a few skill points over 100. Stupid rule of 25.



Do they even look at these forums? I'd like to think that this is constructive and hopefully of use to them, but I've yet to see any of the developers post aside from 'meet the dev' topics, which have little to do with the game itself I find.

Talk about your favorite cereal, or what you like to drink (for ex coffee, Dr Pepper, energy drinks) or your favorite breakfast item (you know all the kind of useless banter you can think of). Maybe they'll post...course it probably won't be about what you want to discuss but hey.....

Yeah, I found I was repeatedly posting those two things over and over again, so I figured I'd just sig and save me the trouble of writing out a text file to serve as a disclaimer that I could copy/paste before I wrote anything trying to constructively criticise things in the game. Can't remember who said, but the gist was that what was most frustrating about this game in particular was just how close they got to something I could really get behind. It's like the awful inventory system in Mass Effect - it sticks out primarily because the rest of the game was so well-crafted. They put so much thought into so many things in Fallout 3, and it shows in every respect save for the ruleset (at least in my mind.) Every other aspect even if they fell a little short of their goal - I can still see where they were trying to go.

With a lot of the things I see in the rules - I don't clearly see their reasoining behind many of these changes. I can understand that they're trying to streamline things to make it a more accessible game for the "casual" crowd (and I think developers often under-estimate their intelligence) but I don't see how they thought through the ramifications of many of these changes, either. And considering that this is a game after all - I would think that the one thing you want to get right is how that works. Many of the rules feel a bit like they were tacked onto a game that in many ways has more in common with something like System Shock (not as that's such a bad thing, either.) It feels to me like if in GTA they made a game with high production values and good voice acting, and all the other trappings of a good GTA game, and then didn't bother making sure the driving portion of the game was up to the same standards as the rest of the game.

You'd have to change things like that bit if you went past 100 for skills, certainly. Personally, I'm not a fan of the "25 or bust" thing they have going on in with those skills. I'd like to be able to at least try to hack a terminal if I was a couple points (or even well under) the minimum required. What I would like to see if we went to 200 (and this would be more likely in a hypothetical Fallout 4, of course) is that up to 100 you're dealing primarily with pass/fail mechanics. Either you hack that terminal or you don't. Past 100 up to 200 a success is almost guaranteed, barring a critical fail, and the focus is more on seeing how well you succeed at a particular task. So hacking a terminal and succeeding well past the minimum required could net you extra information or options, for example. Or open up access to other terminals on that network (just throwing ideas out here - the idea is to give further benefits to wildly succeeding at a task as opposed to simply making it.)

Barter could also be tied to the margin by which you succeed. Critically pass that skill roll, and not only could the vendors offer you discounts, but could offer you items from their special stock, or even give you hints at to where further loot could be found, etc. Going past 100 would do more than just guarantee a success, it would increase the margin by which you would succeed at your tasks. The trick would be to make that an important factor.

I'm not holding out too much hope. I wouldn't be suprised if a Developer swings by to lurk on occasion to test the waters and see what discussion is going on, but I'd be totally flabbergasted if any specific ideas we come up with in these forums end up in the next game by anything save coincidence. Myself, I'm very much interested in the philosophies behind game design, and am involved on a significantly more indie-level in making games of my own, so I find these sort of discussions to be interesting and fun challenges. It escapes me as to why anyone ever bothers to respond to anything I have to say, however.

I'll be blunt, I played Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 (Never played Tactics) and I honesty enjoyed how much more well developed the stories went and how much more frustratingly realistic the skill system seemed to be, but the days of the old well written and complex in depth RPG is gone until the companies peak with graphics and physic systems. Generally, it's much more profitable to put out a piece of eye candy that appeals to a large margin than a master piece that appeals to the few.

Just my two cents.

It's interesting of course



That's one reason why I like to talk about the rules behind games. It's always fun to see what their reasons were, then to discuss those reasons.

