Post by Tao Lung on Mar 9, 2015 18:32:06 GMT
As I love to create things, I would like to suggest an idea to sophisticate our current system, although without altering its simplicity at the same time. What I have in mind will also provide an auto-limiting feature to the power growth system we currently have, making it non-linear. Also, this won’t require reworking/rebalancing any mechanics already set up, what allows this to be perfectly reversible with without having to do any actual calculations to restore the old system, in case you like this proposal enough to go with it. Stick with me and you’ll understand why:
The idea is to give all players a set composed of 3 stats:
1) Offense: Ability to dish out damage.
2) Defense: Ability to endure damage.
3) Speed: Ability to hit precisely and avoid damage.
This would be best in my opinion as we have transformations that do “Offense/Defense” multiplications already. This will keep things familiar enough, plus adds Speed to allow for further characterization of both transformations and characters themselves.
Or the stats could be called:
Strength: Physical defense and power of melee attacks.
Energy/Ki: Power of energy attacks.
Speed: General accuracy and agility.
Although the names sound more awesome in the second set, from a mechanics point of view, I believe that the first set is better. Combat mechanics stay the same. But rather than comparing only PL vs PL, you compare these 3 stats properly to use them as guidelines for your actions. We already have differential multipliers for offense and defense, so it doesn’t break the simplicity of WOD’s system.
Cool, but how Power Level works now? This is what I think it’s the coolest thing about this idea. Power Level is a mere flavor element that can give you an idea of the character’s overall fighting abilities by converting it into numbers, although it can be very misleading, like in the anime, by not computing necessarily everything into those numbers. So having a higher power level is still definitely not a guaranteed win.
ARE YOU INSANE BY ASKING A RESET TAO???
Of course not. This is not a reboot and everyone will preserve precisely as much as they earned for their characters so far. This is because what we have as Power Level now, would be renamed into EXP and the mechanics for earning EXP will be exactly the same as we have now, so you still have to choose:
1) Collect EXP from the thread as an immediate gain.
2) OR collect zenni, for a long-term advantage.
It’s the same as we have now. However, once you pick EXP you will have the following choices to balance out your character growth; all of which will cost a determinate number of EXP.
1) You may pay EXP to increase a stat;
2) You may pay experience to buy a technique slot;
3) You pay experience to earn extra useage of a racial ability (Ex: Extra regenerations for Namekian regeneration);
4) You may pay experience to earn a certain special technique when applicable;
5) You may pay experience to buy a transformation;
Every stat begins at 1. As you spend EXP to increase a stat, however, it gets progressively more costly. The intended formula for buy stats is as follows:
1000 + [100 x (n -1)] where n = your current stat value.
This means to raise your stat from 1 to 2, you’ll pay 1.000 XP. From 2 to 3, it will cost you 1.100 XP. From 3 to 4, it costs 1.200. And so on.
This is what I mean by “non-linear” growth system. The stronger you become, the harder it becomes to get even stronger. It means just because someone earned 100.000 EXP because he/she wrote gazillions of words, it won’t compute exactly a +100.000 power difference between him and another character, since costs progressively increase and. This will allow us to work with smaller numbers in combat and also, make interaction between stronger and weaker players more possible, without individually penalizing those who are stronger or write a lot. With the proper incentive to multiplayer and saga threads, characters will eventually get so strong that growing through solo threads will be severely nerfed in the long run, and players will have to resort to interaction with other players to get better increases, fomenting the in-character interaction, which is ideal to your concept of a player-driven site and at the same time killing the word-count exploit. Grading by quality becomes lesser of a problem when people realize they can earn more by a descriptive roleplay of 5.000 words by roleplaying with others, than with a solo text of 50.000 words to freak graders out. Two birds, one rock.
About EXP costs for techniques, I suggest 4.000 – 6.000 EXP depending on race to have it similar to what we have now. It is good, because since characters don’t get freebies every 4.000 – 6.000 pl, their technique sheet won’t eventually get bloated (at 100.000 pl, a human has 28 technique slots…) and will force players once again to think whether they want immediate power by investing points in stats, or if they want to be more versatile by having extra or more powerful versions of their existing techniques. Same thing for Regenerations (and racial abilities that give freebies every x pl) and transformations. More options for character growth will make characters more diverse and will have players think of other things aside from racing for power level in other to balance out their characters and make them relevant.
