JE Sawyer on SPECIAL

[Saint_Proverbius]

<strong>[ -> Editorial]</strong>

<a href="http://blackisle.com/">BIS</a> designer guy, <b>JE Sawyer</b> has made a few comments in <a href="http://forums.somethingawful.com/showth ... er=2">this thread</a> on the <a href="http://forums.somethingawful.com">something awful forums</a> about the SPECIAL system that powered <A href="http://interplay.com/fallout/">Fallout</a> and it's follow ups, as well as the upcoming <a href="http://lionheart.blackisle.com">Lionheart</a>. Here's what he said:<blockquote><Br><b>* 1)</b> instead of having wildly varying formulae for determining the initial starting values of skills, add four specific stats together. small arms might be PER + PER + AGL + AGL. doctor might be PER + INT + INT + AGL. this results in a starting range of 4-40 for all stats, though scores will tend to hover around 20ish for many. TAG skills are doubled after the initial calculation.WHY: because the formulae used in fallout and fallout theoretically reflect the inherent difficulty of certain skills in comparison to other skills -- but this isn't reflected elsewhere in the system. also, it makes it difficult for designers (or GMs) to assign difficulty, since each skill has its own difficulty scale.e.g.: doctor starts using some ridiculously low formula that will almost assuredly result in a very, very low starting score. melee starts using a formula that will quite often put you over 50 at the start of gameplay. but wait -- if you start spending skill points on your 15 doctor skill, you can quickly raise it at a 1:1 cost until 50. your 65 melee, on the other hand, takes 2 points per point of increase up to 100. in effect, the "hard to learn" skill is actually easier to learn in game than the "easy to learn" skill. whoops.e.g. part duh: my doctor skill is at 15 and my first aid skill is at 60. the difficulty to mend a broken limb with doctor is 20 (made up), 5 above my starting value. the difficulty to heal 3 points of damage with first aid is 65 (made up). based on this, what should the difficulty for repairing light damage to a broken computer be? the fact is, individual difficulty scales have no real bearing on the difficulty of tasks for other skills. despite this, all skills advance according to the same mathematical formula: from 1-50, one point. from 51-100, two points. 101+, four points. any uniformity in the system is lost because there isn't a universal scale for measuring difficulty and generating scores.the benefits of changing the system in this manner would be: a universal scale for skill progression that is much clearer to the player, a scale that is consistent in all of its elements (generation, progression, checking), and a scale that is easy for a GM to set difficulties for.<b>* 2)</b> collapse first aid into doctor and make basic healing simply a low difficulty task for the doctor skill. these do not need to be two separate skills. at low levels, doctor is often useless and at high levels, first aid is often useless.<b>* 3)</b> instead of small guns, energy weapons, and big guns, use pistols, rifles (includes shotguns), autofire, and heavy weapons. it more accurately divides the weapon skills by type. nothing kills the hard-on you have for your sniper character like picking up a laser rifle and finding that you're completely incompetent with it.<b>* 4)</b> remove percentile damage reduction and replace it with a damage threshhold. percentile damage reduction is a pain in the ass to calculate, and it results in some downright stupid situations. a leather jacket that protects against 20% of damage would actually help you more against a 100 point rifle shot to the chest than a 10 point handgun shot to the chest. what. on the other hand, if it were a damage threshhold, the leather jacket might help a reasonable amount against the pistol shot, but it will barely protect at all against the rifle shot.<b>* 5)</b> armor class should be solely derived from things that make you hard to hit, not from things that should absorb damage. the division between damage reduction and... i guess i'd call it "dodging" should be pretty heavily emphasized. hell, include a dodge skill that players can jack up (though it may be limited or penalized for heavy armor/high encumbrance). not everyone wants to make 2-ton juggernauts trudging across the desert in power armor. some people like to make stealthy mcdodgealot in desert camo hopping out of the darkness to snap necks and swerve around dozens of bullets.</blockquote>Thanks to <b>Fenrick</b> for the news.

