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Guest
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Hi Everyone,
So I'm in a cave, with the Bad Guy I'm after up ahead. He doesn't see me. So I pull out the old Longbow, and start sniping. The trouble? I can't hit the guy. At all. Now, this is a beginning character, but I've got Marksman as a minor skill so I oughta hit SOMETIME. NPC AI being what it is, he ignores the arrows flitting by, so I fire off about 10-15 arrows unsuccessfully. But to add insult to injury? My Marksman skill has not increased AT ALL. Not one iota. Is this the way it's meant to be? Whatever happened to learning from one's mistakes?
Addendum: Later on, I bum rushed an enemy with my longbow still in hand (oops), and fired off some shots at very close range. THose seemed to advance my skill just fine.
Similarly, Alchemy (a misc. skill) seems not to raise no matter how many failures I concoct. Am I doing something wrong here? |
Wed Jun 05, 2002 9:12 pm |
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Joey Nipps
Orcan High Command
Joined: 03 Jan 2002
Posts: 849
Location: Outer Space |
No, you aren't doing anything wrong. This game only gives skill advances on successes - nothing for failures. Yes, this is a stupid and unrealistic modeling system - they went cheap and quick. Early on with the bow it IS difficult because you miss more than you hit. I found a trainer and spent some money to get it started - once you start hitting frequently enough it will climb.
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When everything else in life seems to fail you - buy a vowel. |
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Wed Jun 05, 2002 9:23 pm |
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Guest
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Looks like I'm going to have to save up some tuition money then.
Damn, Morrowind IS realistic- I have to work part-time to scrape up cash for school!  |
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Wed Jun 05, 2002 10:49 pm |
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Lisje
Head Merchant
Joined: 20 May 2002
Posts: 61
Location: Fort Myers, Florida |
This thread started me thinking. One of the chief complaints with this game is that it gets too easy too early. For me, with the two characters I've started, I've noticed a huge surge in the advancement rate somewhere in the "teens" level-wise, after which things do become less challenging than I'd like.
I've seen the difficulty MODs out there, but I don't think a linear approach will solve the problem, merely postpone it. But perhaps there is a win-win solution suggested here. Maybe you could simply invert the advancement formula? After all, if you do something successfully, you get rewarded by your effort having the desired result (hit the monster, cast the spell, make the potion, persuade the NPC, etc.)
My idea is that perhaps instead of being rewarded TWICE by increasing your skill as well, you get the increase for failures. This would change the curve that starts when you hit more than you miss and makes you practically invulnerable very quickly once you reach that point. Of course, there are a few skills this would not work for (Athletics & Acrobatics come immediately to mind) that would need to be hand-tweaked, but overall...
This probably should be a separate post, but I wanted to credit the source of my idea. Well, if any MODders out there see this, I would love to see what the results of this change might bring to the game. Anyone have any thoughts to add? |
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Thu Jun 06, 2002 12:04 am |
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Rhys
Guest
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Learning-from-failure isn't a bad model. But it's still not quite what's desired, I think.
I would like to see advancement follow a "bell curve"; in other words, slow advancement at the beginning (while you're too dumb to know what's going on), rapid advancement in the middle (while you have a broad enough background that you learn quickly) and then slow advancement at the end (when you know most of the material, so finding new stuff is better).
Morrowind back-loads it (learn-from-success) so that your rate of learning increases as you go. Learning from failure front-loads it entirely.
One pen-and-paper RPG, the old Call of Cthulhu, employed both; in a gaming session, you ticked off each skill that you successfully used during that game session. At the end of the session, you rolled again for each ticked skill; if you failed *that* roll, you advanced in the skill. So you had to both succeed and fail to get an advancement, which sounds bizarre but resulted in a decent bell-shaped curve (sorta).
There are plenty of models for this, though. A ton, really. And with the capabilities of modern systems, you could mask a LOT of complexity behind a good facade, such as instead of having "slashing weapons" skill, you could have a whole TREE of subskills and methods ("Aha, swordsman, you may know all there is to know about fighting the orcs of the black hand, but you've never come up against the fighting style of the tribe of the bloodied eye!").
But all things considered, they did such a great job with the immersive world this time around that I'll give 'em the benefit of the doubt (heh).
-->Rhys |
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Thu Jun 06, 2002 4:00 am |
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MoonDragon
High Emperor
Joined: 25 May 2002
Posts: 1254
Location: Waterloo, Canada |
1. The engine doesn't seem to support the idea of failures.
2. Game gives you success points. Actions define how much success points they are worth. Other modifiers define how much success points you need to raise the skill.
3. You can easily modify the ... err... modifiers  that define point gains. They are all very accessible from the editor. There is an actual Skills dialog that allows you to define multipliers for each successfully performed operation and how much it contributes to the skill (e.g. for acrobatics, jumping adds 0.15 and falling adds 3.0 points). There are also modifiers that scale the required amount of points gained from successes towards the level. This is why you need 10 successes to raise your Restoration from 7 to 8, but need 45 success points to raise it from 39 to 40 (those numbers are approximate). I don't know how to access these other modifiers, or even if they are possible. Those would be the ones that define the bell curve shaped distribution as you could make it so that you need a lot more points to level up a skill the higher it is.
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Thu Jun 06, 2002 4:20 pm |
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HydroSqueegee
Eager Tradesman
Joined: 11 May 2002
Posts: 48
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quote:
There are also modifiers that scale the required amount of points gained from successes towards the level. This is why you need 10 successes to raise your Restoration from 7 to 8, but need 45 success points to raise it from 39 to 40 (those numbers are approximate). I don't know how to access these other modifiers, or even if they are possible. Those would be the ones that define the bell curve shaped distribution as you could make it so that you need a lot more points to level up a skill the higher it is.
THATS WHAT I NEED TO FIND!!
Just lowering the rate a skill gains is not enough. It just makes the leveling go slower at all levels. It should be slow-fast-slow-painfully slow.
Easier to learn the basics than to become a grandmaster. |
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Thu Jun 06, 2002 5:27 pm |
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