The reversibility of this system lays within the fact that all you have to do is rename Total EXP Gained back into PL and everything will be exactly as it was before. I don’t see why it would become problematic, though.
A cool concept I would like to introduce and suggest as well is the concept of Milestones. The could be either points when a character does something of importance in the site (such as Athren becoming a super saiyan for the first time example) that makes their character more relevant, being more of a per-character based concept. This also could be simply stages of the game that. Something like:
10.000 EXP Spent: Second milestone
100.000 EXP Spent: Third milestone
250.000 EXP Spent: Fourth Milestone
500.000 EXP Spent: Fifth Milestone
750.000 EXP Spent: Sixth Milestone
1.000.000 EXP Spent: Seventh Milestone
Every milestone would grant a progressive bonus of +1 to all stats (+1 to +7). Characters would start as 1-star characters (first milestone) and reach the rank of 7-star characters (seventh milestone) by the end. Yes, it is because of the dragonballs. I’m that lame. I‘m a theme lover. A suggestion that I also extend to transformations and technique tiers, meaning there would be 7 tiers of characters, 7 tiers of transformations and 7 tiers of techniques. Lots and lots of options of progress. Techniques work the way they do now from tiers 1-3. Tiers 4-7 would each give a 25% boost to a proper stat, meaning that at tier 7, an offensive technique would be at 100% your Offense (or Ki/Strength) and earn a x2 Offense boost… or perhaps a x1.5 Boost to both offense and speed, depending on how you wish to develop your character.
For fun-ness, as Power Level would be just flavor stuff, here’s a formula to calculate it:
10m-1 x n x [1 + (n/10)]
m = current milestone
n = average between Offense, Defense and Speed rounded down
That means your starting Power Level is always 1 and as characters reach milestones, a “0” is added by the end of the number, meaning you’ll never have power levels like 6.768.333, which is… ugly. Again, this is for flavor, reason why I designed the formula that way. For example if your average stats are 20 and you have reached the 7th milestone, your pl would be:
106 x 20 x[1 + 2] = 1.000.000 x 20 x 3 = 60.000.000
Sounds clean and canon for an end-game character, doesn’t it?
If you happen to like this, I volunteer myself to update pages with the proper mechanics, by either editing pages myself (in which case, it would be temporary and when all job was done you would just need to demote me back to regular member) or by providing the pages with the content so admins/mods could copy/paste after reviewing it themselves (in which case my user permissions wouldn’t have to be changed at all).
In any case, I’m excited to hear your opinions on this yet another brainstorming from me. Leave your comments, suggest different EXP costs or be as gentle as possible when throwing the rotten tomatoes. I’ll be updating this first post with a “FAQ” guide according with what is asked during this discussion to make it easier to read as well, in case there is an ambiguity in what I wrote that lead people to confusion. In any case, thank you for reading this all through.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FAQs and Updates
I see many people concerned about the simplicity of the system. And I believe you are more than right; I tried to take special care as to not alter that point of the mechanics, which I am very fond of myself. But fact is, that we already operate on stats here, althought the way they are handled have them unnoticed for the most part. The Offense and Defense stats are already there; I threw Speed in the mix just to add the possibility for a bit more customization, as certainly there are people who would like to have a character that is focused on speed and I've already seen comments on transformations regarding the fact that we still have no mechanics for a separate speed boost. Let me elaborate...
Currently, there are two "hidden" stats: Offensive PL and Defensive PL. Certainly abilities such as Durability adds a modifier that acts over your Defensive PL, without altering your Offensive PL. Some transformations, such as the Ultra Super Saiyan hands different boosts for the Offensive PL and Defensive PL. So the only stat I'm "inventing" is Speed.
Currently, the mechanics work the following way:
You want to make an attack, you check your PL and compare it to the opponent's Defensive PL to have an idea of how much damage you can dish out. The same basis is used to compare the speed of the two characters. If you have an attack labeled Offense and another labeled Defense, instead of Offensive PL and Defensive PL, the combat mechanics stay the same? All Im doing here is add Speed into the mix as a separate stat as well. If anything, you could consider merely two stats: Offense and Defense and thus, the system would be exactly the same.
