Coming soon: Character skills (tools)

jasonrohrer · 2019-10-24 23:46:34

Why:

To give you rich, interesting, and weighty choices to make in each life.
To ensure that each life really is different.
To force you to study and understand the most pressing problems facing your village now, and the problems it will likely be facing in the near future.
To enrich player interaction, communication, and cooperation, and short-circuit the tendency to "just do it all yourself" instead of coordinating your efforts with others.
To encourage trade between players.
To increase the importance of communication between village adults and incoming children.
To add an additional constraint to the game, because constraints are generally good. More constraints leads to more meaningful choices.

What:

Certain objects will be categorized as "tools".
Tools are generally objects that have more than one purpose and feel like they might logically have skills connected to them.
Examples: sharp stone, hatchet, shovel, adze, shears, knitting needles, steam lathe, smithing hammer, oven, needle and thread.
You will have a limited number of tool slots that you can learn in a given lifetime.
In each life, it will be up to you which tools you learn in that life.
You won't be able to learn all the tools in a single lifetime.
Any tools that you haven't learned this life cannot be used by you this life.
Tools learned in previous lives are forgotten when you are reborn.

How:

I will pick and mark tools manually in the editor.
Tools and their learned status will be marked clearly in their mouse-over names.
Example: UNLEARNED TOOL - HATCHET
Example: TOOL - KNITTING NEEDLES
Unlearned hand-held tools will be held backwards.
Example: holding an axe by the head with the handle sticking out
If you have unused tool slots, using an unlearned tool will cause it to become learned.
Upon learning a tool, a DING message will appear at the top of the screen, explaining that you learned it, and telling you how many slots you have left.
Example: YOU JUST LEARNED THE HATCHET. 3 OF 8 EMPTY TOOL SLOTS LEFT.
Example: YOU JUST LEARNED THE KNITTING NEEDLES. YOU HAVE NO EMPTY TOOL SLOTS LEFT.
Your Genetic Fitness score will increase your number of tool slots.
A perfect Genetic Fitness score of 60 will double your tool slots.
Tool learning and usage blocking will be implemented server-side.

Details:

Eve will be born knowing all tools.
Only players born as babies will have limited tool slots.
Some objects will be grouped together as the same tool, like "needle and thread" vs "needle and ball of thread."

Unknowns:

Exactly which things will be marked as tools, and how many there will be.
Exactly how many tool slots will be available in each life.

Anticipated basic interactions:

Taking stock of established tool knowledge held by other players to avoid wasteful overlap.
Giving your newborn baby a necessary tour of the village and firm direction about what tools they should learn when they get older.
We really need a Lathe operator, baby. Oh, you don't know how to use the Lathe? My old fingers aren't so nimble, so I can't do it myself, but I can teach you how to use it.
Saving some of your precious tool slots until later in life, just in case.
Running around the village looking for someone, anyone, who can chop some damn kindling for you. Hey little boy, can you hold this axe properly? There's a good lad. Now chop this branch.

Pain:

You've been playing the game for 20 months without this constraint.
Adding this new constraint this late in the game is going to really tickle on the way down.
You will certainly be frustrated as you get the hang of managing this new, limited resource, and depending on others to fill in the gaps in your own capabilities.
No pain no gain.

Inspiration:

Richard Garfield suggested something like this to me in an email after he played OHOL a while back. I've been stewing on it ever since.
Noita.
For goodness sake, go play Noita.
Noita is the greatest single-player game of all time.

Legs · 2019-10-25 00:09:57

This constant trend of reducing what the player can do and constraining their world and experience is poor game design. You don't make a fun game by making the player weak, you do it by empowering them. 'You can only do X' is one thing, 'you're THE BEST at X' is another.