[Spazmo]

I wonder if we'll see any of that in the upcoming Fallout PnP game. A massive revamp of the skill system would make an interesting read, if nothing else.

[Max-Violence]

remove percentile damage reduction and replace it with a damage threshhold. percentile damage reduction is a pain in the ass to calculate, and it results in some downright stupid situations. a leather jacket that protects against 20% of damage would actually help you more against a 100 point rifle shot to the chest than a 10 point handgun shot to the chest. what. on the other hand, if it were a damage threshhold, the leather jacket might help a reasonable amount against the pistol shot, but it will barely protect at all against the rifle shot.

The man has a point. That's a really good idea. *takes notes*

some people like to make stealthy mcdodgealot in desert camo hopping out of the darkness to snap necks and swerve around dozens of bullets.

*raises hand*

[Walks with the Snails]

Cool. I never liked how the gun skills were arranged in Fallout, and first aid and doctor as two skills has pretty much always been pointlessly redundant.

[Megatron]

Could someone tell me why he was posting on sa and stuff?

[Doyle]

Well, these changes make sense, but I don't understand why he was posting them at Something Awful, either.

[Spazmo]

Yeah, seems like a bit of a snub to DAC and the rest of the Fallout community. SA is a nice little site (despite their vicious ravaging of Canadian chocolate bars today...), but it doesn't strike me as the best place to post stuff about Fallout.

[VasikkA]

Actually, I'd like the attributes to affect how quickly/much you can raise certain skills. This would make balancing the attributes more important, not only initially.

But the changes JE Sawyer has suggested look really good.

[Saint_Proverbius]

* 3) instead of small guns, energy weapons, and big guns, use pistols, rifles (includes shotguns), autofire, and heavy weapons. it more accurately divides the weapon skills by type. nothing kills the hard-on you have for your sniper character like picking up a laser rifle and finding that you're completely incompetent with it.

The third one is the only one I have a major problem with. Think about SMGs and Assault Rifles with what he suggests about #3. To use weapons like those, you'd have to develop two skills as opposed to a sniper that just develops one. After all, when you have an SMG or an Assault Fire, you don't just use one mode on them. Depending on the situation, you might use them as a pistol/rifle or as an autofire weapon.

[Crow of Ill Omen]

Maybe sniping should be a skill, as well. I like the way the skills break down more in line with the aptitudes required to use them, rather than the type of damage. I never understood what special skills would be required to using a plasma rifle, as opposed to any other kind of rifle (unless it's something to do with lack of recoil). Admittedly, I've never SEEN a plasma rifle, but even so ...

[Spazmo]

But dividing all the skills into about twenty other skills leads to a grat big problem: overspecialization. If the number of weapons skills increases threefold (which is an underestimation to say the least), and the number of skill points gained by charaters remains the same, then each character will have to be highly specialized in using one type of weapon and, possibly, against one type of foe. A single skill point won't be worth as much anymore. It does make sense that a pistol is a completely different weapon from a rifle, but a character in an RPG, and Fallout in particular, is supposed to have a wide range of skills adaptable to any situation.

[Crow of Ill Omen]

Maybe they can re-balance it somehow. I'm not against greater specialisation in general, because it means greater potential for character diversity.

[Saint_Proverbius]

Ugh.. This is what I get for skimming through what he wrote. I totally missed this:

all skills advance according to the same mathematical formula: from 1-50, one point. from 51-100, two points. 101+, four points. any uniformity in the system is lost because there isn't a universal scale for measuring difficulty and generating scores.

He makes a point that because melee starts off around fifty, it's harder to learn than doctor, which starts off low, and he's using the above for that argument. SPECIAL doesn't work like that. It's 1-100 that's one point, not 1-50.

Furthermore, imagine if Fallout or Fallout 2 followed his design of saying that doctor should be harder to learn than melee. Doctor's fairly useless as it is in Fallout and Fallout 2 due to stimpacks and rest time, but I've still tagged it for quests and mending limbs. If doctor cost more, would you guys have taken it? I certainly wouldn't have.

