Crappy stats

AC Wrote:
"Strength - I don't often play warriors so I shouldn't care about strength, right? But I often play characters who like to collect stuff, bags and bags of stuff. It sucks to not be able to unload your pack animal because you can't carry that much weight, if I couldn't carry that much weight, how did I pack it all on there in the first place?! Great for anyone without a storage room."

I used to think about the packing problem, but I learned that when you actually wear a pack full of stuff it weighs less then when you hold it. So in that rush to remove your pack and pack it. Your actually going to have a harder time taking it off the mount if your encumbering yourself more.

Your the goddess of Arm knowledge so you probably knew this... but its an opprotunity to possibly teach someone something so... there you go!

[Rindan]

I wouldn't mind seeing a tag system that would allow you to select one stat from the four as your primary stat, the other three being randomised. I think if something like this was added it would be better if it was something you chose right when you enter the game after your PC has been approved and all that. Maybe would cut out all the disconnections that would occur if you got to see your stats during character creation as people searched for super statman. I know it's possible that you could get four crappy stats but I think odds are very good that you'll get at least one decent one. If you did get four crappy ones well then I guess you'd just have to deal with it much like people do now but it should happen a lot less.

A tag system is an excellent way to make sure that every single desert elf ever made tags strength.

[Lazloth]

This thread is long and overly thrashed, but I'll say (again, as elsewhere) that the OOC baggage with viewing a char's particular stat(s) is trivially and simply removed/remedied by nixxing the two lines from 'stat' or 'score' or wherever it is that shows up.

To a large degree, this was evidenced with the [d-]evolution of 'skills'.

[creeper386]

Lazloth, if you cut out those two lines in "score" you might stop the complaining of people getting low stats, but it's just going to make a BIG problem for people that play with the stats. If my characters have higher strength and low agility, they are more likely to get heftier armour and big weapons. If they have the oppossite, they are likely to wear VERY light armour, small weapons, and really on being quicker then their opponents. If I can't tell rather I have high or low wisdom, my characters are all going to be generic. I play most my characters as fairly intelligent, but I use what my wisdom is to determine other various things that I don't normally think about ICally. Also, if my character has lower endurance, he's going to be paying alot more attention to where and how far he's traveling, although you can see how much stamina you have it seems to me higher endurance tends to affect how much that goes down when moving and how fast you recover. Lower endurance means I may end up stopping to rest more often instead of waiting the first time I get completely tired, I sit down and rest, and it takes most the day before I recover and by then I've already gotten aten by three scrab, a mek, and several other creatures.

All of this is IC knowledge. It's something my character would know that would effect how my character acts, not something I know that I let it effect how my character acts. It also helps me set up who my character is, although I get a general feel for who my character is when I submit it, I don't finish it up completely, fold everything together and touch it up, untill I'm in the game. Without those two little lines, I'm probably going to be loosing a whole lot of characters and have no chance of not loosing them. Either they get stuck out in the dunes, or they starve/dehydrate because I spent so much money on armour that they can't even effectively use, and so on and so forth.

Creeper who still thinks it'd be funner to see a hot-head noble join the Byn.

[Stroker]

Lets think about this for a moment - do you want to be the best? Well personally I do in RL, same goes for the human characters on Zalanthas, or at least I think so. Well some other races may not be influenced by the human desires of being the best and they just feel that their best is more expressed in their clan, etc. Anyways, getting to the point, yes it is okay to try and be the best as long as you do not abuse the code to do so. Getting good and bad stats - well you have to live with that and like someone mentioned before, once you get good at a certain skills your stats are not that important anymore.

[Dwarven Gigolo]

Of course, you can also sort of do it the other way around, and be making dwarven merchants and half-giant magickers and such...

Don't ever, -ever- understimate the raw haggling ability of a dwarven merchant, intent on selling you something.

Belated and off-topic, but such is life these days as well.

*passes out waterskins to all the participants of this posting marathon, gone horribly wrong*

-Dwarven Gigolo

[Anonymous]

The only thing I would like to see done different with stats is to see them before I write a desc up. I hate when I put in the desc the massive, red-haired man, and then get poor strength. If I would have known my stats before writing my desc, I could have fit it more into my physical reality insted of what I hoped it would be.. am I making sense? I might have written it the skinny, crippled man, or the flabby-armed, red-haired man, you get my point. Again just an opinion..

peace...kiddgoth...again this damn gdb hates me wont let me log in...

