Halls of Mist: super-simple skills?

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Would this be an elegant implementation of Stealth?

Sleeping monsters do not move or attack. Instead, on each of their turns, nearby sleeping monsters force you to make a Stealth check. If the noise you make disturbs them enough (the threshold depending on the monster) they wake up.

Your character and all her Stealth equipment have their own Stealth skill, and they all roll their skill checks separately. You avoid disturbing a monster if any of the checks succeed.

[Nick]

Could you elaborate a bit? How do resists stack in FA?

They stack multiplicatively. It's best to think of it as how much damage gets through:
If you have a 40% RFire item and a 30% RFire item, you take 60% damage because of the first, then 70% of that because of the second. So in total you take 0.6x0.7 = 0.42 or 42% damage, and overall you have 58% RFire.

In the case of Stealth, I guess you would think of each item reducing the noise you make by a fixed percentage, which kind of works; I actually think your idea makes a lot of intuitive sense, though.

[buzzkill]

They stack multiplicatively. It's best to think of it as how much damage gets through:
If you have a 40% RFire item and a 30% RFire item, you take 60% damage because of the first, then 70% of that because of the second. So in total you take 0.6x0.7 = 0.42 or 42% damage, and overall you have 58% RFire.

What he said. It eliminates the need for a hard cap as each additional source of stealth would give a diminished return. 50% + 50% =75% add another 50% and your only up to 87%. another 50%=93%, not that 50% stealth boosts should be at all common. I've always thought that the % resist system is superior to V's.

[Scatha]

Sleeping monsters do not move or attack. Instead, on each of their turns, nearby sleeping monsters force you to make a Stealth check. If the noise you make disturbs them enough (the threshold depending on the monster) they wake up.

Your character and all her Stealth equipment have their own Stealth skill, and they all roll their skill checks separately. You avoid disturbing a monster if any of the checks succeed.

Just to point out that this is equivalent to the multiplicative vulnerabilities Nick and buzzkill describe. Yours is an elegant description, but it can be useful to have the end effect rolled into one number to make it clear to the player.

[half]

They stack multiplicatively.

I agree that this is an excellent way for resistances and some other things to work. It is a bit tricky to work out what to call it. Multiplicatively kind of implies that two 50% resistances make a 25% resistance. The method you use comes up fairly often in systems, for example it is similar to taking the probability of a disjunction, to De Morgan's laws in logic, to harmonic means, and to resistance in parallel. I like to call it 'co-multiplicative', since you take the complements of the numbers, multiply these and take the complement of the result. Effectively it is that the complement is multiplicative (in this case 'vulnerability').

Note that for all my praise of it, Sil uses a system where you take 1/(n+1) of the damage with n sources of resistance, as this fit my purposes a little better. I think that your system is more general and often better.

[Nick]

Yes, it's really the damage fractions that are multiplicative.

Note that for all my praise of it, Sil uses a system where you take 1/(n+1) of the damage with n sources of resistance, as this fit my purposes a little better.

Funnily enough, the O system (which FA started out with) is an approximation to this.

The percentage system makes intuitive sense (after some thought), but it is less elegant and messier to code than the 1/(n+1).

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Just to point out that this is equivalent to the multiplicative vulnerabilities Nick and buzzkill describe. Yours is an elegant description, but it can be useful to have the end effect rolled into one number to make it clear to the player.

Avernum uses this system for all resists and even for armour class.

Since all my skills are percentage based, I could use this system with them all. At the moment I think most items just add bonuses straight to the skill score. (For many skills it doesn't matter if the success percentage grows to 100%. For some skills I even have effects for scores beyond 100%. Weapon skills beyond 100% start increasing your critical chance.)

[buzzkill]

... for example it is similar to taking the probability of a disjunction, to De Morgan's laws in logic, to harmonic means, and to resistance in parallel.

!Bravo!