Outside of eve camps living to 60 is pretty much guaranteed for any decent player so personally it probably won't affect me much, since genetic fitness is very easy to grow. It would be nice to have some tradeoff in return for this restriction though. Assign a value that reduces tool wear the more you use something for example. The smith never breaks his hammer, gravekeeper can bury everyone with one shovel, etc. A journeyman lumberjack's work is half as hungry.

Neither one of these would really work in practice since they're messing with the iron grind and anti-griefing mechanics respectively but you get the point. If you're going to force people to specialize at least give that expertise some kind of bonus. I like that it encourages new players to learn a job though.

Dantox · 2019-10-25 00:23:39

Its a great change that you are telling us more in-depht the what and the why of these kind of updates. hopefully the same will happen on future updates.

Even then i dont think these changes will work with the current state of the game because the tech tree is too short to make it viable to try to specialize on a limited number of tools, hopefully it will atleast force players to expand their knowledge.

Matbat · 2019-10-25 00:30:11

This mechanic seems ok enough, so much so I'd be willing to try and learn what exactly works in most scenarios through it.

But there is one glaring problem that you have oversighted
No-one can get a perfect genetic score of 60.
Or more like you and all your children and your children's children, some times even grand children, need to live to old age. And you have to get that all three or four times in a row. That's not even counting if you happen to be born male and the burden of all your nephew's, nieces, and your nieces children and grand children have to live to old age as well.
Once you're dead those fifty pies you made or all the bushes you tended will barely support your 'family' twenty or thirty minutes after your death.
Or if one of your children or grandchildren are a murderer say goodbye to all your points because two people died at 20 in your line, destroying all the work of the 20 people who lived to old age in a row before them.

Instead of feasibly impossible standards, grace the decently high genetic fitness players instead (top 50? 30? 10? Or a genetic score of 45-50+?) With double tool slots, even though genetic fitness is all pretty luck based at least some people could get the mythical jack of all trades occasionally.

Also I think you're going to come up with funny problems like "are hot coals a tool? It creates so many things for so many different types of people.", "Are ovens a tool? The average person doesn't really know how to cook a pie" "Will horses have to be learned, or will that cause too much backlash?", and "Is carry heavy stones a profession?". Which may lead to strange half measures like if you're 55-60 you can teach one or a few of your skills to a few people who need one but forgot to get it, leading to a phantom skill they didn't learn themself the list and technicalities could go on a long time.

Last edited by Matbat (2019-10-25 00:52:45)

Jwillc · 2019-10-25 00:46:21

I love it! I've always felt there should be more emphasis on player "roles" / "professions". You found a creative way to give the players a choice. Brilliant! It's definitely going to be interesting and probably really frustrating at first, but it sounds fun, gj.

PXshadow · 2019-10-25 01:38:31

Very interesting concept, I'm impressed you went in this direction of limiting factors, on players, I'll try to give my insight earlier on discord, but articulated and more thought out.

My general understanding is, setting up trading is a full time job, there is no automated market in this game, trading occurs in the trenches within populated cities, and various indicators as you said (such as the tools you are holding or the actions you are doing) help figure out if engaging with a person to trade is worth the time or not. My thought however seems to be that in order for trading and by extension characters skills to function in the intended way. A market system must be founded and maintained for each town across the generations, as you seem to agree with.

jasonrohrer wrote:

Giving your newborn baby a necessary tour of the village and firm direction about what tools they should learn when they get older.

This is an probably the most important step, as you said necessary. If this knowledge is not easy to come by. Chaos will ensue. Towns need to indicate and easily direct new players to already established networks of professions and mentors, in order of

jasonrohrer wrote:

Taking stock of established tool knowledge held by other players to avoid wasteful overlap.

but also the player component of set trade networks and agreements, these agreements take previous time, and should not need to be redone every generation, rather it's imperative that these trade institutions can easily be made multi-generational if it is solving a problem for the village and has high demand.

However there is a lot of issues of maintaining such a system practically.

Firstly the incentive to participate in a profession and cooperate needs to be greater, then attempting to steal for resources not personally able to be obtained solely.