[jhunter]

Look at it this way you go through the character creation, you have a preplanned background and personna, now I'm here to roleplay as much as the next guy, but when you create a character to be a woodsman or hunter and when you get into the game with your new char he is average strength, average wisdom and his higher than average stats have no impact on the way you had created your char to be it is really disheartening to have to change your roleplay of the char in order just to keep him alive. I mean, I wasn't born to be a bodyguard, I just don't have and won't have what it takes for the job. Most any intelligent being alive won't choose a job they cannot possible excel at. What good is a hunter who cannot take down a single critter even at the age of 30 and he's supposed to have been a hunter by trade? Same applies to say a thief that cannot pick a single pocket without being arrested or killed and he's supposed to have been surviving that way? I love Arm but I see many ways poor stats can impact the roleplay of the char you have created to play, I don't know about everyone else but I create my chars to be a role that I will enjoy playing through their lifetime.

[creeper386]

jhunter... I think you have a misconception. Even with terrific stats you well still suck when starting out. It's just that. No matter rather you are 13 or 70 your going to suck when your starting. If your making a character thats 30 years old. You can put as much in your background about how he survived on his trade. He's still going to suck. It doesn't matter. You start out sucking. You SUCK. Period.

Stats well have an affect at the start. But your characters life isn't dependant on stats. A moronic player can day with great stats just as easy as he can die with bad stats, but your still going to suck at the begining.


Creeper who says you suck  :twisted: .... at the start.

[jhunter]

Creeper,
I don't think you get the point I'm trying to make here.
Of course as a brand new char your going to suck, but if your char has been created to work a certain career then most likely that is where the char's strengths would lie. Stats and roleplay of the char would be in line for the career you chose. Not every baseball player is a Barry Bonds, but even the worst player in pro basball(who has chosen this profession and made it a career because his mental and physical talents showed strength in the proper areas or it wouldn't be his profession) is still better than the average joe at his job.

What I'm saying is this:Yes of course as a new char you are going to suck because you will need to practice the necessary skills for your chosen career. It would make sense that your char would have the proper attributes as a base to start with or why would they have ever tried to make a living at it?? Or how would they have survived this as long as they have?

When you create a char you cannot effectively change the skills they have to do their job, it would be nice to have the proper balance of attributes for work they have chosen to base their survival on.

I'd like to hear more of what you guys think about this.

-jhunter

[Impska]

I've recently rolled a human ranger with a poor strength. On a reroll (I've never rerolled a character and gotten better stats, always worse, so they've got to be pretty bad in the first place for me to risk it).

With poor, I had some somewhat better, but also crappy stats, hovering around the average range.

And actually, poor strength did define how I played the character. It didn't make it less fun. What's frustrating, however, is that in order to focus on "strengths", there must actually be some strengths.

In the case of this character, where I would have chosen to focus on wisdom as a strength, and ditched every other stat down to poor if I could get a decent wisdom, there was no way to focus on a strength. I could and did role play it, but the learning curve faced by the character was abismal. That doesn't reflect "wisdom/intelligence as a strength" too well.

If stat ranking were an option in the game, I could have picked wisdom as my top priority though, and possibly had other stats suffer by comparison. Even if stat ranking were only an option, one which did cause other stats to suffer, I would still have done it.

It's an idea that's been brought up time and time again, with no reponse (except usually one of support from the playerbase). I've never once read something that stated a clear reason why the staff objected to it. I'd be interested to know, because it seems a sensible idea to me.

[Rindan]

I am fairly sure that the staff objects simply do to the disgusting predictability in stats that it would lead to.  Every desert elf would, almost without exception, pick strength as their main stat.  Thieves would pick agility, warriors strength, and everyone else wisdom.  I would bet that the staff wants people to be different and for not everyone to play the stereotype for their class.

Personally, I am perplexed at people who say that they can't change due to stats.  I have had warriors serve as merchants and spies, thieves serve as body guards and assistants, and magikers pretend to be just about everything under the sun.  Armageddon is, first and foremost, a role playing game.  Some skills are nice to have, and it is nice to have stats that offer a small boost in those skills, but they are by no means required.  The only type of character in my mind that is truly limited are merchants.  Merchants would have a hard time being a guard type person.  Everyone else though has the potential to be anything they want.  If you roll a warrior with poor strength, and are absolutely convinced it is an irreconcilable defect (and you would be wrong as any old warrior will tell you... but that is off the point), then you can easily become an assistant, merchant, informant, spy, or whatever else tickles your fancy.  If you are something other then a warrior then our options only expand further.

