I've spoken before about replacing Turns and Travel points and other action points (such as Scavenging turns) with an expansion of the Stamina system. Here's how I think it might work:

Let's say for the sake of example that every player gets 1,000,000 Stamina points at each new day. Fighting a round of combat (yes, we'll be doing it per round, not per fight) costs 10,000 Stamina points, plus an extra 250 points for each point of damage that you take (and perhaps 100 points for each point of damage that you inflict on your enemy). Travelling one square over clear land costs 20,000 Stamina points, with a multiplier for terrain type ranging up to 100,000 Stamina points for swimming through deep water.

When buying a Mount, or something that would normally grant extra turns or travel points, the cost of fighting or travelling goes down. For example, with a travel-based mount, the Stamina cost for travel might be reduced to, say, 15,000 points. With a more combat-focussed mount, the cost of a round of combat is reduced to 8,000.

Player can reduce the cost of performing certain actions by performing them more often. This is why the numbers involved are so large; it means that we have a lot of fine-tuning ability. For example, as you gain experience and level up in combat, your combat cost goes down. We could do this by simply reducing the cost per combat round by 1 each time, and likewise with Travel. After a DK, you would be able to retain a small percentage of the discount that you earned on each action - so if you'd got your combat cost down to 9,000 before your DK, it would restart at 9,900 afterwards.

When Stamina points drop below a certain amount, negative consequences become apparent, including the familiar debuff that we're used to in the current Stamina system. The big difference is that there is a "free" period in the new system; until Stamina points are reduced to, say, 500,000, fighting continues as normal without any negative buffs. After you're below 500,000 points, you'll get the debuff that we're used to, which gets worse the more you exhaust yourself. At 200,000 Stamina points left, you'll start losing hitpoints.

Each race has a "sweet spot," which will vary according to player and playing style. For example, in a newbie Human, if the player logs off with 150,000 to 200,000 Stamina points left, they'll wake up the following day with higher maximum Stamina points. Go below 150,000, and you'll wake up with fewer Stamina points the following day. Go below 50,000 and you'll risk permanent hitpoint loss.

Hopefully, once the actual mathematics are worked out, this should allow players a bit more flexibility. Any thoughts?

wow! this will keep the game unboring for a little longer

first thought:
i would want some type of warning, before i did permanent damage, not notice it after; such as: "you pulled your hamstring on that last lunge pretty badly; if you try that again, you will cause a permanent injury."

second thought:
i fear newbies will be confused (or more confused; as the case may be) by this system with its large numbers. either make them (or strongly suggest they) go thru a short tutorial showing how the system works or have it be an improbable event that happens to the player at a certain DK, such as 10 (when they have a good idea of what needs to be done on the island).


overall it seems to be very exciting and i can't wait until i can try my chops on it.

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"tis better to be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt"

I would have to agree with Hajen about the risk of a system like that being very confusing to newbies. I mean I've been hear awhile and I had to read your post 3 times and I think I'm still a bit dodgy on it.

Fodder Kid

I think much of the confusion arises from the very large numbers.

Most people don't like dealing with big numbers. Their minds skitter away, and it's hard to get a handle on how big the difference is between 248499 and 250047, not to mention even noticing the difference between 248499 and 24849. It won't help, either, that the game displays numbers in old-style numerals (so they don't line up) without any commas to mark off thousands.

Keep it internally however you like -- but, for heaven's sake, divide by ten thousand and round it before you show it to the player!

Personally, I think bad idea. Not only is it confusing, but it ads the extra advantage of being very tiresome. In the current system, you can get into long fights without losing more than one fight. By this system, you might end up with a much shorter game day. Especially for newbies, seeing as they happen to take longer on each fight than the rest of us. Which, of course, would cause lack of new players staying and thereby reducing the probability that some will donate.

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A magpie's work is never done.

I've been thinking about this a bit, and some of its consequences.

Scavenging.
Scavenging will now cost jungle fights effectively. Making it less attractive. On the other hand, would it be possible to just spend a game day doing nothing but scavenging and get enough to get high weapon/armour right from the go? Might be worthwhile in terms of turns saved, to some, if too easy. Scavenging is the single best way of transferring req to a newly DK'ed character. Perhaps a cap on how much scavenging can be done would be necessary.
Those players who've posted to say they like scavenging the way it is, would you be happy with this? Or would you prefer scavenging turns to be seperate altogether?

Travel
Again, comes at cost of fights. It's been noted elsewhere that people don't tend to travel about much, this will be a futher disincentive, it may well end up being cheaper to catapult from New Pittsburg to AceHigh than walk, in terms of req from lost fights.

I quite like the idea, but I think that the above needs to be thought about.

