About health and focus management

Greetings everyone!

I'd like to expose a concept i developed from something i heard in the Community hangout about skills; Lord Jouten pointed out that as you adventure and fight you suffer more than superficial wounds, and asked to address it as a max health reduction.

SotA faced the resources in a D&D way, assuming your character will suffer only bruises and superficial cuts, and the only serious wound is the one that take you down. I found the new approach interesting, gave it a thought, and came up with another way of managing resources during combat which could change the combat flow for the best. I highlighted the main points of the concept in an attempt to catch attention from fast readers.

RESOURCE DEPLETION: Both resources (health and focus) would face two type of losses; the standard resource loss being what we have now, a loss from your resource pool, and also a semi-permanent max value reduction who could work this way; every time your character suffers a resource loss (health or focus), an internal counter will rise up; when that counter reaches a certain value, your max resource value will be reduced by 1 point (for example; every 50 points of damage you suffer, your max health decreases by 1). I'll talk about each resource separately.

• Health: standard loss is still the same, representing your character suffered a superficial wound. Losses in max value come to represent the way your character physical exhaustion as he keeps moving forward. It also means serious injures and wounds that your character may suffer in his adventure; that´s why critical strikes no longer do an additional amount of damage, instead they reduce your max life a certain amount of points.
• Focus: focus management should be drastically changed. Instead of working as mana (a pool that allows you to unleash every ounce of your power until you got none) I think of focus more like the rogue energy in WoW. This means skills shall cost more focus so it's designed to deplete faster, but it also has an enhanced regeneration. That being said, standard focus loss is the effort your character puts in unleashing a skill, and losses in max value come to represent your character mental exhaustion while he puts his life in the line.

RESOURCE RECOVERY: resource regeneration should be proportional to the current maximum value of the resource, meaning that a character will need the same time to recover his full health with a 10% loss in max value or with a 50% loss.

• Health: as stated in the community hangout, health recovery will stay the same; you can regenerate it or recover it using magic. max value reduction would require an additional mechanic to be restored; to restore it completely, you'd need intensive care, but there should be a way to patch you up and go on. Trying to keep it simple, i suggest spending time in civilized areas would restore your max health progressively (let's say every minute you spend in a town gives you 1 point of max health back) and a first aid kit would allow the player to patch himself up to an exent (an item with a limited amount of charges). Applying a first aid will require being off combat and a bit of time (30 seconds for example); using it will consume a charge, and will give you back half of the max health you lost, and that health value will be regarded as your max health in regard of future first aid applications (this means having two consecutive first aid treatments will give you no benefit). Of course, being interrupted while applying first aid will waste the charge and doesn't give any benefit.
• Focus: as i said before, focus recovery would be enhanced in a way that standing around without using any skills nor moving will recover your focus to it current max value in matter of seconds (running would decrease significantly the focus regeneration, for example down to 40%). However, to recover the max value lost some resting should be required. For example, sitting (/sit) will make you recover your max focus progressively (to give an impression of the amount of time i'm thinking, every 5 seconds you spend sitting will add 1 point to your max focus, up to your real max value).

BENEFITS

• First and foremost, it could give a realistic feeling to combat since people will have limitations to the amount of skills they can unleash before running out of focus. It would make players think and manage focus carefully, and will give battles a more strategic sense, knowing that if you go all out, you'll have no focus to defend yourself while you recover for the next strike.
• It could give more meaning to the currently mandatory Healing skill, making its skills not something you use "because it came up and i was 10 health down", but something which use you will ponder ("still got 2/3 of my health... shall i use a healing now or is better to use that focus to hit my enemy some more/save it to use a defensive skill?").
• It raises the advantage focus reduction for combining skills gives, since the amount of skills you can trigger one after another is much limited than it is now.
• It address the "allmighty character bashing everything around" concern (if i'm not mistaken, that was what brought up the original suggestion in the hangout), since you need to stop and take brief breaks to recover your focus and to apply first aid. It also limits the amount of enemies you can handle at once, because if the player doesn't manage his resources carefully he will reach the point where his max focus only allows him to release a couple of skills before waiting to recharge.

And that's all. Sorry for the long post, i tried to make it as brief as possible... hope it's worth the reading. I'm eagerly waiting to hear your opinions! Don't want to write a comment? use the poll!

 

I will ignore focus for now, because I do not care much either way and there have to be some other things implemented as well. Besides I think there are going to be issues if jumps/rolls, magic and combat actions are linked to one resource.

As for the health, I like the idea of max health going slowly down. I would also see different type of damage, some would be easier to remove (cuts), some harder (burns, poison). They would require also different health magic.

I would like to see few things.

- right health spell should minimize or neutralize max health loss if it is used in time (5-10 s delay max)
- right potions would work the same way, both should be against specific type of damage
- first-aid kits could restore some of the permanent health loss, but not all
- proper healing should take time (e.g. one game day for cuts, up to four days for poisons, burns and such) or skilled healer and no movement for one minute or so.