People need to leave the box.  Stats DO NOT mean that much.  At worst, it might mean you can't use a bow and have to throw spears.  A 25 day warrior is a 25 day warrior.  I don't care what your stats are, he is going to manhandle everything under the sun that isn't as old as he is.  An old pick pocket will tear the sword off your belt without you noticing, regardless of how poor his agility is.  An old ranger is downright fearsome and his skills plentiful and diverse, regardless of whatever stat deficiencies he might have.  Stats simply matter very little.  At best, they give a slight edge on people who are of equal skill.  The older you get, the fewer people you will find of equal skill.

[Anonymous]

My biggest concern about stats would go away if there was some fullproof method for you to know your stats when creating a physical description, but at a point after guild/race selection.

It annoys me to no end to draw up a 'graceful' human only to have professsional wrestler stats and vice versa.

If stats were revealed during chargen as the next to last step and were then followed by the desc/sdesc creation step (AND if chargen status was saved so people wouldn't logout-relog until they got stats they want) then my personal concern over having a desc not in keeping with the stats would go away.

However, my assumption is that would be far more effort than the issue warrants.  So, personally, I will go on with making PCs whose musculature is not described in the desc.

[Angela Christine]

If all else fails you can always claim an old football injury, or scrab hunting injury.    You are a big, muscular fella, but due to tennis elbow or carpal tunnel syndrom you can't hit as hard or carry as much as people might expect.  Or you could have the body of a professional dancer, but then you hurt an ankle or knee, and now you can't move as gracefully as you used to -- still pretty graceful at some things maybe, but under strain the injury acts up and slows you down.  You were a very bright person, untill the day you got lost in the desert with no shelter and suffered major sun stroke and a brain injury -- you are no retard, but you don't pick things as quickly or remember as well as you used to.  And knowing that you used to be smarter (stronger, more agile, healthier) burns you up inside.  This happens all the time in real life, many promising athletes have had their careers cut short by injury.  If your character is 30 he may have been well suited to his career when he was 17, but since then something has happened and he isn't the man he used to be.  If your character is 30 year old warrior, he almost certainly has some old aches and injuries.  I'm not a warrior or in a dangerous line of  work, but at 30 I have some chronic aches and pains anyway, someone who is constantly being attacked would undoubtably have a few more.

It isn't perfect, obviously.  You wanted to play a certain type of character, but due to your stats you feel you have to play a slightly different type of character, and that is unpleasant.  But the football injury excuse at least lets you use the background and description you have, even if it means a slightly different future than you had planned.

               * * *

Another possibility is to always start your character as a teenager.  With a teenager your background will mostly deal with your childhood, and your future is flexible.


AC

[Kalden]

What the hell is stopping us from at least having a priority system, where your highest stat goes where you want them? Just old traditions and fear of new ideas and concepts, or coding?

And I hate having to say this so many times... stats define your character, if they aren't IC(Yes, stats are IN CHARACTER!!) then you should rip them out. OOC things like stats should never affect your roleplay and your success in the mud.  :roll:

I repeat: STATS are IN CHARACTER!

[John]

What the hell is stopping us from at least having a priority system

Because people will focus more on stats (which only define characters at the beginning of their lives) and less on other things. I hate games that let you chose your stats because they tend to be very H&S.

All IMO.

[Kalden]

This wouldn't make make people focus on their stats more at all, after creation. They would simply get a lot of strength if they were a warrior, or more agility if they were a thief. Their stats would fit their character more. Am I not getting through here?

And... this game is pretty H&S, but in a good way. Their is a lot of fighting, and a lot of code surrounding it. It decides a lot of rp.

[Angela Christine]

Bah.  Why not just allow infinite rerolls?  Well, not infinite I suppose, but as many as would fit in the first two hours.  If you want a specific distribution you can spend up to two hours typing "reroll self" over and over until you get one you like.  This would make poor stats rare, and Absolutely Incredibles much more common than they are now, but since stats don't have much long-term affect it wouldn't matter.  It might make it seem like more emphasis is being put on stats, but I think it would end up being less emphasis and a less disruptive influence.  For some people, if they had a very specific character concept planned and they think that their stats make that concept impossible, then they may not try quite as hard to keep the character alive.  If they are being "forced" to abandon their concept and pick a new one due to the vagaries of random rolls, then they might as well pick "reckless daredevil" and have a little fun followed by an early death.  Infinite rerolls would let determined people get the sort of stat distribution they want, but it would still be within racial norms.  A bonus to a specific stat could drive it over the racial maximum.  A priority system would allow people to chose the inverse of their normal racial priority, for example letting elves max Strength or half-giants make thier wisdom their strongest stat, which is a little silly.