My suggestion maintains this same simplicity of the combat system (you will look at something called offense and defense, rather than Offensive PL and Defensive PL, which will already be calculated and displayed on your profile, unlike the current set up, so it makes it one step easier actually than it is);
The technique system works the same way (33%, 66%, 100% of Offense);
The grading system remains unchanged;
The only thing it changes is how you apply your PL (which will now me renamed into EXP) in your application. This is the main focus of this systematic sophistication and not changing roleplay and combat mechanics, which I believe I avoided with my best efforts. A linear growth system is problematic, because +100.000 pl translates into a 100.000 pl difference, making the gap between two characters absurdly high. When you increase costs progressively, you become able to hold this uniform growth speed down, bringing extremes closer and allowing for characters to interact more easily. You also force people to balance out their characters by diverting their attention to other areas they need to invest. Not to mention being able to customize your character is the best part of a RPG. Well, at least to me.
Another concern that led me to suggest the EXP system is the technique system we currently have. Characters earn technique slots as freebies using a constant depending on species: 4.000 pl, 5.000 pl or 6.000 pl. In the first segment of the roleplay, you won't notice things getting out of hand, but when you cross the first 100.000 pl barrier (which is not hard) and you start accumulating tens of technique slots, bloating your technique sheet, things will get out of hand. If you give techniques a cost, people have to choose to buy the technique slots, rather than earning them for free. The same thing applies to certain techniques such as the namekian regeneration. 1 full heal in a thread is a pretty useful ability. At most, you'll see people such as Koramund, who have 2 regenerations. But when these numbers rise to 4, 5 regenerations in a thread, which will happen quickly since they are freebies at every 40.000 pl, you'll easily figure out how unfairly powerful such characters will become. Now when you make people pay EXP to get a new regeneration, forfeiting a stat increase in the process, things get more balanced as the player will have to think better if it is worth buying a new regeneration now, when he has stats, techniques and transformations to worry about as well. That impedes players from focusing on a single area and going nuts about it, for neglecting other areas will severely gimp their character.
Understand that what I said so far in the post is the root of this idea and the most important part of it: Try to sophisticate what we have without destroying simplicity and without penalizing the current players in any way. And I believe I managed that in a sense, as everything we have so far was unchanged: there's only a bit more of extra information to be added. And as I said, if this proves to be much more complicated than what we have, in order to return everything back to what it was, all you have to do is rename "Total EXP Gained" into PL.
The whole milestones thing and 7 tiers for everything are merely some extra sauce I added, that is product of my crazy brain. Mostly, because it was fun to think of the formula to calculate what number the scouters would show as one's power level for flavor element in the roleplay and because 7 tiers for 7 dragonball stars sound just too awesome in my opinion. It is not as fundamental to my suggestion as the core part is.
I tend to talk too much and end up giving the false impression that things are more complicated than they actually are or by writing out in 10 lines what I could explain in one, so most of this would be summarized to the least ammount of information needed for people to understand the "new" mechanics without having to go through a novel such as this very post you are currently reading. I have a bad habit of trying to explain myself too much. But this is all I wanted to say for now.
Click on the spoiler below to see a functional example of this system:
The idea is to give all players a set composed of 3 stats:
1) Offense: Ability to dish out damage.
2) Defense: Ability to endure damage.
3) Speed: Ability to hit precisely and avoid damage.
This would be best in my opinion as we have transformations that do “Offense/Defense” multiplications already. This will keep things familiar enough, plus adds Speed to allow for further characterization of both transformations and characters themselves.
Or the stats could be called:
Strength: Physical defense and power of melee attacks.
Energy/Ki: Power of energy attacks.
Speed: General accuracy and agility.
Although the names sound more awesome in the second set, from a mechanics point of view, I believe that the first set is better. Combat mechanics stay the same. But rather than comparing only PL vs PL, you compare these 3 stats properly to use them as guidelines for your actions. We already have differential multipliers for offense and defense, so it doesn’t break the simplicity of WOD’s system.