I want healing to be both strategic (using the right spell/potion/herbs at the right time) and to have meaning (players should rest between battles and even if someone is powerful warrior in plate armour with plenty of potions and healing spells, they should die by thousand cuts if they are not allowed to regenerate). I also want more game-play options for healers. It is not fun to be healer if everyone has the same universal healing spell in their deck. Using different healing spells for different situations is better for cooperative gameplay imho and while those spells should be replacble by potions, we will be able to carry only so much potions so again healer could have more of them and share them as they would be needed. I think that healing is rather boring at this time, everyone has to use it more or less now and there is no strategy to it. It does not matter whether you have 10% or 90% of health, the healing spell does the same thing and it does not matter when you use it.

 

I agree that physical endurance and the mana pool of casting energy need to be 2 different, unlinked resources.
I think physical exertion must occur based on any sort of work load - whether it's carrying an overweight pack, running flat out for an extended period, or battling enemies with weapons. How fast it depletes and how much you have to start with would be dependent on the avatar's actual physical stats.
The current UO system, while imperfect, addresses this by forcing you to utilize available characteristics points between intelligence, dexterity, and strength. If you're going to be a heavily armored axe wielder, you would try to maximize strength and dexterity while not caring much for intelligence (no offense). This would also limit people from radically changing skill sets. You would have the ability to retrain your avatar for different characteristics, but it would take time to rebalance your attributes. So the strong axe wielder could never successfully transform into a caster en passant. He'd have virtually no mana to cast with. The same would apply to casters suddenly wanting to be heavy weapons users.
Under these rules, intelligence would govern mana (spell casting "ammunition"), strength would be needed for endurance (imperative for heavy weapons folks with dexterity a secondary attribute), and dexterity would be of primary importance for successful crafters, and important to ranged weapons users and casters.
So when in battle, your axe tank is slowing down as he wears down, you'll have no choice but to withdraw, eat, rest, and recuperate. Similarly, when your caster has burned through their mana pool, they'll need to withdraw, rest/meditate, and recharge the ethereal batteries before casting again.
If you have this sort of limitation on extended performance, I'm not sure you need to get so granular about healing times.
Potions can offer some relief from fatigue, and perhaps a mana infusion potion (only mana potions you create can help you?) or mana vampire spell similar to the Death School life drain spell could be beneficial for the caster. Balance is maintained because in melee v caster combat, there wouldn't be much mana available to steal.
Just my 2 cents, but I like where this is going.

 

I am also starting to think that would be a good idea to bring back three calculated stats that represent health, stamina, and personal magic resource (mana).

 

The reason the developers linked combat and magic to the same pool of focus was to help avoid min/maxing. I know, it's ironic because there's still so much min/maxing. But the spirit of a single focus pool makes a lot of sense to me still. If we separate focus into one pool for magic (mana) and one pool for focus (combat) this allows for players to pull from whatever pool is available, basically allowing fighter mages to have twice the viability they would if they didn't have a single pool.

@OP I think this is a good idea, as I said during the Community Hangout regarding Lord Jouten's original idea, which this seems to follow well. I think this addresses a need I had never previously thought of, requiring some level of recuperation before continuing to fight again.

 

I also don't see the need of splitting once again combat resource pools into two. I think this system could balance both parties without the needing of doing that. I'd really love to see something like that implemented in combat... combat should be more interesting (and if we count in this other stuff it could be thrilling).

I'd like to put some perspective on this, trying to heat up the topic. Regarding focus, if we tried to see it as "turns", this system transforms focus into some kind of "time units", but they're invested real time by both players. Until it's depleted, characters usually will go defensive until they get some of their focus back. This way, your turn is measured by the amount of focus you want to expend at once. I think it's a way of giving a game with pvp in real time a feeling of strategy and dinamysm, since is what i'd like to see . What do you guys think could be needed to improve that feeling?

About the implications of each stat into combat, you can make the combat resource pool to be affected by the three statisics without needing of giving each stat a bar. For example

• Intelligence: focus pool
• Dexterity: focus regeneration
• Strength: semi permanent max value reduction resistance

This way, maxing one stat or other will imply a different focus management; pure strength players will have low impact on his max focus, so they'll last longer. pure Dexterity players will be able to use more skills before "finishing their turns", and pure Inteligence will get a bigger pool to use it on what they want. Then by raising a secondary stat you can choose the way you manage your focus (between other things). Just adding a bit more of flavour to the mix

Please, make your comments! I hope at least combat turns into this direction i'd love to see the flaws pointed so i can start thinking about it.

@Net, i'm planning to write something about the skill trees, i'll reflect your health suggestion on it.

 

I answered no but thats only in terms of health. This is just to complicated especially if they are still going to remove the health bar and have your character change to indicate damage. It also has the potential to lead to dead end situations where no matter what you do you will die but not in a puzzle way but just because you happened to be out of town and fighting, this is going to be even worse for those of us who want to play single player

As far as mana I like the way the wizard in Diablo 3 handles it, that it is lower total but rapidly regenerating which spreads out your battle but that means there needs to be "free" attacks as well which don't use mana

 

That would be true if the fighting and casting abilities are easily interchangeable ...which is why I proposed linkage between a character's attributes and their ability to utilize certain skills. Under the scenario I proposed, a fighter/mage would have a profile that was less powerful in melee combat than a dedicated melee fighter, and less capable as a caster than a dedicated mage. Which isn't to say that a blended approach couldn't be a powerful combatant - but they would need a build a skill set that would succeed with less than optimum focus and mana availability.
In this way I feel balance is maintained and the ability to change your avatar from one type to another can only happen over time as you rebalance your avatar's attributes.