To me it seems like the more people dwell on stats the more likely it becomes that the staff will simply hide stat descriptions they way they did with skill percentages.  I would prefer that it didn't happen, I like knowing what my stats are like right off the bat; if nothing else it makes it easier to choose equipment.  But since folks seem determined to flirt with fate, not just dwelling on stats but stridently arguing the importance of stats,  I thought I'd toss out the infinite reroll idea.  My other idea was to be able to undo a reroll that makes things worse, but I decided any idea that misuses the the word "infinite" is more exciting.

AC

[Kalden]

Um, maybe you aren't understanding what a skill priority system is.

Create your character:

Which stat would you like to put your highest roll in?
Agility

Your next?
Wisdom

Next?
Strength

Next?
Endurance

Maybe that clears it up a bit. Or maybe you're just twinkish and thought infinite rerolls would be cool. I dunno.

A priority system would allow people to chose the inverse of their normal racial priority, for example letting elves max Strength or half-giants make thier wisdom their strongest stat, which is a little silly.

Even if their best roll went to wisdom, then their negative racial modifierwould still be added. It would be no different from it is now, except not quite as random. Yes, you could make a semi-intelligent giant, at the cost of a lot of his other stats. His stats might read: above average wisdom, average for the rest. And if this particular half-giant was a mage or thief, then that would probably make sense, eh?

[John]

Maybe that clears it up a bit. Or maybe you're just twinkish and thought infinite rerolls would be cool. I dunno.

I agree it's hard to tell with AC but she was PROBABLY joking.

How many Warriors are going to pick Strength as their highest stat? How many thieves will pick agility as their highest? The Guild you choose already helps put certain stats higher then others, any extra bits IMO is unneccessary.

At the moment we have forced diversity, I think if you took that away then people would tend to choose the stereotypical roles. Sure you'll get people who'll go against the norm but IMO they'll become the exception rather then the rule.

Just my opinion

[jhunter]

How many warriors are going to pick Strength as their highest stat?
How many thieves will pick agility as their highest?

Well a good number of them will of course, which would make sense with a persons strengths and weaknesses determining what type of job they will choose to pursue in their lives. There will still be those rare occassions where a player will choose to create a weakling warrior or a clumsy thief, and a priority system would help out with making the stats fit with the char design that the player has created.

Also, even with the best of stats, a PC can still get themselves very easily killed in Zalanthas, ESPECIALLY when the player tries to go hack and slash.
You just can't get by in Arm without roleplaying, you WILL die one way or another. And even with a priorty system in place, getting to choose which one will be your highest stat and so on, doesn't guarantee that your highest score won't be average or above average anyway. The actual stat rating would still be randomly generated, the player would just get to prioritize them to fit the char they would like to play, for better OR worse.

Hack and slashers, from what I've seen, just don't survive on Zalanthas long...the chars I see stick around are played by good, if not great roleplayers.

Just throwing in some more of my opinion.

-jhunter

[jhunter]

Oops, sorry about the mess above, was doing too many things at once.
:?

[Angela Christine]

Maybe that clears it up a bit. Or maybe you're just twinkish and thought infinite rerolls would be cool. I dunno.

I agree it's hard to tell with AC but she was PROBABLY joking.

Be nice, I was sleepy.    But my point was that I believe no good can come from discussing ways to "improve" the stat system.  The most likely result is that stat levels will be hidden the way skills are.  :x

If you must mess with the stat system, go with something simple.  We already have the reroll command, I assume it wouldn't take much to change the allowed number of rerolls from 1 to 10, 100 or 1000.  Then if you think stats don't matter you go with your first set and get into the game, if you think stats are terribly important, you keep rerolling until you get something you like or hit the 2 hour limit.

Another option would be to completely eliminate random stats.  You get whatever "average" is, and then modifiers based on race, class, size and age are applied.  Every 25 year old, 69 inch, 7 ten-stone, human ranger would have exactly the same stats as every other 25 year old, 69 inch, 7 ten-stone, human ranger.  Take away the randomness and no one can ever claim their concept was ruined by a bad roll.  The variety between individuals would be based more on roleplay and skills than stats.

AC

[John]

Stats aren't that important. Seriously. If you got Absolutely Incredible stats for everything then you would STILL suck (unless fighting other newbies). Someone with poor stats will still be able to beat you.

By the time you have gotten your skills up and if you've roleplayed correctly and send in logs asking for a small stat increase (to help you with armor etc) I'm sure the Imms will do something for you. All it takes is patience and roleplay and "bad stats" can be overcome while still keeping your character concept.

Also, if you get terrific strength and terrible agility and you wanted it the other way around and you continuously take the brunt of people's attacks (but beat them cause of your amazing strength) then just RP that your side-stepping their blows. I'm sure no-one will mind.

So yeah. Stats AREN'T important (IMO).