Having less stimpacks isn't much of a solution to the above though, because that would make doctor manditory to have, which wouldn't be good at all.

Basically, this is about gameplay versus realism. Is it realistic for doctor to be as easy to advance as melee? No, it's not. It takes at least three years worth of schooling to become a physician's assistant. However, is balancing the advancement of skills good gameplay? Certainly. It shouldn't cost you twice as much to reap the benefit of one skill versus another unless that skill was twice as good to have. It's a cost/benefit situation.

This is on par with Chris Taylor not wanting hit points to progress in Fallout, because they aren't realistic. They are, however, good for advancement and balancing, which is good for gameplay. Sometimes, realism just isn't good for gameplay. JE's suggestion in #1 is a good example of that.

As for his point about doctor and first aid being combined, I'd rather see them come up with more and different uses for each, frankly. To just say that they're both "healing" skills, so combine them, really isn't that much of a solution. You'd be dumbing them down. First aid skills are something every doctor knows, but not every person who knows first aid can treat pneumonia.

[Doyle]

What if they just had three skills: Pistols, Rifles, and Heavy Weapons. The Auto Weapons skill would just be absorbed into the other three. It may not be completely realistic, but I like it better than the old system and no one would have to learn two skills to be good with a weapon.

[Section8]

Well,

1. JE missed the fact that Fallout actually does have a damage threshold in addition to percentile reduction. (damage resistance) Ever wonder why miniguns do fuck all to power armour? That because it's pumping out a whole lot of instances of low damage. In theory, 50 * 10 = 500 damage, but if the damage threshold of armour is 10, then that formula becomes 50 * (10 - 10).

2. I think doctor and first aid can both exist in the same system, with more distinction of how they are used.

3. JE has done very well to highlight something about SPECIAL. It's not a system that can be easily applied to anything. It works for Fallout, it didn't work as well as it could have for Fallout Tactics, and Lionheart will almost certainly be using the same SPECIAL base stats, a couple of derived stats, but the bulk of the system will be entirely different. The brand recognition of a system should be eclipsed by the fact that it ain't a very adaptable system at all, but hey what do I know.

[Saint_Proverbius]

Yup, I mailed this to JE Sawyer:

Fallout armors have both threshold and resistance values.

Advanced Power Armor MKII
Armor Class: 35
Normal: 18/60
Laser: 19/90
Plasma: 18/60
Explode: 20/70
Fire: 16/70

The first value is threshold, the second value is resistance. It
basically does the reverse of what you're saying. Instead of making
pistols and rifles have more or less impact on the armor type, it
allows the armor types to have better stopping power overall. I'm
guessing the formula stands now at:

Damage * Resistance - Threshold

This does a pretty good job at modelling armor as it stands since it
models absorbtion *and* stopping power. It gives more fiddling
room with armor types as opposed to what you're talking about if
I'm following what you're saying.

Feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken anywhere.

EDIT: Gareth corrected me on the formula. It's (Damage - Threshold) * (1 - Resistance)

Another thing, about his Dodge skill idea. The problem with that is while it may work well with light armor, getting hit with a plasma rifle with light armor will most likely be lethal because of the low thresholds of that armor. Leather armor doesn't do much at all versus plasma either, there's no energy weapon threshold and 10% plasma resistance. The plasma rifle does 35-60 damage as well. A couple of hits, and you're dead.

Now, on to what Doyle said:

What if they just had three skills: Pistols, Rifles, and Heavy Weapons. The Auto Weapons skill would just be absorbed into the other three. It may not be completely realistic, but I like it better than the old system and no one would have to learn two skills to be good with a weapon.

The problem with that is that you're typically going to be starting with a pistol and *maybe* work your way up to rifle. Think about Fallout or Fallout Tactics where you had to shift weapon types later in the game, from Small Arms to Energy Weapons. Making pistol and rifle their own skills would force that shift on a player much earlier, from Pistols to Rifles.

[Section8]

I think as far as the weapons go, it doesn't really matter what the categories are, as long as there is a nice progression through all of them. Fallout does this to some degree but it could be improved upon.

