PROPOSAL: Make stats less static

[triste]

This debate is practically as old as Armageddon itself. It boils down to two camps who cannot agree. Camp A keeps crying "I wanted to roleplay literal Hercules but the dice didn't let me waaaah" and Camp B keeps heckling, "I've played a mundane withered crone who rolled 0 strength for ten years therefore I am a better roleplayer than you."

Now, in this moment, I am Camp B. Last time I had this debate I was in Camp A. Someone named Fathi was in Camp B. She convinced me to defect to her camp. Ironically I have gotten more kudoses as my characters with shitty stats. My concepts were not ruined by "bad rolls." The struggle actually can add depth.

You never know what rewards await when you open your mind.

[Jarvis]

This debate is practically as old as Armageddon itself. It boils down to two camps who cannot agree. Camp A keeps crying "I wanted to roleplay literal Hercules but the dice didn't let me waaaah" and Camp B keeps heckling, "I've played a mundane withered crone who rolled 0 strength for ten years therefore I am a better roleplayer than you."

Now, in this moment, I am Camp B. Last time I had this debate I was in Camp A. Someone named Fathi was in Camp B. She convinced me to defect to her camp. Ironically I have gotten more kudoses as my characters with shitty stats. My concepts were not ruined by "bad rolls." The struggle actually can add depth.

You never know what rewards await when you open your mind.

That's far from my point man. The stats can come up with three averages and a poor, the point is to not have stats contradict a concept, be it a demented old hag with muscles made out of paper or three times Mr.Olympia, the problem is that you make a concept, go in completely blind, and then in the cases where it blatantly contradicts where you're going for, its disheartening.

Its not about having the best stats, but if I'm rolling up a hunter who is so piss poor that he dies to a scorpion or a thief who turned out to have poor agility but for some reason is so buff that he has biceps on his eyebrows, its a bit confounding. With the new guilds, I can tell that the stat bonuses have changed, and I find myself playing the exact same ones because I don't want to go through the process of trying to figure out how to prioritize correctly for guild A or B.

[triste]

Alright alright some visibility into the system might help (spoiler alert it will help nothing because this is a roleplay intensive mud not a hack and slash).

For instance I worry we may lose players who don't know how things work and might do something like constantly roll teenage city elves and constantly die because they keep rolling 50hp. So it might help newbies.

So the compromised technical solution is showing people the range of stats they might get. Example:

You've chosen to play a Half Giant raider who is 20 years old with a stat priority of ____, your expected stats are:
Hitpoints: 100 - 250hp
strength: above average to absolutely incredible
. . .


But of course, knowing all of you, if we grant ANY visibility into stats, the desire to "win" and "be the best" (gag) combined with this EXTRA information you DON'T need will fuck up your behavior. Even knowing the range of stats, if you then rolled up a 100hp above average strength half giant you might suicide. Because now you know how much HP they COULD have and you'll feel shorted. Because what you are all telling me is you care more about stats than the character concept itself.

And so this is why things are the way they are today.

Fun fact, when I made my guild picker I got a lot of criticism from people who think it emphasizes the worst part of Armageddon when roleplay should be emphasized. They're kind of right. Fun fact, I spent about 40 minutes trying to build stat modeling into my guild picker so that you can guess your stats given an age, stat order, etc, but stopped remembering the criticism from before and realizing WHY staff obfuscate this information.

Everyone whines "I want my stats to match my concept." But when the ONLY examples I hear from you all is I want to "Look and be as strong as Super Man," and "I want to look like Flash Gordon and be just as fast," well, I see a love of power gaming. The fact that the wisdom stat hasn't made it into this discussion at all is apropos and I guess I'll leave this topic alone for a while.

^{_{next mdesc is going to describe intelligent soulful eyes for two sentences plz give me max wisdom and psionics}}

[triste]

Last post for real.

* The Flash not Flash Gordon, autism fail.

Someone smarter than me can come up with a solution that doesn't shift incentives. One I mentioned two years ago that I saw hinted at here.
- In the name of fairness all characters get stat points that are equal. ALL. Let's bullshit a number like 60 CGP.
- Your initial roll is still RANDOM. A bad roll would burn 25 CGP for example while a great roll burns 35 CGP for example.
- Every year you age you get some formula's worth of CGP say (60CGP - (roll CGP for example 30 CGP)) / 10 years for up to ten years.