Cool, but how Power Level works now? This is what I think it’s the coolest thing about this idea. Power Level is a mere flavor element that can give you an idea of the character’s overall fighting abilities by converting it into numbers, although it can be very misleading, like in the anime, by not computing necessarily everything into those numbers. So having a higher power level is still definitely not a guaranteed win.
ARE YOU INSANE BY ASKING A RESET TAO???
Of course not. This is not a reboot and everyone will preserve precisely as much as they earned for their characters so far. This is because what we have as Power Level now, would be renamed into EXP and the mechanics for earning EXP will be exactly the same as we have now, so you still have to choose:
1) Collect EXP from the thread as an immediate gain.
2) OR collect zenni, for a long-term advantage.
It’s the same as we have now. However, once you pick EXP you will have the following choices to balance out your character growth; all of which will cost a determinate number of EXP.
1) You may pay EXP to increase a stat;
2) You may pay experience to buy a technique slot;
3) You pay experience to earn extra useage of a racial ability (Ex: Extra regenerations for Namekian regeneration);
4) You may pay experience to earn a certain special technique when applicable;
5) You may pay experience to buy a transformation;
Every stat begins at 1. As you spend EXP to increase a stat, however, it gets progressively more costly. The intended formula for buy stats is as follows:
1000 + [100 x (n -1)] where n = your current stat value.
This means to raise your stat from 1 to 2, you’ll pay 1.000 XP. From 2 to 3, it will cost you 1.100 XP. From 3 to 4, it costs 1.200. And so on.
This is what I mean by “non-linear” growth system. The stronger you become, the harder it becomes to get even stronger. It means just because someone earned 100.000 EXP because he/she wrote gazillions of words, it won’t compute exactly a +100.000 power difference between him and another character, since costs progressively increase and. This will allow us to work with smaller numbers in combat and also, make interaction between stronger and weaker players more possible, without individually penalizing those who are stronger or write a lot. With the proper incentive to multiplayer and saga threads, characters will eventually get so strong that growing through solo threads will be severely nerfed in the long run, and players will have to resort to interaction with other players to get better increases, fomenting the in-character interaction, which is ideal to your concept of a player-driven site and at the same time killing the word-count exploit. Grading by quality becomes lesser of a problem when people realize they can earn more by a descriptive roleplay of 5.000 words by roleplaying with others, than with a solo text of 50.000 words to freak graders out. Two birds, one rock.
About EXP costs for techniques, I suggest 4.000 – 6.000 EXP depending on race to have it similar to what we have now. It is good, because since characters don’t get freebies every 4.000 – 6.000 pl, their technique sheet won’t eventually get bloated (at 100.000 pl, a human has 28 technique slots…) and will force players once again to think whether they want immediate power by investing points in stats, or if they want to be more versatile by having extra or more powerful versions of their existing techniques. Same thing for Regenerations (and racial abilities that give freebies every x pl) and transformations. More options for character growth will make characters more diverse and will have players think of other things aside from racing for power level in other to balance out their characters and make them relevant.
The reversibility of this system lays within the fact that all you have to do is rename Total EXP Gained back into PL and everything will be exactly as it was before. I don’t see why it would become problematic, though.
A cool concept I would like to introduce and suggest as well is the concept of Milestones. The could be either points when a character does something of importance in the site (such as Athren becoming a super saiyan for the first time example) that makes their character more relevant, being more of a per-character based concept. This also could be simply stages of the game that. Something like:
10.000 EXP Spent: Second milestone
100.000 EXP Spent: Third milestone
250.000 EXP Spent: Fourth Milestone
500.000 EXP Spent: Fifth Milestone
750.000 EXP Spent: Sixth Milestone
1.000.000 EXP Spent: Seventh Milestone
Every milestone would grant a progressive bonus of +1 to all stats (+1 to +7). Characters would start as 1-star characters (first milestone) and reach the rank of 7-star characters (seventh milestone) by the end. Yes, it is because of the dragonballs. I’m that lame. I‘m a theme lover. A suggestion that I also extend to transformations and technique tiers, meaning there would be 7 tiers of characters, 7 tiers of transformations and 7 tiers of techniques. Lots and lots of options of progress. Techniques work the way they do now from tiers 1-3. Tiers 4-7 would each give a 25% boost to a proper stat, meaning that at tier 7, an offensive technique would be at 100% your Offense (or Ki/Strength) and earn a x2 Offense boost… or perhaps a x1.5 Boost to both offense and speed, depending on how you wish to develop your character.