Second, a new player system (new player joins profession) needs to be extremely clear and simple to participate in (with or without a knowledgeable mother)

Thirdly professions have to scale depending on demand rather then shear interest alone, for instance everyone wants to be a log cutter because of a new update on it, and everyone starves as a result. The demand for a tool set needs to be clear and simple to find.

Ideas for the three problems.

Signs come to mind for the first one, however you are opposed to them everywhere from a game design perspective, so why not have a way to build pre made signs for different shops such as "wood", "food", "water", "cloths" etc. They should be relatively easy to make and be bound with property as a requirement. Late rift people could mass produce maps to hand out to people to give the location for blank shop.

Second problem, the location of the first problem is key, but than the extra step to find someone to bring you into the profession and familiarize you, there needs to be a heavy incentive for the mentor, one idea is to make it a mutual thing where by mentoring someone you both have your skills increase as a result.

Third is quite hard with a primitive market, however one idea could be over-saturated professions would have a way to easily inform people of potential trade opportunities and encourage them to partake in that lucrative profession vs the one posting the opportunity. No good ideas currently about implementation so let me know.

antking:]# · 2019-10-25 02:20:42

how many tool slots will every one have? I think that 4 is a good number....

FulmenTheFinn · 2019-10-25 03:51:38

It's an exciting concept, but I can't help but wonder if it's too much of an ask from the player base. Considering most players seem to be noobs with less than 50h in the game, and that experienced players often spend their entire lives just fixing the mistakes of said noobs, and in general just saving the village from destruction (and this is something you cannot fix by typing to people in-game; VOIP might have a bigger impact, but that wouldn't entirely fix it either), I can see this change leading to the death of many, many villages, especially well-designed ones (which we are already seeing anyway as so many experienced players have quit the game).

Also I don't like how fitness score impacts your tool slots, or rather, I don't like how the score system actively punishes Eve players such as myself for having to /die sometimes up to 12 times to spawn as an Eve. Spawning as Eve should be a toggle when the window's open, plain and simple.

I also almost never play as a boy, simply because it's so boring not being able to have kids, but there's more of an argument towards why players should be punished for SID'ing just because they're born male. Not so much for wanting to Eve. Either way your normal gameplay should not suffer because you want to Eve. If anything, Eve players should be rewarded when managing to create lasting dynasties, especially when taking into account how hard Eve runs are these days.

Spoonwood · 2019-10-25 03:57:00

I think I agree with Legs.

The saying 'no pain, no gain' doesn't really make sense in the context of a recreational activity. On top of this, what do players gain from this? I don't see anything. As you said, it's another constraint. Constraints are not a means of gaining something.

Also, this undoubtedly will increase the learning curve of the game, and the game already has a steep learning curve that puts people off. I remember people talking about the learning curve of this game that way back last December/November before I bought the game.

Skills which enchance current abilities, that sounds fine. But, this isn't more skills. It's just limiting the players. I'm glad I haven't played OHOL lately and don't have plans to play in the future.

Jk Howling · 2019-10-25 04:13:04

Interesting, to say the least. I don't have faith in it working out but we'll see how it goes lmao. It's probably going to be a make-or-break update for a lot of people and I've got my popcorn ready to see which it ends up being.

Mildly curious though, would this apply to killing [since knife/bow/sword could be considered tools]? I feel like that'd be a really harsh blow to what playerbase is left. The average player already struggles to deal with griefers- now imagine if they couldn't get rid of them at all unless they used a slot on a knife/sword/bow. Yikes.

Coconut Fruit · 2019-10-25 04:30:54

Shovel + sharp for compost, axe for kindling and firewood, hammer + kiln for smithing, adobe for cooking.
6 tools is enough to do almost everything that is needed to survive.

