New Attribute - Awareness

[Wiglaf]

New Attribute: Awareness (or Cunning?)

First of all, this is for people that enjoy toying around with new ideas that are probably never integrated into the game – please point out troubles you see but do it in a constructive way. The author is fully aware (hurr hurr) of the complexity arising with implementing a new attribute.

Second, I think it is important to have a possibly third attribute totally voluntarily, so that your überbuild can remain as it is. People should not be forced to have any points at all in this new attribute.

Thus the main reason for implementing a new attribute is to increase diversity. As a pen & paper rpg player I found the character sheet in native mount & blade somewhat meager but it had all the essential stuff. Crpg doesn’t even need half of the attributes and most of the skills from native, so it is even more meager if not bare when it comes to skills.

Awareness Attribute:
Awareness starts with 3 points as the other attributes.
Every point in Awareness increases your Alertness-Radius (to be explained later). Basically it is a radius around your character where you can spot Hidden enemies. The Alertness-Radius should be slightly decreased by the weight of the head armor, maybe 2 meters per point of weight.

Awareness-based Skills:

Stealth
Stealth is triggered only while not holding a weapon in your hand and walking (as in ‘not running’) or standing still. When stealth is triggered, the character disappears from sight of enemies – he is Hidden. When the Hidden character enters the Alertness-Radius of an enemy he immediately becomes visible again for EVERY enemy. The Alertness-Radius for 3 points (the basic value) should be big enough, so he is far out of reach when he becomes visible (I’ll just throw in 50 meters for an example). More points in the Stealth-Skill decreases the enemy Alertness-Radius (like 2 meters per skillrank – again this is just an example). This makes a character with Stealth 10 appear 30 meters away from an enemy with a basic Awareness value, far enough away, so the enemy can react, but close enough to still come as a surprise.
Additionally this skill should decrease the volume of the walking and unsheathing sounds the character makes by 10% per skillpoint invested. This holds true even when running and also decreases all other sounds the character makes (shouting while preparing your haymaker and so on). Furthermore the volume will be increased by every point of weight the character carries after a threshold of 6 (or 10 or so) – maybe 1% volume for every point of weight after the threshold?
[Probably there should be something like: If you are the last survivor of your team, the Stealth skill is disabled to avoid afk-leeching]

Find Weakness
Alternative 1:
This skill provides a certain chance on every hit (or shot) you deliver to deal 125% of the normal damage. The chance increases with a higher value in the skill: For every single point in the skill the chance is 2% so at Find Weakness 10 you have a chance of 20% to deliver more damage than usual.
Alternative 2:
This skill provides the ability to ignore a certain amount of armor of the enemy on every hit (or shot). The amount of ignored armor could be something like 3 times the value in Find Weakness.


More Skills:
The attribute needs at least one additional skill I think. Some skills I haven’t thought about enough until now contain the following:
Formidable Senses: Character is able to see other characters through walls (he can hear people). This sounds cheesy at first, but think about it. We all play with stereo-sound, so we can only differentiate sound between left and right, this skill could reflect a persons ability to locate the noises other people do. Would be best if you could see a highlighted aura of a character only, not the whole model, I saw something like this in other games that I can’t remember. Skillpoints increase the reach of the Formidable Senses.
Blocking: This skill provides a certain chance to autoblock an incoming hit. (I foresee a flamewar coming my way just for thinking of this idea...)

That’s all for now.

@chadz: If it is completely impossible to implement a new attribute, please say so

[bruce]

NO.

[Wiglaf]

Another idea for a skill takes into account the problems that are discussed here: http://forum.c-rpg.net/index.php/topic,442.0.html

Prudence (desperetly looking for another name)
A character with this skill handles his equipment with care, he knows when a sword needs to be sharpened and how to avoid the breaking of an axe shaft. Every point in this skill reduces the upkeep cost for broken equipment. So someone willing to sacrifice some of the available skillpoints finds himself in the position to maintain better equipment.

[bruce]

Prudence (desperetly looking for another name)
A character with this skill handles his equipment with care, he knows when a sword needs to be sharpened and how to avoid the breaking of an axe shaft. Every point in this skill reduces the upkeep cost for broken equipment. So someone willing to sacrifice some of the available skillpoints finds himself in the position to maintain better equipment.

Yes. He puts adamantium armour on his heavy plated charger, so it is not damaged when trampling people with two shields.