As it stands:

Small Guns

Pistols and upward to combat shotguns/sniper rifles. The progression is largely item based, as a level 2 or 3 character should have enough skill to be hitting anything the try to fairly regularly. Because of this the sort of weapons available to said character should be doing fairly low damage yields.

To compensate for lower damage yields against bigger targets, called single shots ramp up damage with criticals as the skill progresses. That's why small guns starts higher than the other ranged weapon skills.

Big Guns

There is no real item progression to big guns. There's nothing early in the game, and by the time you can get any big gun, you may as well opt for the biggest. To counter this to some degree, the skill starts lower, which has a dual purpose.

Big Guns do most of their damage with bursts, usually at close to extremely close range. So a percentage that exceeds the 95% default shot doesn't really have any trade off, aside from slightly longer range, and better performance vs high AC values.

Secondly, the low skill levels, and this is basically theory, mean that if you were to have a big gun at a low level, you aren't going to hit very often, but when you do, it's basically going to be an instakill. Of course, as mentioned before there aren't really any heavy weapons available at low levels, which is a bit of a flaw.

On another note altogether, but a quite elegant piece of SPECIAL nonetheless. Large amounts of ammo weigh a considerable amount. Heavy weaps have higher str requirements. Coincidence?

[JESawyer]

Hey, guys. I have actually posted all of these ideas before on various BIS boards, but the reaction was less than civil. Things I learned from those threads:

* I am a homosexual
* I am a stupid dumb idiot
* I am incompetent
* I don't know anything
* I want to ruin Fallout

Strangely enough, these weren't the sort of things I was planning to "learn" when I participated in those threads. So, given the general reactions from "hardcore" members of Fallout communities, I often don't see a lot of point to bringing up ideas in those areas.

This thread, on the other hand, seems to be pretty reasonable, so I'll try to discuss some things here.

The third one is the only one I have a major problem with. Think about SMGs and Assault Rifles with what he suggests about #3. To use weapons like those, you'd have to develop two skills as opposed to a sniper that just develops one. After all, when you have an SMG or an Assault Fire, you don't just use one mode on them. Depending on the situation, you might use them as a pistol/rifle or as an autofire weapon.

Maybe this isn't a good idea, but I figured shotguns and rifles would use the same skill category. That would allow area-effect shots and precise sniper attacks from the same skill. I've also wondered if just having Small Arms and Big Guns (instead of Small Arms/Energy Weapons/Big Guns) would be a bad idea.

He makes a point that because melee starts off around fifty, it's harder to learn than doctor, which starts off low, and he's using the above for that argument. SPECIAL doesn't work like that. It's 1-100 that's one point, not 1-50.[/b]

Sorry, I was going off an erroneous listing in a document.

Furthermore, imagine if Fallout or Fallout 2 followed his design of saying that doctor should be harder to learn than melee. Doctor's fairly useless as it is in Fallout and Fallout 2 due to stimpacks and rest time, but I've still tagged it for quests and mending limbs. If doctor cost more, would you guys have taken it? I certainly wouldn't have.

I think you're mis-interpreting what I wrote. The idea behind starting Doctor with a low initial value is that Doctor is a difficult skill to learn. It's complicated and technical in nature, so its forumula for derivation is intentionally weighted low. That's the idea, anyway. Melee, on the other hand, starts with a high initial value (for most characters). Melee is a relatively simple skill, so it starts with a high value. The problem with this setup is that advancement gets harder at a faster rate for the "easy" skill than for the "hard" skill. The 1-50 example is off, but this example should work:

Let's say that my Doctor skill starts at 30 and my Melee skill starts at 80. If we assume that a slide in the difficulty scale for any given task is paralleled at a 1:1 ratio across all skills, a Doctor task with a -30 check should be an equal increase in difficulty to a Melee task with a -30 check. The problem is that to cancel out those penalties for difficult tasks, it takes 30 allocated points in Doctor to "meet the challenge", but 40 allocated points in Melee to do the same. That's the discrepancy that I see, and I don't honestly know why the skills are scaled like that.

