Strength should have ZERO impact on how many hit points you have

An interesting option would be some deep passives in strategy trees that require you to lose or have limited str, dex or int to train.

Focus Skill - Scholar: Your devotion to training your mind at the cost of strength and dexterity allows you to reach new heights of knowledge.
Tactics Skill - Titan: Your devotion to training your muscles at the cost of intellect and dexterity allows you to push your muscles to new limits.
Subterfuge Skill - Acrobat: Your devotion to training your reflexes at the cost of strength and intellect allows you to push your agility to new levels.

 

I like the general idea but think implementation might get a bit messy.

Are the bonuses / penalties additive or multiplicative?
Are you planning to nerf current stats or are we at risk of extremely high values because of the skill?
What happens if a penalty totally wipes out the stat?
Doesn't this mean people will train the same skills anyway just have slightly different attributes due to their devotion skill?
Should people be viable with no devotion at all?
Should the combined penalties to secondary skills be larger or smaller than the bonus to the primary skill?

 

He's just saying the Strength shouldn't factor into our total HP calculation.

 

Which frankly is entirely absurd because it just shifts from "Why should playstyle X need strength?" to "Why should playstyle Y need intelligence?" without addressing the underlying problem of all types of players equally gaining stats from all stat skills and therefore needing to train them all to be fully viable.

 

If I was designing it something along the lines of:

bonus = Scholar level;
bonus = bonus - (str/2 + dex/2);

if (bonus > 0)
{
int = int + bonus;
}

so just to keep it simple at gm you get +100 int from Scholar if you have 0 strength and 0 dex, but if you had 100 str and 100 dex even at gm 100 Scholar you would get 0; 100 int - (100 str/2 + 100 dex/2). Also you wouldn't want it to ever produce -int so any negative number is simply a 0 bonus. Obviously you wouldn't want this to be 100 extra, maybe its only 30 extra int, you have to balance it around the fact you can't have dex or str, so it needs to be a worthy gain for a wizard to make the choice interesting.

 

Totally agree. I have not gone down the Earth tree this time, so am missing the strength buffs from there. I do have "healthy" turned on from the start, and there is a health buff in light armour. But I have been concentrating on pushing DEX and INT (31/30 ATM) as they seemed more relevant to an archer/magic user.

From previous posts it seems that if I had strength turned on from the start I would now have much less XP in my pool (bad) but maybe an extra 60 or so HP (that can be lifesaving!)

 

It sounds like there is a consequence to your decision to train a certain way - is this inherently bad? If you removed the hp from strength you would be directly punishing people that decided to go for the earth tree by making their skills have less impact. If someone decides to focus on strength over dex they miss more and get hit more, or if they forego int their spells(only viable healing method) are weaker and they run out of focus. Why shouldn't there be consequences of prioritization? The bigger issue i see what end-game builds start looking like rather than a player in the adv level 50s foregoing 20% more life in order to train some other stuff.

 

Not going to lie - seems like a nice system. I had more been thinking of ratios of stat to total stats, but basing the bonus on the raw alternate stats and not making it go negative seems pretty good.

 

Meaningful choices, remove that and I will start to lose affection for this game. The more meaningful choice, the better. All stats for free would be tragic. As of right now they take a serious amount of XP to level and you must choose what is more important to you.

I've pointed this out before, the skill trees are not equal when it comes to stats. There should be separation in skills that causes some exclusivity & priority for the stats, the way that Heavy Armor & Light Armor and Earth & Air function. If you can do that you can achieve the meaningful choice of what stat is the most important for you. Light Armor really should be split up to enable proper benefits for dexxers and casters.

 

I'd prefer it stay the way it is, personally.

 

The problem is that the meaningful choice becomes less meaningful the higher you go. The experience to train a skill from 80 to 88 is larger than the experience to train a skill from 0 to 80. This means that once you've gotten your primary stat skill to 80, it makes MORE sense to train a secondary stat skill to 80 than it does to train your primary stat skill to 88 (The benefits of the primary stat to you would literally need to be more than 10x those of the secondary stat for this not to be true). This means that your ability to make decisions plateaus and everyone will be running around with ~80 in all the stat skills and other passives because once you're a certain level it makes more sense than grinding high level skills.

 

This is true, which is why I outlined the second portion of having exclusive access for stats (armor trees) and punitive access the way that earth & air function. What happens when you them all at 80? When all things become equivocal, or the stats in this case, you will need to make the decision again of which is most important. Math dictates certain no brainer decisions along the way, but the way is long and good skill tree design can make us decide which path we're going to take.