I'm not sure if limiting things people can do is a good idea. It would be so boring if I had to cook all life.
And btw, this change won't make our lives more interesting in more advanced towns. People will still be bored and walk around with no purpose.

jasonrohrer · 2019-10-25 04:48:41

Matbat, sorry if it wasn't clear.

A perfect genetic score will double your tool slots, but lower scores will add slots as well.

Suppose the base was 6 slots. Everyone has at least 6 slots.

If your genetic score was 10, you'd have 7 slots.
If your genetic score was 20, you'd have 8 slots.
If your genetic score was 30, you'd have 9 slots.
And only if your genetic score was 60, you'd have 12 slots.

So almost everyone will have more than 6 slots. The very best players will probably have 11 slots.... or maybe 12, if the effects are rounded up.

I'm not sure that "6 slots" will be the base. It's just an example.

And yeah, I was kinda thinking that weapons will be tools too, but I'm not sure about that....

I mean, that's the kind of player interaction I'm looking to create. There's a griefer in town, and you run to the soldier and beg for his help, because he's the only one who has trained in using the bow.

But also town meeting with the youngsters: we need a few more soliders. You three go study the bow when you become teenagers, okay?

This also fits in with the "pitchfork posse" thing, because you can all help the soldier run faster if you take up sticks and join him, but he's going to do the killing before breakfast.

Gotta go for the night, and I haven't read everything here yet. I'll respond to more tomorrow.

Jk Howling · 2019-10-25 05:10:12

Coconut Fruit wrote:

Shovel + sharp for compost, axe for kindling and firewood, hammer + kiln for smithing, adobe for cooking.
6 tools is enough to do almost everything that is needed to survive.
I'm not sure if limiting things people can do is a good idea. It would be so boring if I had to cook all life.
And btw, this change won't make our lives more interesting in more advanced towns. People will still be bored and walk around with no purpose.

Yeah I envision a lot of tools being lumped together for work.

Compost: Shovel + Sharp Rock + Hoe [to grow your carrots/wheat]. Maybe knife too, since you're tending sheep anyways and might need to clear it out occasionally.

Forge work: Hammer + Kiln + Axe/Hatchet [to cut kindling].

Cooking: Oven + Round Rock? [for grinding flour for pies] + Knife [bread/killing sheep] + Sharp Rock [if you're making the worse pies]

Hunting/Backpacks: Snare + Sharp Rock [bait] + Knife/Flint [skinning] + Needle/Thread [making bp/clothes]

Building: Chisel + Mallet at least

Also, engine work.. if each newcomen component is considered a dif tool: Hammer, Roller, Bore, Lathe, Drill.. plus your regular hammer, and the forge/kiln..

Not to mention you'll want shears for working with sheep.

It all comes down to "whats considered a tool" in the end, too. There's some items like round rocks that are necessary for a lot of work but also integral for basic things like home markers.

Would round stones be a tool? Flat rocks? Skewers? Lassos? Ropes? Loom? Horse carts? Hand carts? Flint? Obscure shit like net/fishing pole that nobody uses or has reason to use?

fug · 2019-10-25 05:19:11

The biggest fear is that a bunch of niche skills end up basically being traps.

Knitting needles are the biggest culprit of something you never ever want to take due to how wool clothing is. Wool is better used to make pads and thread vs making actual wool clothing with the only notable good piece of wool clothing either being a santa hat (bis nondecaying) or an apron which isn't really needed.

The adze is something you ask grandma Eve to make a bunch of mallets and a few fence kits then you don't really need it anymore. Basically you lose a tool skill slot if you end up being saddled up with being the adze person.

You also really don't want to be stuck being the only person who can use a saw since they're important but also rather useless due to lack of things you can do with them. Another tool I'd tell Eve to make a bunch of stuff related to it to save others the hassle.

Again, the pickax is important but sucks to have to be trained in. You can open up a mine (normally sometime you do once or twice max.), you can break walls, and then of course rip up roads and bust ovens/kilns. Pickaxes just plain suck to need to be trained in.

