My 2 cents is: thumbs down to the 5(well 3 of 5 at least!) senses as your skills in a fantasy rpg, Since your placing illogical reactions to your attributes in the first place...which no one is brave enought to come out and simply tell you.

Warning!! Im gonna say some things these others didnt have the heart to tell ya..so dont take it personally, but as a wake up call.

1)Taste: You say a lower "ability" in taste doesnt allow medicine to work as well. HUH?!? that makes no "sense" at all. You dont die because u got a bad taste to medicine..its because of a disease from bad health created from diseases and lack of maintaining body. Taste is responsible for your health. HUH? Just say that out loud and listen to how umm..."sense-less" that is. You can do better than taste..boring.

2)Touch: you say its responsible to how well your implants work. HUH?? What you gonna say:"the implants dont feel right..your special skill decreases -20" Blah! That would irrate me if playing the game. The effect of these implants are related to your body and mind..depending on the type of implant(strenth, quickness, xray vision -for body, telepathy, mind control -mind)!
and these are just ones i pulled out my ass in a minute..come on..touch is not the way to go!

3)Smell: you say..haha..smell will help you remember geographic areas of the map! LOL. umm...maybe for dogs and maybe if you werent Wearing a Suit!! sure some will argue ..."i remember that spot in the park because of the dog crap i stepped in..boy it smelt bad"...Why use this at all. In the future you will have palm pilots implanted in your brain to display maps..who needs to remember that spot!? next...

4)Hearing: you say..no hearing, no evasion. Not all together true. It is important for undetected monster behind you, but if you survive first hit...its the rest of your skills that "allow you keep balanced and avoid injury" This one has potention to be saved as is.

5)Sight: Well, finally a realistically programmable skill to implement. Finally a solid skill you can use.

Sorry to sound so negative man but you just were not listening to some of the warnings to scrap these skills. Maybe that month on these skill should have woken your ass that they were not too hot to go on. Sometimes it takes a swift kick in tha ass to straiten one back up...and that was my warm intention...so go watch some sci-fi movies or books and see how the pros do it. It shouldnt be too hard considering we all watch tv and have seen star wars.

Good luck and hope you straiten this out!

aka John M.
Never give up. Never surrender!

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Thank you for the constructive critism John. I''ve got to admitt to barely researching the issue so it''s really no surprise to hear this. and thanks for having the courage to speak up about this although i would exactly go as far a to call it a butt-kicking?? Sounds familiar though Obviously this requires a great deal of research and logical thinking before i jump this hurdle. See you on the other side, and thanks again

Definition of Progress: Durability control (see Financial interests of stockholders)

There are some hurdles with using the senses as stats, and in our world it''s practically impossible to connect just the five senses to all of our actions. Our minds, muscles, attitude, and constitution usualy have a lot more control than our senses do except in specific cases.


Using the five senses is a great idea though. If well designed it provides a very interesting theme for a game. You already have a futuristic setting, so I suggest somehow connected our senses to our environment through technology.


Imagine already, on the moon 1/6th our gravity people will evolve or merely develope to be 1/6th as strong. Strength suddenly is not so important; sight and touch(tactal reflexes)are now more important in combat situations.


The characters in your game are going to be inside a biomechanical suit or somesuch. This doesn''t have to hinder the senses. Infact, because the characters are confined to their suits that relay tons of information to them, vision alone is not enough to process so much information. Hearing is an obvious form of imformation processing that would become invaluable to tell the man inside a suit how far away his enemy is, what is the best attack plan, the temporature, ect.


Imagine that seeing and hearing wasn''t enough to process the loads of input coming in. In the future, we might have developed processes to use our now useless senses (taste and smell) to help process the input. People wouldn''t really be tasting the radar, but the radar might be translated into a tastable format.


How do we control these mech suits? It''s possible that numerous button pushing and hand movements are required to make a mech process more air, load a missle, contact hq, and evade an attack, AT THE SAME TIME. Having better touch sensory could make doing these delicate activities easier and faster.


