Re: [Audyssey] Swamp: brainstorming ideas for expansion and player limiting.
I agree with everything except the safe zone being finite. In a realistic situation, it would be, and I get that. It would also mean that people donating becomes more mandatory, but the trouble is that we have people who go play for a while and stop, taking stuff from the safe zone to start out and never giving back, and then we have people who play for days on end and use pretty much all the ammo they collect. I'd rather leave the safe zone alone, though I do like the idea of ready weapons versus carried weapons. As for specializations, I think that each level should allow a skill point, rather like the skillpoints in most RPG type games. Yeah, eventually you get someone who has played enough to get every skill maxed out, but that's going to happen in most games. A wide variety of skills would be pretty awesome. Also, the number of levels in a skill could be decided on and could be pretty high, meaning that even if you have, like, level 35, you still aren't at maximum. For example: Quiet movement: which lowers your detection rate. The different categories of weapons, either light, medium, and heavy or pistols, rifles, shotguns, light automatics, medium automatics, and heavy automatics as well as melee, grenades and such, medkit boosts. There's possibility there for about ten different skills, plus you might be able to do skills for accuracy boosts and damage boosts in conjunction with weapons, meaning even more skills. THen you could have a skill whose sole benefit is a bigger health bar. My point is that specialization could be entirely based on character choice, making it even broader than the soldier, medic, sniper, etc. For example, you could put a bunch of skills into your different weapons, or you could put a bunch in moving quietly and work toward sneaking in and killing zombies close up. Signed: Dakotah Rickard On 12/13/11, Christopher Bartlett themusicalbre...@gmail.com wrote: The following are some concepts I've been playing with as additions to the game. Skills. I don't know what future things are tied in to the current experience system, but an alternative to an overall level would be to subdivide experience by spending it on skills. Begin with an initial award for a new character, and gain experience as normal, except that dependent upon the weapon you are using, the experience is added to the pile for the given skill, rather than as an overall level. Skills might include medic, (small award for healing yourself, larger for healing others) pistols, rifles, shotguns and heavy weapons. When grenades come into play, then grenadier could also be a skill. Skill benefits might include more healing per kit for the medic skill and accuracy boosts for the weapon skills, not so that a miss becomes a hit, but so that each hit becomes more damaging. What might be a graze only doing small damage would become a more damaging strike. To balance this, death should cost experience points equal to a third of each skill category. Weapons at the zone should have level minima as they do now, but specific to their skill category. As levels will advance more slowly with the points being divided up, the minima should be lower than they are now for some of the heavier weapons. Finally, when a character begins play for the first time, he/she should be issued a weapon to match his skill specialization. After death, go back to the pistol, but give the newbie characters a little boost. The advantages I see to this wad of modifications are that they would support character differentiation with mechanical rewards/limitations. In turn, this could encourage some very different playing styles and specializations, which would come into play when group missions are available. It would then become a good idea to have a sniper, a couple soldier types and a medic on your expedition. Each could fulfill particular roles, to the benefit of the mission. Alternately, it creates an interesting choice say for the pistol specialist who is confronting a situation where a rifle might be more useful. Does he stick with his weapon of greatest skill, trading range for accuracy, or does he pick up the rifle and go at it? To support these ideas, we'd need at least a couple more pistols and submachine guns, of which there are currently only one of each. Add in, say an Uzi, tougher to break than the MP5 (they are legendary for being able to fire under extremely bad conditions) and maybe a Gloch or something with a bigger magazine, and a Desert Eagle with six shots but more stopping power. This would add some ammo types to the game as well, 9MM and .44 I believe. Inventory. Players should have ready weapons and carried weapons. Given the nature of looting, it would be over complicated to limit the absolute number of weapons carried, but each character should choose two ready weapons which can be readily swapped. If they want to go to one of the carried but
Re: [Audyssey] Swamp: brainstorming ideas for expansion and player limiting.