 

You could represent superficial wounds (damage) as bleeding that stains the armor, and serious wounds (max health value reduction) as bruises or serious bleeding. About your second statement, the point of this system is preciesly to make the combat less dramatic and a bit more handeable, but to also require some management if you plan to expend some time risking your life. You can still can put up a fight even if you don't have first aid kits. If you spend an hour (real time, half a day in game?) fighting creatures and you didn't brought up some material to patch you up, it's your fault if you die. Archers has arrows, Mages has regs... but everybody has life, and that's also something worthy of maintenance.

That's another analogy that fits perfect on the system i suggested. But there's a difference in genre. Diablo III is an Action RPG, where you're supposed to kill endless waves of monsters without even flinching. I find a "no free skills" policy to make the game interesting (leaving autoattack aside).

Splitting resource pools could generate the issues we mentioned before, and you can imply all atributes in the way focus works, I just pointed a way of doing that in the suggested system. There's no need to think that physical and magical efforts will get energy from two different internal sources. If we had a legendary fighter-mage, could he fight his ass off and when he's out of "physical energy" start launching fireballs? i think when you're exhausted, you're exhausted. In my opinion, there's no point on giving each style a resource.

 

I think you may be missing my point ... If you've created character attributes that rely on maximum strength, you would have physical power and endurance but virtually no mana pool to cast with, so no your concern couldn't be possible. The converse would be true for a pure mage. The blended instance would be able to draw on both, but both would be inherently limited based on a characters' maximum attribute limitations

 

Now i know what you mean, I misunderstood you. Your concern is undeniable, but also fixable. Once you've established the way something works, you just need to raise and low the bonuses given by each attribute so extra attributes would mean a personalization, an advantage to the way you play. If pure int characters started to beat every other characters, bonus to focus should be reduced, or the other two bonuses raised. Since is just matter of numbers, i'm sorry, but for now i still stick with focus

 

Glad you watched the hangout! The part you're referencing is at minute/second mark 36:51

Here's the video for others to see/listen to:


Additionally I'd like to key in @Lord Jouten as he's had a form of this idea for a while. Hopefully he responds!

 

Not with our suggested system that reduces min/maxing issues on stats We suggest that the focus pool should increase with str as well because it also represents stamina... so you can't stack a specific stat to increase your hp/focus ... reduction of min/max potential is important for the game staying skill based (if you can min/max easily then it's gear based and if you "max" with gear and setup you'll get an easy win... or it's not min/maxing ... or it's completely failing... yeah anyway)!

 

The good news here is that everyone is presenting thoughtful and defensible proposals. I'm new to this sort of meaningful community with respect to gaming - I've always been a rather casual UO player in the past. I've developed characters to experiment with different styles of play, but I've never participated in this kind of mature dialog with respect to game development. It's a pleasure - and I hope I'll be able to meet you in game.

 

I pretty much like everything you said, except for one little suggestion that is not really necessary (your system works just fine, I just think this'll streamline it more).

I don't think being out of combat for 30 seconds is necessary if the bandaging aspect takes some time. Since you're bandaging yourself, you're going to be open for attacks which is penalty enough. People should be able to just walk up behind you and do backstab damage, but since you're not paying attention, I think you should take whatever backstab modifier is in the game and apply it to all directions while you're bandaging. Depending on how the final game will end up being in terms of it's battle flow and speed will determine how long the bandaging will take to complete. If it's kept the same, I think 10 seconds in the animation is more than enough for somebody to run up and at least interrupt you somehow, especially if they add the sprint function that they talked about. It'll be something that'll be constantly tweaked but we'll all let them know when it's just right.

Besides that, I am all for everything you're suggesting!

PS: ...I need to slow the F down when I talk...

 

@Violation and @Lord Jouten I'm glad you guys showed up! I usually listen to hangouts while a wander around my house cleaning and things... since English is not my main language it's hard for me to keep names (but it's a given Lord Jouten its particulary recognizable for his "particular rhythm" ) I updated the post with a link to the hangout (don't know why i didnt' that sooner) because it contains lots of good tips that i'd like people to hear and to be taken in consideration while analyzing this kind of stuff.

After hearing that part of the hangout i agreed with the idea, and then thought the system i'm proposing should take in consideration the three stats in the way focus is managed. As i said, Community hangouts are a mine of wisdom.

Of course, that could also work. I think the proper way of getting ahead of this is to think how we see the first aid action. It's some bandages you quickly wrap over your wounds to stop the bleeding? or is something more caring, more delicate? I adressed it in the second way, but i'd be fine with the first, too. Maybe not having effect at all if you're interrupted during first aid is a bit rough... it could be a progressive recovery to your max value during the time of application, which stops if you got hit.

Thanks all for your comments, keep up the machine rolling!