I cannot see away to get over mental prowess as a stat, whether intelegence, wisdom, or whatever. It''s possible though that somehow everyone''s intelegence was leveled off because everyone has been engineered to be as smart as possible. Possible the character is a science experiment or workslave and has a low intelligence. Either way his intelligence is stationary.


Another possible solution to the int problem which is suprisingly rarely used would be to incorporate the actual players intelligence into the equation. Let the character simply be as intelligent as the player is. I can realize some problems in programming and playability fun with this, but it''s something to think about.


I''m running out of ideas, and it may be a stretch, but in your game you could make technology warp the senses to new needs. This, I think, would be interesting in its self.

-Jason

Some very good points there Jason, thanks. Here''s a little something else that i''ve been thinking about, i think i may have already mentioned this in a post prior but i''ll do it again to see if there any criticisms about it.

The 5 Sences are responsible for using skills. The skills take the place of primary attributes in the game in terms of importance. So instead of using attributes to measure what your character can do (can i lift this bar, can i dodge this bullet, do i get +5 to health each level) you use skills instead.

So how do you know what skills you have a how good you are at them?

The player chooses skills to start the game with (character construction), from here on in if the player wants more skills then they must use implants. Implanted skills will never be as good as the real thing but they are useful never the less. But going back to character construction; these skills that the player chooses for their character at this point in the game (begining) will act like/asthe primary attributes.

Next, what determines how well the skills are used is based off 2 factors. First, the condition of your 5 sences. When you use a skill that uses a sence then that sence is exercised. By not exercising a sence it will deteriourate and then you will have to get implants to fix this up. Secondly, skills are improved through level gain.

But there is something else interesting thats going on all this while. If your sences deteriourate then you will also suffer a loss in xp gained whilst this is occuring. All sences are measured out of 20. The equation works like this:Take your 5 sences x 20 points for each sence = 100% of experience points (gained when you kill something or what not).

That''s how i''ve designed the system, i don''t know if the guys i''m working with want to use it or not. I guess that''s that though.

One more time for the dumbies
ar+gu+ment n. A discussion in which reasons are put forward in support of and against a proposition, proposal, or case; debate.

Hello Again,


I understand better how the senses and skills will work together now and I think it''s an interesting and definately workable system.


In defense of taste used to increase the effects of drugs: consider, once again in the future, on the moon, with 1/6th the gravity and the strength...there would have been increased research in the mind and its abilities. I can imagine psychosematic(sp?) drugs developed that when tasted stimulate the production of antibodies. The better you could taste something then, the more your brain would try to heal you (or think you needed healing).


-Jason

well think in the senses in this way: their only use from it is gathering information, that´s all. they don´t do nothing with the exeption of that.

just think about it. a person without all the senses still will be able to modify the external world ( like fall in the ground, or walk into a wall )

========
There´s no ugly woman
You that didn´t drink enough
A brazilian popular belief

Edited by - The Alchemist on November 17, 2000 10:44:40 PM

quote: By Alchemist
well think in the senses in this way: their only use from it is gathering information, that´s all. they don´t do nothing with the exeption of that.

just think about it. a person without all the senses still will be able to modify the external world ( like fall in the ground, or walk into a wall )

I couldn''t have put it better myself, cheers. So what we have here is an underlying mechanics for a character that can Percieve the world (5 sences) and via the use of them they can interact with the world (the primary skills). Note that the 5 senses (perception) is what allows the character to interact. Aha, so now we understand how it operates, or is meant to at least - Perception comes before interaction.



One more time for the dumbies
ar+gu+ment n. A discussion in which reasons are put forward in support of and against a proposition, proposal, or case; debate.

What, no Uncertainty Principle?

quote: What, no Uncertainty Principle?

Nope, j/k. Just in case that huge smiley was not an indication of humour.. to skills would work like normal (percentages). I can do big smilies too. I can do fancy one''s aswell.

hehehe


One more time for the dumbies
ar+gu+ment n. A discussion in which reasons are put forward in support of and against a proposition, proposal, or case; debate.