Some of the changes I just can't wrap my head around. For example, AP. They went and made this drastically different system....that basically accomplishes what was there before, just with different numbers. Maybe I can get an extra shot or so with this current system, but they would have accomplished that with the Quick Shot Trait and the AP values from before. With no insight to WHY they made these changes, it seems like a lot of needless effort. I mean, if you OWN the rights to the original ruleset....why spend all this effort to drastically change it? In all the previews and interviews....how they were approaching SPECIAL was completely left out. So frustrating




I wouldn't mind a simple pass/fail system, but I think there's some merit to what they attempted. They just missed the mark a bit lol. The rule of 25 cripples the concept horribly in my eyes, with it's all or nothing silliness. It had a chance to be really innovative, combining both player skill AND the lockpick skill.



It's sad, isn't it? Sometimes I wish developers would have a side division for making not necessarily blockbuster games, but smaller, almost indie type games.

Huh. I guess that's kinda what BIS was lol....

OP:

I carefully read your opening post and it seems to me that you are approaching Fallout as a combat game. To me, combat in an RPG is secondary to the roleplay. I agree that stats should carry more weight, but when you mentioned that CHA wasn't important to you in FO1/2, I have to wonder how important the non combat aspect of the game is to you.

That's one thing I really wondered about, too. Why change the whole AP rate at all? We went from a simple 1-10 to... according the Vault the highest maximum (taking into account drugs and other boots) is 260. I mean obviously the point cost was adjusted as well.

My guess is that it has to do with trying to have APs refresh in real-time and being modified by your AGI score. The wider the numerical range you have, the more variation you can have in how long it takes your AP meter to recharge.

But yeah - I'd like nothing more than to see an interview with some of the Devs discussing some of the reasons behind their decisions. I'm not saying they wouldn't have any reasons (though chances are I might disagree with many of them) but it would still answer a lot of questions at the same time.

I like the idea of the mini-games as well, actually. What I'd like to see is something where you could make an attempt regardless of skill, but the difficulty increased exponentially the further away you were from the minimum. And conversely, became easier the higher you were over the level (which they have, of course.)

I can't speak for the OP, of course. But for me, it is a lot easier to quantify the combat aspects of the game. There's a lot more numbers involved that aren't "under the hood," which you can compare with the earlier games. And you can discuss the mechanics in a more objective way (though it is, of course, entirely subjective in regards to whether or not this is even an issue in Fallout 3.)

When it comes to Charisma, though - it's a lot harder to quantify to the same degree. I can't even really say just what went on behind the scenes with Charisma in Fallout 1 and 2, much less how it compares to this game. It's my understanding that in Fallout 3 it's more about modifying speech success, whereas in previous games it also modified NPCs reactions and first impressions of your character. In the "talking head" portions, I noticed some difference in the facial expressions they gave you (with low CHA I got a lot more frowny faces at the beginning of the conversation, and with a higher Charisma I was less likely to offend the NPCs and could recover easier from any mis-steps I took.) But I can't really talk numbers or compare the effects between the two ways of doing things.

If I had my choice, I'd like to see in Fallout 4 a bit more weight given to Charisma in how NPCs first approach and react to your character - but I haven't done a bunch of playthroughs and research to really say to what degree I'd like to see this done, how to go about it, or how to quantify it in a more objective manner.

Hmm.

Actually, now that one mentions it...

There wasn't a whole lot Charisma affected in the first games, at least that I recalled, beyond Barter, Speech, and follower limit, and the first two can be compensated by skills...

Although I'd need to go back and take a bigger look at the conversation options...but Intelligence had a way bigger impact, particulary if you went with a stupid character (which is very amusing, but challenging)

But that basically comes down to coming up with more and better dialogue options.

There really isn't a need to "fix" the system, the system worked just fine in the first two.(Barring some tweaks that need made that pretty much everyone agrees on)

The problem is...