In this system everyone wins and the only new incentive is to live longer. You still have interesting randomness and an incentive to live.

I came up with and discussed this idea two years ago anyone is free to come up with better. Think about incentives.

[triste]

Last post, keeping it brief because I already discussed this more than a year ago. If your initial roll is incongruous with your mdesc that can easily be covered with a small recent addendum to their background. Less strong initially than described? Maybe they broke a limb recently but will fully recover in a year (when you get CGP to dump on strength). Less wise than expected? Maybe they recently developed a drinking problem which can also resolve conveniently by the time you get your CGP. Your character overcoming an initial challenge might make them stronger in the long term, eerily like real life. This system doesn't put stats and skill grinding first, only roleplay and longevity first.

[cali]

My main issue with stats is you have to write your description beforehand. You wrote an average throwaway Amos but surprise he is a Greek God at least according to stats.

[Greve]

I still don't understand why that, of all things, is what people are so concerned about. It doesn't make sense to me.

Three of the four stats can reasonably be called "physically invisible." You can't look at somebody and tell how wise or agile they are at a glance. Assuming you didn't describe your character with "the witless eyes of a blatant simpleton" or "the hunched, arthritic posture of an invalid," it really doesn't matter what your description is when it comes to any stat besides strength.

And if you prioritize strength and didn't make an extremely young or old character, you're virtually guaranteed a good enough strength roll to justify anything short of an Arnold Swarzenegger description. If you pick any age between like 22 and 40, you're nearly guaranteed at least 'very good' strength and probably more than that, and there's really no description one could write where that would clash with the stat. Moreover, it's not something anybody except you will give the remotest of fucks about. Nobody submits a player complaint because that guy described his character as burly but didn't hit hard in the sparring circle. It's an imaginary issue.

Considering how many layers of imbalance and ill-conceived 1990s-era game design make up the onion that is Armageddon's stat system, I'm just continuously baffled to hear this cited as the most popular problem with it. It is very close to impossible to get a 1st prioritized roll that does not justify whatever description any reasonable person might come up with. As long as you're not creating intentionally bizarre troll characters, like a 70-year-old Conan the Barbarian, you can describe your character any way you want and almost certainly get stats that justify whatever you wrote. Nobody's gonna notice or care in the slightest if your agile young man only has very good agility, or if your muscle-bound brute didn't quite reach absolutely incredible strength.

There's a whole bunch of issues with the idea of writing descriptions after seeing one's stats. For one thing, how would it even work? Should you submit a character without a description, wait for approval, see your stats, then submit a description, wait for approval on that, and then finally enter the game? Or are people seriously suggesting that we should just be able to roll stats over and over again, and then submit the application afterwards? Because both are equally silly.

And more importantly, if the stat system didn't allow for a level of randomness that makes players feel screwed over or handed a godlike character for free, there wouldn't be this debate in the first place. Games like Shadows of Isildur and Atonement had a relatively static pool of total stats (give or take a few points) that rolled to determine the distribution, and stats were not discussed regularly in those games, nor did people feel the need to suicide characters because the dice fucked them in the ear.

[Krath]

My main issue with stats is you have to write your description beforehand. You wrote an average throwaway Amos but surprise he is a Greek God at least according to stats.

You can be muscular and weak. And not muscular and strong.  Plus you can prioritize strength.

The problem, based on post in this thread, seems to be everyone is writing up JACKED MDESC BODYBUILDER PCs and upset when they do get ai.

[triste]

Holy crap it's been so long since someone's backed me up. Though indirectly, always.


_{^{I guess our company does hire smart people.}}

[wizturbo]

Stats matter.  People care about them.  They aren't bad roleplayers for caring about them or any other coded aspect of the game.  It isn't outlandish for people to want a way to affect their stats outside of using magick, largely because it's realistically what you'd expect to happen.   There wouldn't be threads on this subject for the last twenty years if these things were not true. 

No need to make this all about the extreme high end of the stat range either.  No, not every character should be able to get the highest stats... I don't think that's the point of the thread.  It is to let players have some agency over how their character changes over time, be it through in-game character actions or player decisions. 

Those who prefer a random number generator to determine everything, great, how does this thread impact you in anyway?  No one is suggesting the random number generator has to go away?  Are you really suggesting it harms your play experience to consider that stats shift to some small degree over time, so much so that you derail the thread discussing the topic to try and invalidate the entire source of the demand for such a change?