TBH, since inventing One-Shot Teleporters, I've been thinking about removing the Travel Agents altogether. It'd be nice to have travel-based Mounts actually worth something again.

I would advise against this, unless you massively increased the chance of getting one shot teles. I love the new map, but it is impossible to visit every town in a day, and extremely difficult to travel for a number of places. I think it would make sense to increase the price of Travel agents by 2 or 5 fold, but eliminating them completely would be a bad idea.

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Glory Points awarded for this fight: 0 You have defeated The Watcher! You receive 1377 Requisition! You receive 20193 experience!

Digging up this old thread, as it's becoming more pertinent now...

Okay, here's a more thorough idea of how a system like this could integrate with the rest of the game, and how it could also function as a quasi-experience system too.


The Stamina bar

The interface for Stamina would be represented by a three-coloured bar. Red on the left, amber in the middle, green on the right. It'd be displayed on the top right with your hitpoints, and during fights and events that use Stamina, it'd be displayed in a larger and prettier format in the main output section, like hitpoints are now.

Overlaid on this bar would be a percentage value, showing how much Stamina you have left. This is your main focal point - you don't really have to worry about the exact values, as you've got the bar and the percentage readings to get a good idea of how you're doing Stamina-wise.

In smaller numerals below it is the actual number of Stamina points you have left, presented in number format (with commas as thousands separators).

Like this, only less shitty-looking (this is something I knocked together in a coupla minutes to show you the general principle):



The greyed-out area represents the Stamina points that have been used up, so the bar fills with grey from right to left as you run out of Stamina.

Now, once you've got no green bar left, and you start eating into the amber bar, your combat performance will deteriorate, as will your performance in any other activity that requires Stamina. In combat, this will take the form of an attack and defence debuff; in Travel, a higher rate of monster encounters. In Scavenging, a higher proportion of crappy bits of tin.

When your amber bar is all gone, you'll be at 20% of your usual Attack and Defence power, and you'll be tripping over your own feet and finding nothing but empty beer cans. When you start eating into the red bar, you'll slowly begin to lose hitpoints.

The three segments of the bar can vary in size over time (see "Affecting overall Stamina values").

Like the current system combining Turns, Travel points, Scavenging points and Stamina, you'll be able to choose for yourself when to stop playing for the day, rather than being stuck with a standard ten Turns and no more. When I wrote the original Stamina system, I did it so that you would have another decision to make, and a little bit more freedom and flexibility. The stock LotGD system said "Ten turns and twenty Travel points only." The original Stamina system said "Ten turns and twenty Travel, then have some more if you like but it'll get more dangerous." The proposed new Stamina system says "Ten turns and twenty Trave, or Twenty turns, or forty Travel, and some Scavenging too, or any combination of the above in any order, and take more if you can handle the extra danger."


Recovering Stamina

Stamina is recovered and refilled automatically at the start of each new day. New one-shot items such as tea, coffee, cigarettes, rations packs and so on could be used to recover Stamina throughout the player's game day. Some of these are only "borrowed" Stamina - as any hardcore caffeine or nicotine junkie knows, a few cups of coffee will keep you going for a few hours, but you'll pay for them later with a big crash. So, for example, smoking a cigarette might give you an extra hundred thousand Stamina points, but it'll slightly increase the costs of everything you do.

Current random special events that award or remove Turns will be rewritten to work with Stamina instead.


Detailed Stamina Stats

At any time, you can click on the bar and a popup window will open telling you the exact Stamina costs of performing any given action, in a format like this (this represents a low-level aggressive player who doesn't travel much and has never Scavenged):

Aggressive combat: 9,560
Defensive combat: 9,982
Balanced combat: 9,894
Travel over Plains: 3,458
Travel through Jungles: 6,926
(and so on and so forth with the travelling)
Scavenging: 5,000

Bear in mind that all these values are just example values, and the real ones will be carefully balanced.

(also, those costs might be better off in the right-hand column - we'll see, anyway, like I say, this is all theoretical at this point)

Note the distinction between aggressive, defensive and balanced combat stances; this is a theoretical system meant to illustrate one example of how the expanded Stamina system could make a player's experience more suited to how they play, and how we can use this new system to integrate cool new ideas. In this very basic example, the player has three sets of Attack links - one for normal combat the way it is now, one to activate a mild buff to the player's Attack stat and a debuff to their Defense stat, and one that works the other way around. The more the player uses each combat stance, the fewer Stamina points it costs to use that combat stance.

That's just a theoretical example of how the game would alter itself to suit everyone's playing style. Here are the mechanics to how it works:


How Action Costs change over time

Basically the more often you perform any given action, the lower your Stamina cost for that action will become.