these are grate ideas On 12/14/11, Dakotah Rickard dakotah.rick...@gmail.com wrote: I agree with everything except the safe zone being finite. In a realistic situation, it would be, and I get that. It would also mean that people donating becomes more mandatory, but the trouble is that we have people who go play for a while and stop, taking stuff from the safe zone to start out and never giving back, and then we have people who play for days on end and use pretty much all the ammo they collect. I'd rather leave the safe zone alone, though I do like the idea of ready weapons versus carried weapons. As for specializations, I think that each level should allow a skill point, rather like the skillpoints in most RPG type games. Yeah, eventually you get someone who has played enough to get every skill maxed out, but that's going to happen in most games. A wide variety of skills would be pretty awesome. Also, the number of levels in a skill could be decided on and could be pretty high, meaning that even if you have, like, level 35, you still aren't at maximum. For example: Quiet movement: which lowers your detection rate. The different categories of weapons, either light, medium, and heavy or pistols, rifles, shotguns, light automatics, medium automatics, and heavy automatics as well as melee, grenades and such, medkit boosts. There's possibility there for about ten different skills, plus you might be able to do skills for accuracy boosts and damage boosts in conjunction with weapons, meaning even more skills. THen you could have a skill whose sole benefit is a bigger health bar. My point is that specialization could be entirely based on character choice, making it even broader than the soldier, medic, sniper, etc. For example, you could put a bunch of skills into your different weapons, or you could put a bunch in moving quietly and work toward sneaking in and killing zombies close up. Signed: Dakotah Rickard On 12/13/11, Christopher Bartlett themusicalbre...@gmail.com wrote: The following are some concepts I've been playing with as additions to the game. Skills. I don't know what future things are tied in to the current experience system, but an alternative to an overall level would be to subdivide experience by spending it on skills. Begin with an initial award for a new character, and gain experience as normal, except that dependent upon the weapon you are using, the experience is added to the pile for the given skill, rather than as an overall level. Skills might include medic, (small award for healing yourself, larger for healing others) pistols, rifles, shotguns and heavy weapons. When grenades come into play, then grenadier could also be a skill. Skill benefits might include more healing per kit for the medic skill and accuracy boosts for the weapon skills, not so that a miss becomes a hit, but so that each hit becomes more damaging. What might be a graze only doing small damage would become a more damaging strike. To balance this, death should cost experience points equal to a third of each skill category. Weapons at the zone should have level minima as they do now, but specific to their skill category. As levels will advance more slowly with the points being divided up, the minima should be lower than they are now for some of the heavier weapons. Finally, when a character begins play for the first time, he/she should be issued a weapon to match his skill specialization. After death, go back to the pistol, but give the newbie characters a little boost. The advantages I see to this wad of modifications are that they would support character differentiation with mechanical rewards/limitations. In turn, this could encourage some very different playing styles and specializations, which would come into play when group missions are available. It would then become a good idea to have a sniper, a couple soldier types and a medic on your expedition. Each could fulfill particular roles, to the benefit of the mission. Alternately, it creates an interesting choice say for the pistol specialist who is confronting a situation where a rifle might be more useful. Does he stick with his weapon of greatest skill, trading range for accuracy, or does he pick up the rifle and go at it? To support these ideas, we'd need at least a couple more pistols and submachine guns, of which there are currently only one of each. Add in, say an Uzi, tougher to break than the MP5 (they are legendary for being able to fire under extremely bad conditions) and maybe a Gloch or something with a bigger magazine, and a Desert Eagle with six shots but more stopping power. This would add some ammo types to the game as well, 9MM and .44 I believe. Inventory. Players should have ready weapons and carried weapons. Given the nature of looting, it would be over complicated to limit the absolute number of weapons carried, but each
Re: [Audyssey] Swamp: brainstorming ideas for expansion and player limiting.
Your idea of one skill point per level (or more, depending on how many levels for each skill and how many skills there are is simpler than what I had suggested, so I'd support using your plan instead of mine. One reason I suggested the safe zone idea is that there is currently no incentive for working together, no sense that the survivors should be working together for a common goal. Since the number of zombies is relatively stable, kill one and one pops up somewhere else, there's no way to deplete the enemies with a concerted attack. We aren't working towards anything other than our own advancement. I'd like to see the game head in a direction where players are forced to work for something other than their own good, where sacrifice might even make sense for the survivor community as a whole. A safe zone restricted to what loot is donated would be a step towards this idea. Another step would be to change the spawning model to a certain number of zombies spawned per unit time, regardless of the number already in play. There may be times when life gets difficult as the zombie density increases beyond safe limits, at which point some concerted attacks will need to be brought to bear to lower the population. The safe zone guard should be removed, so that keeping the approaches to the fortress open becomes a player responsibility. (of course the zone has to be sacrosanct, zombies should never appear in the zone, though if they wander in, that's another issue to be dealt with by the players. I know that we have missions to look forward to, and I am, but I don't see them addressing this question of group good vs. individual achievement. Unless there is a mechanical tie-in, i.e. something goes terribly wrong for everybody if a given mission isn't accomplished in a certain amount of time, then it's just another bug hunt, a fascinating one I will enjoy, but it's not high stakes except individually. If others would enjoy having this aspect of play come into being, I'd be interested in ideas for how to mechanically make it happen. Chris Bartlett -Original Message- From: gamers-boun...