On Thu, 4 Jan 2001, Brandon Allen wrote: > and that is not realistic. maybe if i say that you can only have a max > of 2 stats with 8's assigned to them ... any ideas ? Why bother with something so artificial? I think if you design the game right, a character with eight intelligence, eight wisdom, and eight charisma will have a hard enough time getting much of anything done they won't want to do it. Give them ample warning that making yourself a dumb, unwise, and unlikeable brute will get them no further than making themselves a highly intelligent weakling that can't move about to save his life, and if they do it, anyway, then all the best luck to them. How do you balance between strength/dexterity and intelligence for things like combat to discourage warriors from overloading on str/dex and ignoring intelligence? One method is weapon skills. People sort of forget about a good application of the feature in favor of just noting it as a novelty. If you have low intelligence and wisdom, it's harder to practice. If you need to practice to be adept at combat, then being dirt stupid is going to make channeling those abilities into something very difficult. Difficult enough that most players won't want to do it, and those that do should be okay by you. There's bound to be someone somewhere that is *that* dumb, *that* unlikeable, and pulls it off anyway. Anyway, you're probably starting to see my answer: make the effects of extremely low (and high) stats tangible. You've got low charisma, you've got to pay more in shops (this has the effect of simulating, in part, the effects of bargaining) or it's harder to pick up the bargaining skill. You're very big and strong, maybe the guards look after you a bit more. You're really weak, maybe a thief will be more inclined to go after you in the alleys. The important thing is to balance this out so it's not overly negative and doesn't force everyone into the middle. Something like the bell curve would be acceptable, where you've got the greatest density of players somewhere in the mid-range, with their good stats only have a one or three point advantage over the bad; a small, but still significant, population with less balanced stats (a four through six point difference between the good and the bad); and a very small population with extreme differences between the good and the bad (seven and up). Make the game different depending upon who the character is, and you'll be better able to enforce specific stat ranges that are consistent with your vision and design. This avoids the need for hard-and-fast, code-enforced restrictions and for manual approval of characters. -dak -- +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | FAQ: http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~fletchra/Circle/list-faq.html | | Archives: http://post.queensu.ca/listserv/wwwarch/circle.html | +---------------------------------------------------------------+
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