For fun-ness, as Power Level would be just flavor stuff, here’s a formula to calculate it:
10m-1 x n x [1 + (n/10)]
m = current milestone
n = average between Offense, Defense and Speed rounded down
That means your starting Power Level is always 1 and as characters reach milestones, a “0” is added by the end of the number, meaning you’ll never have power levels like 6.768.333, which is… ugly. Again, this is for flavor, reason why I designed the formula that way. For example if your average stats are 20 and you have reached the 7th milestone, your pl would be:
106 x 20 x[1 + 2] = 1.000.000 x 20 x 3 = 60.000.000
Sounds clean and canon for an end-game character, doesn’t it?
If you happen to like this, I volunteer myself to update pages with the proper mechanics, by either editing pages myself (in which case, it would be temporary and when all job was done you would just need to demote me back to regular member) or by providing the pages with the content so admins/mods could copy/paste after reviewing it themselves (in which case my user permissions wouldn’t have to be changed at all).
In any case, I’m excited to hear your opinions on this yet another brainstorming from me. Leave your comments, suggest different EXP costs or be as gentle as possible when throwing the rotten tomatoes. I’ll be updating this first post with a “FAQ” guide according with what is asked during this discussion to make it easier to read as well, in case there is an ambiguity in what I wrote that lead people to confusion. In any case, thank you for reading this all through.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FAQs and Updates
I see many people concerned about the simplicity of the system. And I believe you are more than right; I tried to take special care as to not alter that point of the mechanics, which I am very fond of myself. But fact is, that we already operate on stats here, althought the way they are handled have them unnoticed for the most part. The Offense and Defense stats are already there; I threw Speed in the mix just to add the possibility for a bit more customization, as certainly there are people who would like to have a character that is focused on speed and I've already seen comments on transformations regarding the fact that we still have no mechanics for a separate speed boost. Let me elaborate...
Currently, there are two "hidden" stats: Offensive PL and Defensive PL. Certainly abilities such as Durability adds a modifier that acts over your Defensive PL, without altering your Offensive PL. Some transformations, such as the Ultra Super Saiyan hands different boosts for the Offensive PL and Defensive PL. So the only stat I'm "inventing" is Speed.
Currently, the mechanics work the following way:
You want to make an attack, you check your PL and compare it to the opponent's Defensive PL to have an idea of how much damage you can dish out. The same basis is used to compare the speed of the two characters. If you have an attack labeled Offense and another labeled Defense, instead of Offensive PL and Defensive PL, the combat mechanics stay the same? All Im doing here is add Speed into the mix as a separate stat as well. If anything, you could consider merely two stats: Offense and Defense and thus, the system would be exactly the same.
My suggestion maintains this same simplicity of the combat system (you will look at something called offense and defense, rather than Offensive PL and Defensive PL, which will already be calculated and displayed on your profile, unlike the current set up, so it makes it one step easier actually than it is);
The technique system works the same way (33%, 66%, 100% of Offense);
The grading system remains unchanged;
The only thing it changes is how you apply your PL (which will now me renamed into EXP) in your application. This is the main focus of this systematic sophistication and not changing roleplay and combat mechanics, which I believe I avoided with my best efforts. A linear growth system is problematic, because +100.000 pl translates into a 100.000 pl difference, making the gap between two characters absurdly high. When you increase costs progressively, you become able to hold this uniform growth speed down, bringing extremes closer and allowing for characters to interact more easily. You also force people to balance out their characters by diverting their attention to other areas they need to invest. Not to mention being able to customize your character is the best part of a RPG. Well, at least to me.