@audyssey.org [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of Dakotah Rickard Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2011 10:49 AM To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Swamp: brainstorming ideas for expansion and player limiting. I agree with everything except the safe zone being finite. In a realistic situation, it would be, and I get that. It would also mean that people donating becomes more mandatory, but the trouble is that we have people who go play for a while and stop, taking stuff from the safe zone to start out and never giving back, and then we have people who play for days on end and use pretty much all the ammo they collect. I'd rather leave the safe zone alone, though I do like the idea of ready weapons versus carried weapons. As for specializations, I think that each level should allow a skill point, rather like the skillpoints in most RPG type games. Yeah, eventually you get someone who has played enough to get every skill maxed out, but that's going to happen in most games. A wide variety of skills would be pretty awesome. Also, the number of levels in a skill could be decided on and could be pretty high, meaning that even if you have, like, level 35, you still aren't at maximum. For example: Quiet movement: which lowers your detection rate. The different categories of weapons, either light, medium, and heavy or pistols, rifles, shotguns, light automatics, medium automatics, and heavy automatics as well as melee, grenades and such, medkit boosts. There's possibility there for about ten different skills, plus you might be able to do skills for accuracy boosts and damage boosts in conjunction with weapons, meaning even more skills. THen you could have a skill whose sole benefit is a bigger health bar. My point is that specialization could be entirely based on character choice, making it even broader than the soldier, medic, sniper, etc. For example, you could put a bunch of skills into your different weapons, or you could put a bunch in moving quietly and work toward sneaking in and killing zombies close up. Signed: Dakotah Rickard On 12/13/11, Christopher Bartlett themusicalbre...@gmail.com wrote: The following are some concepts I've been playing with as additions to the game. Skills. I don't know what future things are tied in to the current experience system, but an alternative to an overall level would be to subdivide experience by spending it on skills. Begin with an initial award for a new character, and gain experience as normal, except that dependent upon the weapon you are using, the experience is added to the pile for the given skill, rather than as an overall level. Skills might include medic, (small award for healing yourself, larger for healing others) pistols, rifles, shotguns and heavy weapons. When grenades come into play, then grenadier could also
[Audyssey] Swamp: brainstorming ideas for expansion and player limiting.
The following are some concepts I've been playing with as additions to the game. Skills. I don't know what future things are tied in to the current experience system, but an alternative to an overall level would be to subdivide experience by spending it on skills. Begin with an initial award for a new character, and gain experience as normal, except that dependent upon the weapon you are using, the experience is added to the pile for the given skill, rather than as an overall level. Skills might include medic, (small award for healing yourself, larger for healing others) pistols, rifles, shotguns and heavy weapons. When grenades come into play, then grenadier could also be a skill. Skill benefits might include more healing per kit for the medic skill and accuracy boosts for the weapon skills, not so that a miss becomes a hit, but so that each hit becomes more damaging. What might be a graze only doing small damage would become a more damaging strike. To balance this, death should cost experience points equal to a third of each skill category. Weapons at the zone should have level minima as they do now, but specific to their skill category. As levels will advance more slowly with the points being divided up, the minima should be lower than they are now for some of the heavier weapons. Finally, when a character begins play for the first time, he/she should be issued a weapon to match his skill specialization. After death, go back to the pistol, but give the newbie characters a little boost. The advantages I see to this wad of modifications are that they would support character differentiation with mechanical rewards/limitations. In turn, this could encourage some very different playing styles and specializations, which would come into play when group missions are available. It would then become a good idea to have a sniper, a couple soldier types and a medic on your expedition. Each could fulfill particular roles, to the benefit of the mission. Alternately, it creates an interesting choice say for the pistol specialist who is confronting a situation where a rifle might be more useful. Does he stick with his weapon of greatest skill, trading range for accuracy, or does he pick up the rifle and go at it? To support these ideas, we'd need at least a couple more pistols and submachine guns, of which there are currently only one of each. Add in, say an Uzi, tougher to break than the MP5 (they are legendary for being able to fire under extremely bad conditions) and maybe a Gloch or something with a bigger magazine, and a Desert Eagle with six shots but more stopping power. This would add some ammo types to the game as well, 9MM and .44 I believe. Inventory. Players should have ready weapons and carried weapons. Given the nature of looting, it would be over complicated to limit the absolute number of weapons carried, but each character should choose two ready weapons which can be readily swapped. If they want to go to one of the carried but unready weapons, impose a delay in switching, and the formerly ready weapon becomes unready. Example: Mad Dog Riley is armed to the teeth. Given his specialties, he choose the Benelli and the MP5 as his ready weapons. After a firefight in the church, he emerges, low on health to find himself confronted by a dozen or more of the undead blocking his path to safety. Well crap, thinks he, I'm almost out of .45 rounds, and the Benelli is nice for stopping power, but I'm going to get overrun. Does he stick with what he has ready, or does he take the extra time to unlimber the M60 for crowd control purposes. I'm also suggesting that the safe zone storage be finite and change based on donations/withdrawals. So if no one has been donating .45 ammo, you're out of luck if you need it for your MP5. To balance this, we should be able to pick up more than one of a given weapon type, or else there would never be weapons available for purchase from the Zone. The best games are about forcing players to make choices, each of which is high stakes. These points become the places around which the story of the game revolves. This is the idea that is behind every suggestion I make for advances in the game. As it stands right now, I have to royally screw up to die, even fresh from having done so and being out of ammunition. I have praised Jeremy for creating a game that rewards caution and patience. I'm looking forward to the missions to provide incentives to throw caution to the wind and dare the odds. I'd like to see every decision made have impact on the character's future. Chris Bartlett --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at