Of course on the flip side there's some things you just generally always want depending on how many slots you have. You almost always want to be able to use a sharp rock because of how versatile they are. Mashes rabbits, digs up wild foods, makes storing branches easier, opens up making arrows, etc etc.

You always want to be able to cook food or be able to smith. You obviously don't need both but you definitely want to be able to do one or the other. This allows you to skip out on waiting for tools to be made or makes sure you can keep yourself well fed throughout your stay in a place. Having oven access gives you turkey, all pie variants, rubber cooking, bread, potatoes, and mutton which works out well since mutton pie is basically the best food.

Having access to hoes is probably nice too just for the sake of being able to farm on demand but isn't something I'd put S tier like Smithing hammer/Sharp Rock/Oven.

Basically the only real issues I see are the traps (knitting needles), the terrible (saws, pickaxes, files), and the must haves (sharp rock, oven or smithing hammer, and hoe.)

Last edited by fug (2019-10-25 05:39:21)

Roblor · 2019-10-25 07:49:36

Good thing is; I'm not gonna flunk in any subjects this semester... Unlike my two previous ones...

DiscardedSlinky · 2019-10-25 08:07:42

Jason I get it we're not always nice to you, but you don't have to be so mean to us.

This game is already VERY hard to learn for new players. This is going to make it so much worse

MultiLife · 2019-10-25 08:19:02

Eves mass producing stuff with niche tools sounds about right.
Steep learning curve getting steeper sounds about right.
It sounds quite unintuitive. An odd, dare I say, magical limitation is blocking you from learning more tools even if your uncle is using the tool right under your nose.

Wasn’t there a thread about this just a while ago? Skills and such.

Not gonna stay and be the party pooper more but I’m sailing on the same boat with fug and Spoon and Legs. Gonna see this through Twisted and Cothfotmeoo.

Don Holm · 2019-10-25 08:20:21

Ok let's agree that using sharp stone does not require skill. Just before we have to go through hell, skills should be bound to how complicated the tool is, for example a monkey is able to use the sharp stone, we are humans (bit more intelligent).

Amon · 2019-10-25 08:50:11

I like this overview of an incoming update.
I am curious, if transisioned same items are the same tool. Would similairly working items like the axe and hatchet count as the same skill slot as well?

I think the problem of niche tools could have been fixed by simply giving it more practical, important advancement uses, alas. It's easy to think that most people will pick up mainstream tools like axe and shovel, so spending some skills for niche tools might end up saving the village regardless, or give you a special slot/importance in the village.

Twisted · 2019-10-25 09:28:18

I love this overview post, you should do more of these!

One of the most common complaints I hear about OHOL is that at a high skill level it's a single player game that you play on a server with other players. This kind of solves that, as you won't be able to do everything yourself.

Another common complaint is that we fly through the tech tree too quickly - I feel like this is a result of the pro 1% basically carrying everyone else. If any given player can only do a finite amount of things, this naturally slows down progression. There may be a need for some progression tweaking as a result (i.e. slowing down early well drain), but I think it's going to work out well.

And of course, the most common complaint, that lives are increasingly similar. If the skill system means that means you can only do so many things each life, it makes each life more different to the previous. You might have made a bunch of compost last life, and if that's something you enjoy you can do it every life. But once you to decide to do something different you're not going to fall back into your old compost habits just because your town needs it, because you won't be able to shovel dung. You're rarely going to be the jack-of-all-trades (but you can work on getting your gene score up if you want to be).

fug wrote:

Basically the only real issues I see are the traps (knitting needles), the terrible (saws, pickaxes, files), and the must haves (sharp rock, oven or smithing hammer, and hoe.)