For example, a player who travels to every town, every day, will soon learn how to navigate the terrain that's now becoming familiar to him - his legs will become more muscular and his feet more callused. It won't be long before his Travel costs drop - for example, if he cuts through the Jungles most of the time, then his Jungle travel cost will go down from 7,000 to eventually bottom out at 2,000, the minimum value (again, just a reminder - these are example values, they'll be balanced properly if we go ahead with this) and allowing him to Travel more in any given day. Granted, to get this good at Travelling he can't have been doing much combat, but everyone on Improbable Island plays differently to everyone else, and that might just be his thing.

You can also reduce your Stamina costs by other means; training in a gym or martial arts class will use up your Stamina for that day, and use up some of your money too, but the instruction given by folks in the establishment will actually increase the benefit to the Action Costs. For example, spending 500,000 Stamina points fighting monsters in the Jungle might result in an Action Cost reduction of 50 points, but spending the same number of Stamina points in a martial arts training school will reduce the cost of combat by 200 points.


Stamina Buffs

Just as you can have modifiers to your attack and defence stats, we can also have modifiers to your base Action Costs and Stamina levels. These might be racial buffs, or they might be given by a Mount or equipment, and they might be temporary or semipermanent. They'll be represented like this, with the actual cost first and the natural cost in brackets:

Aggressive combat: 4,500 (5,000)
(an example showing a 500 point reduction from the player's natural Aggressive combat action cost)

So, drinking beer might give you a reduced Aggressive combat cost until a certain number of Stamina points have been used up, and being a Gobot might give you a reduced cost for all areas of Travel, all day.


Affecting overall Stamina values

Action Costs are not the only thing that can be affected by your style of play. Certain events and things you can do will increase the number of Stamina points you start each day with. Some will increase or decrease the proportional width of the green bar, giving you a greater or lesser period of "free" Stamina. Likewise with the red and amber bars.

One of the things that can affect the relative width of each bar is knowing when to stop; for every player there will be a spot somewhere towards the left-hand side of the Stamina bar where they have exercised enough to get the most benefit, but not enough to pull a muscle or leave themselves in agony the next day. Crossing this line will result in a smaller green section the next day, and a larger red section until the end of the DK (or until they reverse the process by correctly finding the sweet spot) - hitting it just right will result in a larger green section.


DK-wide and cross-DK Stamina Effects

As you proceed across a Drive run, the costs of performing an action, along with the overall look of your Stamina bar, will change due to random events, actions that you've taken, decisions that you've made and your overall playing style.

At the end of the Drive run, a small proportion of these changes will be carried over for your next Drive run. Thus, your character becomes much stronger over time in the areas in which you've chosen to specialise. This happens automatically - no pissing about with character classes.


Stamina, Spirits and Morale

Of course, where we sleep, what we eat, and how much we exercise can affect our real-life Stamina, so you'll see things like a Stamina boost for sleeping in a Mansion as opposed to a Shack, eating a steak rather than a dead squirrel, and so on and so forth.


So. What do you think?

It would definitely take some getting used to, but from my standpoint, I see it working out pretty well.

Just in case you were considering it, I would advise against putting any stamina cost on 'posting' actions. People should be able to Role-Play without hurting their other opportunities.

Too right.

I'd suggest the opposite. Either do away with the teleporters or make them much more rare. If people want to visit multiple cities, they should pay for a good mount or for travel services. Besides, the Travel Agents have made for some amusing catapult roleplay on the message boards.

You might look at making the Travel Agents more expensive, or limiting the number of times one can safely use them per game day, if you want people to use the mounts for travel instead.

"Hmmmm," quoth he.

I rather like it. It gives you scope for adding other interesting wrinkles as you think of them, too. Which is always good.

But I agree with Epaphus about keeping the Travel Agents. They're crazy and fun. Colorful. Where else can you travel by catapult? Teleporters are all very well in their way, but they aren't a patch on getting launched through the air by a crew of malicious midgets! I like them both. Don't make me choose -- I want to keep both!

Besides, certain kinds of game play require moving from city to city to city very quickly. No travel-based mount is going to be worth anything for last-minute Council Politics contests.

Complexity is sticky. Don't take stuff away from the game. Add. Wherever possible, create more options, not fewer.

Travel-based mounts aren't just for commuting back and forth between outposts over and over again along the same old beaten paths. That's too limited. It's boring. They're for exploring the whole Island. And you've got lots of ideas lined up, I believe, for luring us out into the Map. Trust in them.