1. Bethseda doesn't seem to want to make games based on character skill, and as such, skills will remain largely useless. When your game is based on the Player's skill, the Character's is never going to have much of an affect. Lockpicking for example will never do much more than be a gateway for you to use your skill.

2. Bethseda doesn't seem to want to make games with exclusionary content. They seem to want everyone to be able to do everything. So Skills must be largely unimportant, because if they are important, then you have to start excluding people who've chosen not to invest in X.

This is a symptom of the design. You can't waffle between Player and Character skill and have skills be important, nor can you let everyone do everything and let skills be important. You have to commit to one or the other, excise the other choice, and go with it. You have to commit to exclusionary content, or commit to letting everyone do everything and excise skills.

In short, you can't have cake and eat it to, you've gotta make a choice at some point. Otherwise you get Oblivion or F3 where skills are largely redundant.

I see it as a bit more a sliding bar than an either/ or, though. I think you can make a game where player skill plays a role, but where character skill is also an important factor as well. ie, you can be the greatest FPS player in the world, but you're still going to have a hard time doing much with that 10mm if you have no Small Guns skill. The extent to which this is true is a variable rather than an on/off, the way I see things.

I think you are right about the exclusionary/do-everything philosophies, though. But if you're not going to limit what options are available to the player, you might at least be able to differentiate between where your strengths are with a more elegant stat system.

As far as mini-games go, I actually like them. Especially in the Hacking game, character skill seems to play a role in success, though obviously it's simply more a matter of the ease of your success. (ie, if you have the minimum Science to hack a terminal, you're going to be able to hack that terminal - but the higher your skill level is, the easier it is to get through it.) What a mini-game can do is provide the illusion that you're really having an effect on the outcome. That's sort of what the hacking does. You're going to succeed at that hack (unless you go hard-core and don't log out after 3 mistakes and retry) so it's not really any different than if you automatically succeeded if you had the minimum level and went straight to the selecting whether or not to diable the turret instead of doing the min-game first. Adding the mini-game just adds a bit more flavor to the game, if all you're really doing is making the player think they're playing a role in succeeding at the task.

This was exactly what I felt when playing Fallout 3. In fact, there was a point with my "I only have 7 SPECIAL points" character where jumping around like a monkey saved my butt. It looked stupid, I felt stupid, but I survived against the raider who couldn't decide if she wanted to shoot me with a rocket launcher or a 32 pistol

I really think they need to find a way to reintroduce AC back into the game.



Exactly. Just look at the plethora of ways to get skillpoints. Bobbleheads, books at every turn, not to mention the numberous multi ranked Perks that gave 10 or more skill points. Before, those Perks were one shots, and never for combat skills.

BTW, I'm really liking the tone we're using here. I can only imagine one of the reasons devs avoid mingling in topics like this is because of how toxic some individuals can be....

I like where this is heading... But how do you balance a system based on both player skill and character skill? (The million dollar question) Let's use lockpicking as an example... It's frustrating when I simply am not able to crack a 75 when i have 73. The rule of 25s IS essentially a pass/fail system. The minigame is superfluous. How do you make it attemptable but more difficult? It will jam on failure? What about the included bypass feature "force lock?"

Hm. I've always thought the whole "Force Lock" function to be rather silly. Isn't that what you're doing in the first place?

Anyways, the mechanics are fine, they just need to be creative with how your skill affects it. Rather then being an on/off situation, I still think they should have a % based off your skill if you jam the lock when you break a pick, or have the skill determine how many times you can break a pick before jamming the lock.

They're so close to making it a cool system, they just need to think outside the box and be creative. And murder the rule of 25.