[wizturbo]

I still don't understand why that, of all things, is what people are so concerned about. It doesn't make sense to me.

People like their character concepts to be reflected in the code in some manner.  For some people, it may mean they want to roleplay literal greek gods...  and no, I don't think they should be able to do that.
The dice are there to limit the number of characters that win that genetic lottery to a healthy amount, so every character running around isn't hercules.  This is a good thing!  For most people however, they just want the code to semi-reflect the concept they have in mind.

Let's say I want to make an uneducated, rugged outdoorsman whose good at archery and hunting and likes to earn extra coin logging for a living.  I prioritize agility > strength > endurance > wisdom.  I end up with Exceptional agility, and below average in everything else.  Yes, this happens.  In fact, statistically speaking, it's more common than players who have great stats.

The ramifications of these stats are clear:  My rugged archer cannot use a good bow or crossbow.  They cannot even lift a log, and get exhausted from logging very quickly.  If I play this character for 5 in-game years, they will still not be able to do anything of these things...even if they use archery daily and go logging every week.   The concept doesn't really work... sure you can alter your concept, roll with the punches and adapt.  Some people find that kind of thing fun, in fact I personally love that sort of thing but I can easily recognize how others would not!

[Birdbrain]

I guess I've had an imaginary issue then?
I've prioritized rolls and have gotten dog shit rolls. If I prioritize strength, roll up my hulking muscle man, and I get an average roll, I wouldn't have written my character to be hulking muscle man.

Unless you picked something really odd like a minimum age character with strength prioritized, or extremely old with agility, the odds of getting anything less than 'good' in your first priority are so microscopic that it's not worth thinking about. I don't believe I've ever seen anything less than very good in my 1st priority in the like sixteen years since stat prioritization was implemented, but I imagine it would be possible if you picked some really absurd class/age/prio combinations.

The posts I quoted claimed to be getting poor strength when prioritizing it, or medium strength and "crazy wisdom." I maintain that this is literally impossible. The mechanics for that to happen straight-up do not exist, unless that dude's "Hulk with poor strength" was like 70 years old. The  code does not permit for someone who prioritized strength 1st to roll mediocre strength and crazy high wisdom unless it's a max-age meme PC. It can't happen under normal circumstances.

You can roll pretty crappy overall stats, like VG/AA/P/A or something, but you cannot roll poor in your first priority without intentionally creating an absurdly configured character.

I've played maybe half a dozen characters so far and can tell you that your assertions here are anecdotal and not indicative of people's personal experiences.
I think 1/3rd of the characters I've rolled, my best stat was a good. Ponder on that for a minute. Priority #1 is a good. Rest is average or below average. The ONE reroll didn't help.
Guess my character's just shit. 10/10 will roll again.

Edit: I just want to make clear as well, I love the game, I just think totally random, fixed stats are probably one of the few weak points the game has that really sticks out to me.

[lostinspace]

I think 1/3rd of the characters I've rolled, my best stat was a good. Ponder on that for a minute. Priority #1 is a good. Rest is average or below average. The ONE reroll didn't help.
Guess my character's just shit. 10/10 will roll again.

Good isn't even 'good', it's average. I think that likely leads to some misunderstanding at times as well.

The scale currently:
Absolutely Insane
Exceptional
Extremely Good
Very Good
Good
Above Average
Average
Below Average
Poor

The scale how it should be:
Abolutely Insane
Exceptional
Very Good
Good
Average
Bad
Very Bad
Terrible
Completely Horrendous

[Alesan]

The scale currently:
Absolutely Insane
Exceptional
Extremely Good
Very Good
Good
Above Average
Average
Below Average
Poor

This scale makes perfect sense when taking the v/npc population into consideration. I assume that's intended.

[mansa]

It certainly feels like this discussion comes up again and again:
https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,30474.0.html - April 14, 2008

In my experience with other games, as my characters "grow and get better", I have the opportunity to affect their skills and stats development and to focus on particular growth in a certain style.

I may want to bump my charisma or luck in Fallout games (to experience a diplomatic gameplay), and I may want to bump my endurance and strength in other games (to carry more stuff than before, because I'm hording all objects in the game).   At level 4 and at level 8, I'm able to pick which stats I want to bump when playing D&D 5e.   It's part of the culture of roleplaying games.