A few questions:

a) How do henchmen impact Stamina? (Bet y'all forgot about henchmen/mercs)
-- Do they have stamina of their own?
-- Will they hold you back?
-- If they do, can one buy vehicles for one's mercenaries? Or a vehicle-equipped mercenary?
b) Will large weapons (IE, double-barreled cat launchers, and other devices that cost travel) impact stamina?
-- Conversely, will small weapons impact them less?
-- Will scrap weapons/armor vs. Shiela's items have greater stamina cost? They ought to.
-- What about force-based armor (shields), vs. servo-enhanced armor vs. standard armor (non-force-based, non-servo enhanced
c) Will the amount of trade goods one is carrying impact Stamina? Ought to. Ditto for amounts of scrap. And what about carrying lots of req?
d) Will wounds impact the amount of stamina one is able to exert? Ought to.
e) Will multiple monster encounters (ie, 5 on 1) affect stamina vs. a single monster encounter?
f) Will there be encumbrance, and will that impact PVP encounters?
g) Will clan buffs impact clan member stamina?

A few points of agreement:
a) Ala Sessine, keep integers small, please, thanks.
b) I'm interested in trying the new system.

My feeling is that a handful of aspects have been thought through with respect to stamina, however, and I would prefer to see a system that touches all game components, rather than just combat or travel.

My final question: When is the current target start date for Season 2?


All best,

~CTP

I'm a relative newcomer and never actually experienced the game before catapults. As such, i'm not actually certain i'd be able to function without them. My general day has me bouncing from city to city like an insane poorly served ping-pong ball. Upon waking i go from wherever i'm starting to cyber city to scavenge for scrap, and from there to wherever my quest is, where i pound monsters until i level up, at which point i will catapult to acehigh and then, upon defeating my master, back to my quest area. If i am lucky enough to get a quest step complete that day i then catapult to improbable central to get the skinny on my next quest portion and then straight to wherever dan and whimsy has decided to send me next. For me, killing catapult travel would be akin to handing me an iphone and then telling me i could only use one application a day. It would limit my potential for activity and exploration, and limit my enjoyment of the game.

In regards to the changes in stamina: as a regular scavenger i'm... uneasy about having to choose between scavenging and fighting (and traveling, really), but at the same time i see the logic of it. Indeed, looking from the other direction there's a certain allure to the idea of spending an entire day's worth of energy on nothing but scavenging, should i not feel like fighting.

I like the idea of pulling a lot of stuff together into the proposed Stamina system. Right now, the points allocated for all the various things seems rather arbitrary, whereas linking all those actions to a single stat is a little easier to comprehend and ultimately gives people more freedom to do what they want. Some people might just want to use all their stamina for fighting and not travel at all, and under the current system those travel points would just go to waste. Or they might want to spend an entire day scavenging.

Overall, I really like this idea.
Please don't get rid of the Travel Agents! I usually save my teleporters for when I'm about to be sent to the Failboat, and it costs much less to travel via catapult than to buy another one in the vending machines.
Question! When we make a Drive Kill, would we have the option of adding to our maximum stamina, as we currently have the option of gaining extra turns, or only have the points needed decrease?

I'm all for this. How far will you be able to take it?

Say if I spend all my stamina searching for tinctures, balms, unguents, salves, potions, herbs, the latest Nokia Mobile, poisons, plants and medicines and then making a shack, and calling it a 'healer's', over time I develop my own 'character class' of 'healer'. This becomes accepted in the game that if in trouble, the hospital tent is less a monopoly and you can come and see Healer Bernard, and eventually I set up my own guild with clan buffs different to those of a fighting/ battling guild? People from around the globe join, and we then make money in a market economy so that we can get better at doing what we do? You build in req sinks for advertising or having your shack on the High Street, whilst the council won't allow too much competition if you 'keep them sweet'.

(*tries to imagine a Healer's Hut run by Uncle Bernard. Fails utterly. Tries again because the partial images received were so mindbogglingly funny*)

You've got a lot of great ideas packed into a paragraph there, Bernard. I really hope Dan can make something like that happen. It would be wonderful.

Another twist that would open up many possibilities is to let those consumables that affect stamina be easily giftable, in many different ways. And player-modifiable, at least in their descriptions. I've talked about food, for instance. Wealthy players should be able to throw banquets with huge guest lists -- and delicious gourmet menus... or utterly disgusting ones.

And drinks: In a pub, players should be able to buy each other drinks, or buy a round for everyone in the room (interpreted, perhaps, as anyone who enters within the next n minutes, or the first n people to come in....) If there are clan inns, or pubs run by individual players, there should be a way to invent one's own drinks.

I agree! Buying drinks for the first n people would keep the cost predictable for the buyer, while buying for everyone who enters in the next n minutes would make costs unpredictable (I don't know how often people head into the pub). And I like the idea of having players invent their own drinks--or at least be able to name the drink they're buying for other contestants. Another round of "Epaphus' Eel Slime Surprise," anyone? Anyone at all? C'mon--you're hurting my feelings here.