Another concern that led me to suggest the EXP system is the technique system we currently have. Characters earn technique slots as freebies using a constant depending on species: 4.000 pl, 5.000 pl or 6.000 pl. In the first segment of the roleplay, you won't notice things getting out of hand, but when you cross the first 100.000 pl barrier (which is not hard) and you start accumulating tens of technique slots, bloating your technique sheet, things will get out of hand. If you give techniques a cost, people have to choose to buy the technique slots, rather than earning them for free. The same thing applies to certain techniques such as the namekian regeneration. 1 full heal in a thread is a pretty useful ability. At most, you'll see people such as Koramund, who have 2 regenerations. But when these numbers rise to 4, 5 regenerations in a thread, which will happen quickly since they are freebies at every 40.000 pl, you'll easily figure out how unfairly powerful such characters will become. Now when you make people pay EXP to get a new regeneration, forfeiting a stat increase in the process, things get more balanced as the player will have to think better if it is worth buying a new regeneration now, when he has stats, techniques and transformations to worry about as well. That impedes players from focusing on a single area and going nuts about it, for neglecting other areas will severely gimp their character.
Understand that what I said so far in the post is the root of this idea and the most important part of it: Try to sophisticate what we have without destroying simplicity and without penalizing the current players in any way. And I believe I managed that in a sense, as everything we have so far was unchanged: there's only a bit more of extra information to be added. And as I said, if this proves to be much more complicated than what we have, in order to return everything back to what it was, all you have to do is rename "Total EXP Gained" into PL.
The whole milestones thing and 7 tiers for everything are merely some extra sauce I added, that is product of my crazy brain. Mostly, because it was fun to think of the formula to calculate what number the scouters would show as one's power level for flavor element in the roleplay and because 7 tiers for 7 dragonball stars sound just too awesome in my opinion. It is not as fundamental to my suggestion as the core part is.
I tend to talk too much and end up giving the false impression that things are more complicated than they actually are or by writing out in 10 lines what I could explain in one, so most of this would be summarized to the least ammount of information needed for people to understand the "new" mechanics without having to go through a novel such as this very post you are currently reading. I have a bad habit of trying to explain myself too much. But this is all I wanted to say for now.
Click on the spoiler below to see a functional example of this system:
Tao Lung has a pl of 10.089. Compared to Athren, who has 118.613, that makes Tao around 11 times weaker than Athren. Now, let me convert both bios, as if we were using the EXP system. I'll be disregarding Speed to keep the number of variables equal to what we have now (Offensive Pl/Defensive Pl = Offense/Defense):
TAO (10.089 EXP Total; 9.200 EXP Spent; 889 EXP Left)
Power Level: 75 (Flavor)
Offense: 5 (4.600 EXP Spent)
Defense: 5 (4.600 EXP spent)
Techniques Earned: 0 (0 EXP spent)
ATHREN (118.613 EXP Total; 117.800 EXP Spent, 813 EXP Left)
Power Level: 336 (Flavor)
Offense: 14 (18.600 EXP Spent)
Defense: 14 (18.600 EXP Spent)
Techniques Earned: 19 (76.000 EXP Spent)
You compare your offense v.s. the opponent's defense; the opponent compares his offense to your defense. Absolutely nothing changed about the the combat mechanics. But a character that was previously 11 times stronger than me, turned into roughly 3 times my power mechanically speaking. See what I mean about "braking" the power race?
Plus, you work with smaller numbers, which is way better to compare. Pl is still there as a flavor element, which still reflects an idea of a huge difference between Tao and Athren. I had to change the formula to calculate it slightly, as I didn't consider milestones to keep it simplier.
TAO (10.089 EXP Total; 9.200 EXP Spent; 889 EXP Left)
Power Level: 75 (Flavor)
Offense: 5 (4.600 EXP Spent)
Defense: 5 (4.600 EXP spent)
Techniques Earned: 0 (0 EXP spent)
ATHREN (118.613 EXP Total; 117.800 EXP Spent, 813 EXP Left)
Power Level: 336 (Flavor)
Offense: 14 (18.600 EXP Spent)
Defense: 14 (18.600 EXP Spent)
Techniques Earned: 19 (76.000 EXP Spent)
You compare your offense v.s. the opponent's defense; the opponent compares his offense to your defense. Absolutely nothing changed about the the combat mechanics. But a character that was previously 11 times stronger than me, turned into roughly 3 times my power mechanically speaking. See what I mean about "braking" the power race?
Plus, you work with smaller numbers, which is way better to compare. Pl is still there as a flavor element, which still reflects an idea of a huge difference between Tao and Athren. I had to change the formula to calculate it slightly, as I didn't consider milestones to keep it simplier.