Skill System

[theguruofreason 1]

There are ways to dramatically change the meta-game in the right direction that would probably require less effort than adding and balancing dogs. For instance, adding skills to survivors that give minor bonuses, such as medical skills (maybe it takes less time to transfuse, bandage, morphine, and epi, and there's a chance that the item is not consumed when used), or engineering skills (same deal but for repairing vehicles). I actually have a whole set of ideas for skills that could be developed with very little work. These accomplish many of the goals of improving meta-game in meaningful ways; you may not want to kill someone if they're a good doctor or mechanic because their skills can be valuable to you as well if you team up. This encourages player interaction and provides a great reason to avoid death other than having to gear up again.

There should be 2 kinds of skill ranks for each skill; theoretical and practical. Theoretical skill ranks would unlock new actions, such as applying morphine and transfusing, while practical skill ranks would improve the ability to perform those actions (quickness of action, chance of not consuming item used, and reduction in critical failure chance, for example). This would come with the addition of new items to the game: skillbooks. Reading skillbooks would increase theoretical skill, allowing players to gain access to new actions easily and quickly by obtaining and reading skillbooks, or being taught by players who already have the theoretical skill level (new player interaction, nice?). For balance reasons, skill books might need to be consumed upon use (otherwise you could just stockpile 1 of each and skill out at a tent). Practical skill levels will be gained by performing the actions, and will be given skill-gain bonuses if supervised by an already skilled player. This fixes a lot of problems I believe many players are having with the meta-game; not much meaning to survival, little player interaction besides shooting/healing each other, very little reason to think before shooting another player, general boredom once geared, etc.

Potential Skills:

Hunting - alters use of bear traps or other potential traps you could set, in adition to allowing more meat from gutting animals, also possible tracking skill.

Medical - alters use of medical items and gives a chance to not consume medical items upon use. Also, if infection from wounds is added, could alter treatment of or prevention of infections.

Engineering - alters amount of parts required to fix vehicles, and allows repairing in the first place. If scavenging is introduced, will increase amount of scavenged material from cars and whatnot.

Aerobics - slightly increases run speed and ability to run without getting tired (very slightly).

Swimming - slightly increases swim speed (should up swim speed anyway, it's preposteriously slow).

I also will propose a crafting system to swing us away from simply looting powerful guns and going and killing people with them (making the game basically a deathmatch) and towards small arms, ammo management, and need to scavenge for parts to create weapons and ammo. This will be in another thread. Obviously, skills related to crafting would be added for that as well, and should follow a similar overall design. I also suggest weapon durabilities with an additional repair or maintainance skill, but I will save those for the crafting thread.

Edited September 4, 2012 by theguruofreason

[Ashnik 113]

I have seen this a couple times. Each one just a bit different. :/ They're all decent in a way.

Aerobics is already in. Team up with a bandit with you having a hero skin and see who runs faster?

[Captain"hawkeye" 0]

Very well thought out you have my beans. :)