In ArmageddonMUD, there is a chance when your character grows older, that their stats will updated and changed, and (in my opinion) the most popular game experience for stat changes are when your character gets older and those stats gets reduced.  It doesn't seem that when your character gets older, their stats increase.  These "stat changes" happen when your characters have a birthday, and you don't have to be logged in at the time to get the stat adjustments.

If I roll up a character concept, and I'm unhappy with my original stats and unhappy with my reroll, there really isn't anything else that I can do with the character concept, since the staff do not take roleplay logs of my character working out every day in order to bump their strength score as policy.  In reality, I'm still unhappy with the roll I got for my character I want to play.

I still think a generic "every character gets one bump after the first 6 weeks of play, on your character's birthday" would make characters of 'average' stats feel better about the story they put into their characters.   We all want to play heroes and villians, right?

[Veselka]

I would even be fine with the ability to reduce an Awesome Stat 1 -3 points, to increase another stat 1-3 points.

But yeah, I really think if a PC survives 5 days played, they should get a stat boost as a pat on the butt.

[Birdbrain]

Mansa, I like some of your analogies but I think maybe one of the holdups with implementing a stat progression system as your character ages is that we have relatively few stats comparative to most RPG's (six for most D20 systems, IIRC, and 7 for fallout inspired games?) Whereas here we have 4, and really 3 if we're talking about directly combat-related stats (which arguably is the most important aspect for a good percentage of the population) I could see that as a possible point of contention regarding any prospective changes being made, as you get significantly more 'bang for your buck' here as you would with D20.

Still, compared to the suggestions I've put forth, I think your suggestion of having milestone /played rewards is a very good idea. It's a good middleground between having something people have to grind for in addition to skills, as well as a carrot put forth for players to simply not reroll a 'poorly' rolled character.

[triste]

Nice idea in that it rewards longevity like my idea.

But as Birdbrain says doesn't really work because limited stats, and also as I mentioned before, the idea of opportunity cost and fairness.

My idea still has the added benefit of making all of this more fair. People will still complain with Mansa/Veselka's idea when they get a shitty initial roll. What's the point of a longevity stat boost if you roll all poor stats and Joe Blow rolled three Absolutely Incredible stats and now has four absolutely incredible stats.

The psychology of opportunity cost is ugly but it is also the crux of the problem here and my solution fixes that problem unlike the recent proposals.

[Greve]

I've played maybe half a dozen characters so far and can tell you that your assertions here are anecdotal and not indicative of people's personal experiences.
I think 1/3rd of the characters I've rolled, my best stat was a good. Ponder on that for a minute. Priority #1 is a good. Rest is average or below average. The ONE reroll didn't help.
Guess my character's just shit. 10/10 will roll again.

Edit: I just want to make clear as well, I love the game, I just think totally random, fixed stats are probably one of the few weak points the game has that really sticks out to me.

I don't understand what you're trying to say.

I said: "You're essentially guaranteed at least 'good' in your first priority."

You said: "You're wrong! Some of my characters had 'good' in their first priority."

I was responding to people claiminig to have rolled poor strength on a character with (presumably, given what they wrote) strength prioritized. Or average strength and "crazy" wisdom. This isn't something that happens, simply put.

There's a hell of a lot wrong with the stat system. I was simply baffled that so many thought that the main issue is that you don't get to see your stats before writing your description. Of all the things that have been suggested, that's the one that makes the least sense, and yet it's the one that seemingly got the most agreement, so I had to point out that no, nobody rolls poor strength on a "Hulk" character unless they prioritized strength last to go with their muscle-bound description.

If I roll up a character concept, and I'm unhappy with my original stats and unhappy with my reroll, there really isn't anything else that I can do with the character concept, since the staff do not take roleplay logs of my character working out every day in order to bump their strength score as policy.  In reality, I'm still unhappy with the roll I got for my character I want to play.

I still think a generic "every character gets one bump after the first 6 weeks of play, on your character's birthday" would make characters of 'average' stats feel better about the story they put into their characters.   We all want to play heroes and villians, right?

The root of the problem is that stats are so wildly random that one can legitimately and rightfully be unhappy with them. It really sucks when you have your heart set on playing, say, a gritty mercenary who lives by the sword and one day takes up raiding, and then your stats come out good, average, poor, above average. Especially when you know that if you had only been luckier, you might have had exceptional, extremely good, above average, extremely good. I don't understand why it should be that way. I don't see any benefits whatsoever.

