|
ZacQuicksilver
|
 |
« Reply #7 on: July 20, 2008, 12:39:14 AM » |
|
I'm going to post based on my own game. The game I speak of is a Pencil and Paper combat game I'm working into an RPG. The core mechanic is you take your EXP in a skill, add a d100, and your opponent does the same. High roll wins.
In the beginning, EXP was gained based on one's opponent's skills: If we were evenly matched, we had the same chance to gain EXP, no matter who won. If I was better, and I won, it was harder for me to gain EXP if I won, and easier for you. There was no cap, except that provided by your opponent's abilities (if you were too much better than them, you couldn't gain EXP from them). The exact chances have been tweaked over time, and still get tweaked occasionally.
However, there was one problem with this: I could spend a long time trading blows with a creature slightly more powerful than me, then fight a weaker creature, and be practically invincible. I could spend time advancing some other skill up to a point where I could take on creatures as powerful as me with it.
I've messed with caps since then, but where it's at now is that after a certain point, your advancement slows down. In my game, which has a fantasy theme, I can divide characters into classes, and vary how much it slows down (Fighters don't slow down much when they hit the cap in Melee combat, but stop almost completely if they hit the cap in anything Magic related). Not sure if you can do that in this game, although it might be an idea to bring up later.
The second way to advance is to kill monsters. When you kill an enemy, you get a small EXP bonus, which can go wherever you want. This has gone through several phases:
During the first phase, it was a flat amount based on the monster. This broke down because you could kill weak creatures which couldn't threaten you, and which you would gain nothing from through an entire battle because they were that much worse than you. But when they died: free EXP. Even in that skill you had capped.
So I made you roll for it, same as if you won a roll against them. I'm thinking over this summer how to change this a little, because there are some things you can spend EXP from one neglected skill on, and benefit a skill you've gotten really good at.
Where I'm going with this is that capping skills is useful, but you don't want to make in an absolute cap. Ideally, you set it up so that people who are ahead of the curve are slowed down, so that they stay ahead, but can't be complacent; while people who are behind the curve are sped up, but not so much that they can overtake someone who is working just as hard as them, but got a head start.
With the current system, I'm willing to bet Soviet could take a day or two off (maybe longer), and still be on top. If not, he'd still be in the top ten: X Ray, at 9, is 1/10 as powerful as Soviet is. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I doubt I am.
What I suggest is that there be three restrictions:
1) Each person has a hidden value based on who they are hacking and being hacked by: perhaps the average value of the Power of each interaction (an interaction is a crack, a debug, a virus capture, or any such thing. The power of the interaction is the Power of they player it is with, reduced if they are unsuccessful for any reason). If this hidden value is lower that their own power, their research slows down. This should never stop a player; but it should be able to slow them down noticeably.
2) Overloading X(n) should increase the costs (n)fold, but increase the effective version by the base version times Sum(1/2, 1/3,...,1/(n)); or have some other limitation that means that the more you put in, the more you get, but in diminishing amounts.
3) Hardware costs should increase by 1% the base costs per previous upgrade. Yes you can always buy more computation power, but it costs money to buy the space to put it, and to make sure it's working with everything else; and as you get more, that gets more and more costly.
Finally, as a bonus, whenever you use a program to beat a better program, there should be a small chance that you find a way to optimize the software slightly, adding less than .001 to the software used. Likewise, if you beat a program better than one you have, the same things happens: A small chance for a minor upgrade. These small upgrades will keep newer players advancing, while making the better players tend to seek out challenges.
|