Lockpick could be an easy one - just decrease the "sweet spot" range when picking a lock if you're lower than the minimum. What I'd rather see is instead of setting a level of skill that you'd need to access that mini-game, just do difficulty modifiers like an old-school tabletop game. You have your base skill, which determines how "spot-on" you have to be with the position of the lockpick, and a "25" lockpick would decrease your effective skill level by 25 points for that purpose. This would also help in raising the skill limit to 200 - so for a character picking a level 100 lock with a skill level of 200, it would be a breeze - but picking a "100" lock with a skill level of 150 would feel like it does now trying to pick a level 50 pick in the current system. (I have noticed that harder locks are a bit harder to pick.)

You'd just have to work out a range of player difficulty in solving that lock that accomodated for negative effective skill levels due to the difficulty modifier (trying to pick a "100" lock with a skill level of 50 would give you a -50 effective skill level - so you'd have to work out just how hard that is - and possibly adding in chances of breaking the lock if you don't get it in the first couple tries, etc.)

Not sure if that's really helping the "player skill" problem all that much, though. Honestly, I don't break all that many locks in Fallout 3 either way - basically if I'm at a skill level to pick that lock, it's going to get cracked. It might take a bit longer some times, but it's also pretty much a done deal. I really don't feel there's that much skill involved with either of the mini-games, once you get a handle on how they work. Unless you're very unskilled at that mini-game, it's going to succeed.

The trick would be to come up with a way of doing the mini-game in such a way that failure is a very real option if your skill level was too low. If we could make the player replace the random element of figuring out success, you'd have a win/win. Because yeah - it should be primarily about character skill (at least that's my preference if you put a gun to my head and made me choose.) But I also find that the mini-games add an interesting element to it as well. I'd even like to see more of them, if you're going that route - a Repair mini-game could be interesting, as well.

One way of doing it (and you'd have to rework some things) is that success or fail is decided entirely by character skill, but in such a way that the player doesn't realize. And the player element would be more about adding in a variable where it mattered to what degree you passed or failed the task. No solid ideas on that point, though.

*sigh* another post moved to the less read forum.

Well, the problem as I see it is that the game itself is not hard even at a VERY HARD rated lock. Perhaps at lower skills the bobby pin is more sensitve to pressure, and you only get a limited number of attempts before the lock is jammed. You don't even have to include it in the description specifically like "Higher skills make the bobby pin less sensitive to pressure.", but just have it gradually become easier.

At the same time, a lot of things DONT have minigames. Pickpocketing for example, and speech (thank goodness, I wasn't a fan of Oblivion speech game) are purely pass/fail. And I dont feel I have a big problem with these.

I really do hope they fix the ruleset, as its one of the things that I feel holds the game down in terms of role-playing.

Yeah, if you had a range where picking a hard lock at lower skill is very hard, while picking a low lock at high skill level was incredibly easy...

With hacking, it could be less about bypassing passwords, and more about pulling corrupted information out of the computer (these things are 200 years, a lot of the data could be very degraded by that point.) So your skill level (and the difficulty level of the computer) could factor into how much decipherable information you're able to pull out of the computer. So if you passed the attempt, but by a slim margin - a lot of what you're reading is just garbled gibberish. How well you did in the mini-game could also factor into that as well. Honestly with that mini-game, I was half-expecting to have a timer based on my skill and the diff. level. In that regard, it could be less about hacking, but more about restoring some sort of structure to the program and making some of it somewhat readable.

The degree by which you pass could also factor into what options are open for things like turrets, etc. So if you just barely made it, you only had the option to turn it on or off. If you passed with flying colors, you could also be able to change the targeting parameters, etc.

(And of course, if Science continues to only be used for hacking computers - they might as well just change the name to "Computers." No sense in pretending it's something it's not.)

Agreed. There's lots of talk about "immersion" in this game, and what breaks it. The rules are the number one "immersion-breaker" for me, however. If I'm pretending I'm a weaker character who has trouble wielding a Fatman, for instance, even though the rules don't support it; or limiting myself to how much ammo I carry; or not picking up Bobbleheads - that's every bit as "immersion-breaking" to me as a player as other have with things like "Magic Clothing" or the Quest Compass.