I do agree that knitting needles get the short end of the stick, but I think the terrible tools are kind of great in a weird way. You spawn into a town with no buckets, and you realize that you need to learn a Saw this life. Kind of a bummer, since you might need to miss out on a Hoe or something, but it also makes that life different from the others. Once you learn the Saw you probably want to make a bunch of disks for future generations, and bam, that's a brand new type of life that you probably never lived. Since you know how to use the Saw you can make slot boxes as well, and you'll make two slot boxes full of disks for future generations, and five more slot boxes for general storage purposes.

MultiLife wrote:

An odd, dare I say, magical limitation is blocking you from learning more tools even if your uncle is using the tool right under your nose.

I don't think it's magical, I think it's quite realistic. There's only so many things you can learn in real life. I've watched my dad reroute electricity a bunch of times but I don't think I'd be able to do it myself. On the other hand, I can translate a text to English but he can't get his grasp on that at all, even though he's seen me do it. Sure, we could take classes or read a book to get better, but there's a finite amount of things we can learn in life.

DiscardedSlinky wrote:

This game is already VERY hard to learn for new players. This is going to make it so much worse

I don't think this is going to make it worse. If anything, it might make it easier as new players will have a dedicated task each life without possibility to swerve from it. It's a fairly easy concept to explain as well - "You can't learn all tools every life"

I think the whole system sounds great on paper, and I think it's going to work out great in practice as well. I could be wrong with my hunch - I have been wrong before - but I have to say I like what I see.

Gogo · 2019-10-25 10:13:07

So instead of expanding tutorial or change something in tool tips a game itself would be a tutorial. Clever.

Number of slots is most important, not too many, but enough. I think most players will choose one slot for a weapon. My own favourite gameplay was rather frequently change of 'profession' to avoid boredom. But I like this idea of slots very much, it will refresh the game.

What will encourage people into professions would be more 'uniforms' perhaps.

Mothers should now pay extra attention to what's goin on in town, role of sexes would split a little, single workers will be asking for teaching more often.

Rocks shouldn't be considered tools, what about fleeing from war and need to establish new village quickly, with only few people?

Overall thanks and I suggest you guys to get used a little to any change before criticize, I didn't like rift at first, but now I'm cool about it.

--
I'd like to add that zoom mod will be now necessary.

Last edited by Gogo (2019-10-25 10:20:21)

Guppy · 2019-10-25 10:52:02

How about a tooltip telling you how many family members already know the tool youre hovering over? That way you could save up on slots

sigmen4020 · 2019-10-25 10:54:47

Guppy wrote:

How about a tooltip telling you how many family members already know the tool youre hovering over? That way you could save up on slots

That could at the very least be an idea for a mod feature. Would be interested to see what Jason thinks of this.

Dafuto · 2019-10-25 11:05:38

Could males have a slightly higher tool limit than females? It would make sense, as males should be doing more work than females, and it would encourage people to keep male kids as they can do more with tools than females can.

MultiLife · 2019-10-25 11:12:53

Twisted wrote:

MultiLife wrote:
An odd, dare I say, magical limitation is blocking you from learning more tools even if your uncle is using the tool right under your nose.
I don't think it's magical, I think it's quite realistic. There's only so many things you can learn in real life. I've watched my dad reroute electricity a bunch of times but I don't think I'd be able to do it myself. On the other hand, I can translate a text to English but he can't get his grasp on that at all, even though he's seen me do it. Sure, we could take classes or read a book to get better, but there's a finite amount of things we can learn in life.

If it's about survival, you'd learn whatever is needed, whatever it took and how long it'd take. The example of a smith trying to find a child who can chop him kindling sounds pretty ridiculous.
Instead of some hard limit, which to me, is magical, it'd make more sense if things just took time and your life would run out before learning the 7th item or so.
If I know how to hit things with a hammer and see someone hit things with an axe, I should be able to do that. Maybe not as well but I certainly wouldn't hold the axe by its head.
If I know how to draw and see someone create code, yes, I wouldn't be able to just do that.

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Coming soon: Character skills (tools)

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