I'm not suggesting that Doctor cost more -- not at all. I think that the skills should be derived using similar formulae that produce a fixed range of starting values. However, this isn't enough. All skills need to have a "robust" use across all strata of skill levels. That's one of the reasons why I would suggest collapsing First Aid into Doctor and letting low uses of Doctor serve as First Aid. This way, characters with only rudimentary Doctor skills could still make use of it, but the big boys could still do the massively cool stuff like removing cancer with a toothpick and some milk.

To just say that they're both "healing" skills, so combine them, really isn't that much of a solution. You'd be dumbing them down.

Come on. That's like saying that NOT subdividing Gambling any more is "dumbing it down". Why isn't there a Poker skill and a Roulette skill, etc.? It doesn't have anything to do with dumbing things down. I think that if a skill is in the game, it should have "robust" usefulness across the various skill levels. One solution might, indeed, be to find more uses for First Aid and Doctor. That doesn't mean it's the BEST solution or even a particularly GOOD solution.

1. JE missed the fact that Fallout actually does have a damage threshold in addition to percentile reduction. (damage resistance) Ever wonder why miniguns do fuck all to power armour? That because it's pumping out a whole lot of instances of low damage. In theory, 50 * 10 = 500 damage, but if the damage threshold of armour is 10, then that formula becomes 50 * (10 - 10).

My quote did make it sound like I missed it, but I really just worded my statement poorly. I know that DT and DR are BOTH in Fallout -- I've just never understood the need for a percentile operation when calculating damage reduction. At the high end, it seems to produce scary results. If my power armor has 80% resistance to the bullets slamming into me for 100 points of damage. Well -- I'd hate to think of what happens to anyone who, woe betide, simply doesn't have access to or doesn't want to wear power armor.

Another thing, about his Dodge skill idea. The problem with that is while it may work well with light armor, getting hit with a plasma rifle with light armor will most likely be lethal because of the low thresholds of that armor. Leather armor doesn't do much at all versus plasma either, there's no energy weapon threshold and 10% plasma resistance. The plasma rifle does 35-60 damage as well. A couple of hits, and you're dead.

That is true, but I'd rather have it be a player choice for risk balancing and character "style" than something where you basically have to wear heavy armor or die a horrible, horrible death. In the current system, a guy wearing leather armor or metal armor is basically screwed if anyone with a decent skill shoots a powerful weapon at them. There isn't any way to make Bendy McDodgealot. Adding a skill like Dodge would help allow that player flexibility. YUK, YUK.[/quote]

[JESawyer]

I think that all references to skill values as "percentages" should be dropped. Refering to a 57 skill in Barter as "57%" is erroneous, confusing, and unnecessary. You randomly generate a number between 1-100 to check against that stat, but the stat itself doesn't really have anything to do with the scale used in the game.

[Section8]

My quote did make it sound like I missed it, but I really just worded my statement poorly. I know that DT and DR are BOTH in Fallout -- I've just never understood the need for a percentile operation when calculating damage reduction. At the high end, it seems to produce scary results. If my power armor has 80% resistance to the bullets slamming into me for 100 points of damage. Well -- I'd hate to think of what happens to anyone who, woe betide, simply doesn't have access to or doesn't want to wear power armor.

Well, one of Fallout's design flaws is it's progression. It was made very obvious when attempting to "balance" 150+ weapons and 16 armour types in FOT. Because you need a fairly massive damage yield to get through the better armour types, then as soon as someone puts on power armour, half of the weapons are absolutely useless. Likewise, it means that splitting your points between 6 squad members and arming them up with a modest weapon set is not a fair trade off against a single uber-character.

And that's purely the damage threshold doing that crazy stuff, at it's high end. Personally I like having both there because it makes for some interesting armour types. eg

Armour X - High DT/Low DR: Great against the little stuff, but anything that gets over the threshold is going to cause a LOT of pain

Armour Y - Low DT/High DR: You take damage against just about anything, but you're better protected against the bigger stuff.