And it's not that anyone needs great stats to enjoy a character. It's not that a character can't do anything cool without great stats. It's just fundamentally bad game design, especially in a game with permadeath and globally free-for-all PvP encouraged by the game's setting, to saddle some players with a big advantage or disadvantage that was not earned or deserved in some fashion. It's why no games have done it this way since the 90s.

I don't think any of these fiddly little suggestions would change anything. The ability to move a point from one stat to another doesn't change the fact that two otherwise identical characters can come in with one having two, three or even four categories higher in every stat than the other. It's still gonna blow to see G/AA/P/A, even if you get a +1 to one of them after five days of play or whatever. And that change would help Mr. EX/EG/G/EG even more because a +1 to any stat at those levels gives you more than it would at lower levels.

Rolling stats from a set pool solves basically every problem. That's how it has worked on a slew of other RPIs, and it worked great. You wouldn't get all-high or all-mediocre rolls. If you get a high score in one, you'll get a correspondingly low score in another. If you got no particularly high ones, you'd get no really low ones, either.  It didn't lead to boring, samey characters. It didn't prevent anyone from playing a cripple or a half-wit or a muscle-bound hero. All it did was ensure that nobody was screwed over unfairly, or handed a bunch of extra power for free through sheer blind luck.

Most importantly, it meant that players had no real reason to be upset about any of their characters' stats, and as a result, it was just not a topic of discussion in those games. Everyone was satisfied. There was no need for a bunch of arcane rules about shifting points from one stat to another during the course of play. Because as mansa points out:

It certainly feels like this discussion comes up again and again

And that's because it's something that has bothered players throughout this game's history.

[Birdbrain]

I don't understand what you're trying to say.

I probably shouldn't have quoted, it was more a rebuttal to people saying "But it works for me when I get godrolls 2/3rds of the time!"

The root of the problem is that stats are so wildly random that one can legitimately and rightfully be unhappy with them. It really sucks when you have your heart set on playing, say, a gritty mercenary who lives by the sword and one day takes up raiding, and then your stats come out good, average, poor, above average. Especially when you know that if you had only been luckier, you might have had exceptional, extremely good, above average, extremely good. I don't understand why it should be that way. I don't see any benefits whatsoever.

And it's not that anyone needs great stats to enjoy a character. It's not that a character can't do anything cool without great stats. It's just fundamentally bad game design, especially in a game with permadeath and globally free-for-all PvP encouraged by the game's setting, to saddle some players with a big advantage or disadvantage that was not earned or deserved in some fashion. It's why no games have done it this way since the 90s.

I don't think any of these fiddly little suggestions would change anything. The ability to move a point from one stat to another doesn't change the fact that two otherwise identical characters can come in with one having two, three or even four categories higher in every stat than the other. It's still gonna blow to see G/AA/P/A, even if you get a +1 to one of them after five days of play or whatever. And that change would help Mr. EX/EG/G/EG even more because a +1 to any stat at those levels gives you more than it would at lower levels.

Rolling stats from a set pool solves basically every problem. That's how it has worked on a slew of other RPIs, and it worked great. You wouldn't get all-high or all-mediocre rolls. If you get a high score in one, you'll get a correspondingly low score in another. If you got no particularly high ones, you'd get no really low ones, either.  It didn't lead to boring, samey characters. It didn't prevent anyone from playing a cripple or a half-wit or a muscle-bound hero. All it did was ensure that nobody was screwed over unfairly, or handed a bunch of extra power for free through sheer blind luck.

This was more or less my suggestion, or one of them, rather. Either use a pool of values with a fixed sum, or use a weighted average.
As you stated, my personal issue is with the variance. Stat's don't make or break roleplaying skill or ability in a game where a GM isn't giving us CHA checks to roll against.
What it does allow, however, is someone curb-stomping someone else who's put in the same amount of work and time into skilling and training their character, because arbitrary number being bigger here and there means they're statistically much more likely to win a battle. Not because of RP. Not because they didn't put the time in. Because they won a literal lottery in cgen.

I'd also point out that there's likely a nice added benefit of using a set pool, in that the players who are keen on min/maxing to get epic killstreaks are going to waste significantly less of staff's time dumping in app after app.
That could only be a positive thing for the game at large.