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[EuchreJack]

Yeah, it does, should have been more clear.

One thing that's been proposed for chargen is this , which I think is quite interesting.

Hm, to me hiding the point values doesn't really eliminate the point system, but maybe I misread the proposal.

Now, it would be a lot of work, but I was thinking of the Traveller character generation system.  If anything like that could be implemented, it would be truly awesome.  A similar system was featured in Twilight 2000.

[notquitethere]

That looks pointless. There's already a freeform option for chargen.

Yes, but the proposal here is to have an indicator of how tough or easy the character would be to play when making freeform selections.

Hm, to me hiding the point values doesn't really eliminate the point system, but maybe I misread the proposal.

You did, the proposal doesn't just hide the point values, it would make it freeform. The point values would be to just signal a difficulty level to the player.

Now, it would be a lot of work, but I was thinking of the Traveller character generation system.  If anything like that could be implemented, it would be truly awesome.

I agree, a character creator that at the same time gives a strong sense of character history can be very rewarding.

Kevin's comment is pretty on the ball though, the whole trait cost design is arbitrary and trying to tweak it for 'balance' is a waste of time:

The concept of "various traits are worth different numbers of points, either positive or negative, and adding those numbers together gives you a number that tells you how hard challenging that character is to play" is simply incoherent outside of an extremely constrained system which we don't have. All the skills are slightly different in value, all the stats are VERY different in value, and traits have shot-in-the-dark values, and to complicate things further, the actual values of all of these things actually depend on what other traits you have, so simply summing them together gives you an almost completely useless number.

[Random_Dragon]

Thing is, there's an inherit assumption here that swapping out the chargen system will be easier to determine balance. It won't. Quantifying the overall difficulty of a character is really difficult and really complex. We have a system that, while not a GOOD metric, at least provides rough guidelines to people adding new content to chargen.

With this new system, you still have to go through the effort of quantifying the effectiveness of any given trait, stat, etc. You still have to go through the effort, and in fact the devs will have to go through effort that's ALREADY been expended in the past to build the system from scratch. It's just the math is going to be hidden from the player and from new contributors.

Having the math be better will be nice sure, but you're not to be able to escape the underlying problem: Balance Is Hard. It definitely won't be a miracle solution to game balance in the slightest, and it will be a herculean effort to convert all the existing chargen content to operate under the new system.

[anothersimulacrum]

Forgive me if I'm misreading your post, but that doesn't really appear to me at least to be very much about balance at all, so of course it won't be a miracle solution or make it easier to determine balance.
Reworking everything will be a bit annoying, but overall the cost of doing that is less that the improvement that I think this would be.

[duckman]

Someone is apparently planning on eventually adding a genocidally anti-mutant purist trait. If it's going to work like I think it will, the change that other guy made to make the Pretty mutation line visible is going to have some funny results since, as I mentioned in a previous post, ugliness and mutation visibility are completely separate factors for NPC trust/friendliness.

Edit: There seems to be an inverted value somewhere with int/skill rust scaling. Unless making smarter people more forgetful was intentional or higher values mean that skill rusts slower now.

Edit: You'd think that a raised welding mask would have basic glare protection, like a baseball cap, but apparently the mask becomes transparent when up.

[Salmeuk]

 Freeform chargen is all I ever used, for the exact reason that balance is a silly concept in a simulationist game (yet another example of cdda's internal dissonance). I wanted to play a specific character, derived from a narrative I made up on the spot. I should be given the freedom to select whatever traits or skills I feel are representative of that character.

The issue with the current system, as I remember, is that for any given trait or skill, the effects are not obvious to someone new to the game. The names of traits have very little to do with the numbers they affect, since the effects are decided arbitrarily by the developers. So one persons interpretation of 'bad back' might be very different from anothers. It's a big issue for roleplayers where a certain trait sounds like it would make perfect sense for a character's backstory, but in practice the trait is negligible or affects some unrelated aspect of gameplay.

To summarize, chargen as an act of roleplay is difficult when there is disagreement between the language of the player and the language of the developer. For new players especially, it makes it tough to design and play characters that feel right. The redesign seems to acknowledge this, but also suggest putting a cap on points, which is a mistake IMO.

[duckman]

Seems the Telescopic Eyes CBM reduces perception by 4 permanently. Must be because it forces the removal of all eye mutations (specifically Avian Eyes, in this case), even if you don't have them.

[Iceblaster]

-snip-

Yeah I agree, probably gonna start doing the same myself. I'm kinda bored with the meta mutations and having to game the system. Would prefer having mor einteresting characters than having to play with pointbuy.

Also whoever made it so the max is 14 for stats, I hate you
I really loved making mutants with 20 in INT or whatever stat and shit otehr stats.

[EuchreJack]

Forgive me if I'm misreading your post, but that doesn't really appear to me at least to be very much about balance at all, so of course it won't be a miracle solution or make it easier to determine balance.
Reworking everything will be a bit annoying, but overall the cost of doing that is less that the improvement that I think this would be.

Also, I think if the proposal is just to add a fourth standard character generation system, and to drop the current point system to "it's there, but we're done working on it", then it isn't really something controversial.

Personally, I like "gaming the system" with "unrealistic point buying" from time to time.  It presents a fixed challenge where I can use whatever skills I have to achieve an optimum solution.  But I can see how it suspends disbelief, and isn't perhaps the "best" character generation system.

[Random_Dragon]

In the meantime, have a Cata++ update. Mostly focused on making hydrogen tanks actually useful for something, and giving Bio-Weapon Beta a good "spike" powergen option now that mini-reactors are obsolete.

[EuchreJack]

Can the waste heat catch stuff on fire?  I mean, can I use this weapon to kill everything in front and burn everything behind me?

[Random_Dragon]

Sadly Thankfully no, but it will ruin the player's day if they just sit there letting it run. That said, when you're shoving a megawatt hydrogen cell into your chest cavity (r/hedidthemath), it stands to reason that you're not outputting waste heat anymore, so much as backblast.

[anothersimulacrum]

Also whoever made it so the max is 14 for stats, I hate you
I really loved making mutants with 20 in INT or whatever stat and shit otehr stats.

You're welcome!
We may see see mutations for that being allowed in chargen in the future (I'd be for it, though I'm not the person who makes those decisions, and it should only be in the scenarios where it makes sense), but it won't happen before 0.E.
In the meantime, you can leave the points behind and use the debug menu to set your stats up.
There is a slightly annoying bug to fix there with stat raising mutations, but that will get fixed.

Forgive me if I'm misreading your post, but that doesn't really appear to me at least to be very much about balance at all, so of course it won't be a miracle solution or make it easier to determine balance.
Reworking everything will be a bit annoying, but overall the cost of doing that is less that the improvement that I think this would be.

Also, I think if the proposal is just to add a fourth standard character generation system, and to drop the current point system to "it's there, but we're done working on it", then it isn't really something controversial.

Personally, I like "gaming the system" with "unrealistic point buying" from time to time.  It presents a fixed challenge where I can use whatever skills I have to achieve an optimum solution.  But I can see how it suspends disbelief, and isn't perhaps the "best" character generation system.

No, this is proposal is to replace the current point systems. Keeping the current point systems concurrently this this point system would be annoying (this system would have several different knobs for telling how it impacts, compared to the single point knob current ones have), and largely pointless, because it just gives worse feedback than this new system would.

[pisskop]

is coolthulu still mia?

[Soadreqm]

No activity on Github since last November.