Removing Practice and Training Points

[Gatz]

So, upon talking to some former players, I realized that we have a lot of 'point systems'. We have practice points, training points and ability points. Original, we only had practice points and training points and over time things changed to have the ability trees and ability points. Then even later on, ability points could be converted to training points or practice points.

So, I thought: why not just go down to only ability points? Practicing skills or raising stats would require ability points rather than practice points, so maybe a quick guide could be shown on how many of your current points would a skill. For example, to get an in-village skill it would be 15 ability points for say a level 30 out of village skill, 30 points, for example. To balance things out, everytime a player leveled up they'd gain more than 1 ability point, as for how many? I am roughly thinking between 5-20 but I haven't crunched any numbers on that. New players would also start with say 20 to 50 ability points.

I think this make players realize you have a great deal of freedom with your character and HOPEFULLY make things less confusing. My only worry is new players will be overwelhmed on how to use these points and get stuck not spending any, but maybe that could be remedied by a helpfile or command to help point out what to invest in first.

So, what do you all think? This system would be setup to grandfather in older players to make sure they got as many points as they should, so current players shouldn't worry about getting potentially shafted if this idea were to go into affect.

[Ichiro]

Hmm. This -could- work out really well. I need to crunch some numbers and see how things could potentially work out before I give a solid conclusion on what I think would be good, but I like this idea a lot and I think it could potentially address a lot of the issues that players have had with various aspects of the system.

[Gatz]

Hmm. This -could- work out really well. I need to crunch some numbers and see how things could potentially work out before I give a solid conclusion on what I think would be good, but I like this idea a lot and I think it could potentially address a lot of the issues that players have had with various aspects of the system.

Really, what I think makes this system "better" is that it really drives your character growth based on you. Wanna be Naruto-esque with high stats but only 2 or 3 moves or go Kakashi route of many moves, but not a lot of endurance? It is up to you to pick extremes or ride the middle. I've been working things out and this is my tenative plan (if this go forward, which there is a big chance it might not.) The biggest change, I'd like to revamp ability point conversion stuff to really embrace this idea.

Training a stat costs the price in ability points.
-For example, if you want to raise a stat to 8, it costs 8 ability points. (The cap still being 20 without LSC)
Practicing a skill from in-village costs that skill's ability level/2.
-For example a level 30 skill in Taijutsu costs 15 points, but a level 100 skill costs 50.
Practicing a skill from out-village costs the skills ability level.
-Learning a level 80 skill from a different village costs 80 ability points, for example. In villages where one learns it before another, you are forced to with the village that learns it latest.
Raising your level in an ability costs ????
-Not sure about this, we could keep it 1 for 1, but with everythings costs getting re-balanced, I feel this should probably go up a bit too. Maybe doing a perfect exchange is too expensive. However, if it is too low and I raise the how many ability points you gain per level, then it'll be easy for people to all be walking around with every ability maxed out at level 10.

So, that is basically it, the other idea I had was making it so players started out with 100 ability points, and every level they gain a random amount which varies, so at early levels players trend to gain more and later levels a little less, but at given points if a player hasn't gained 'enough' for that level they are just given what they missed. That way, at certain points, all players are caught up with each other AP-wise.

Roughly, I had been thinking 1000 AP points total, counting the inital 100. So, 900 would be gained via levelup. Hopefully that sounds cophesive enough to make sense. Ultimatlely, I hope this leads to more deverse players and people who really feel like they can make their guy exactly how they want.

[Ichiro]

For trains, are you talking about raising a stat from 7 to 8 costs 8? setting it to 8 costs 8 (so that going from 5 to 8 would cost 3(?) and from 7 to 8 would cost 1....basically the difference between the current and the new)?

[Gatz]

For trains, are you talking about raising a stat from 7 to 8 costs 8? setting it to 8 costs 8 (so that going from 5 to 8 would cost 3(?) and from 7 to 8 would cost 1....basically the difference between the current and the new)?

Not exactly. to make a stat go from 5 to 6 would cost 6 ability points. To raise a state from 7 to 8 would cost 8. To make a stat go from 5 to 8 would cost 21 ability points.Hopefully that makes sense.

[Ichiro]

That's what I was afraid you meant...

As best as I can tell, with the system you've described so far and not knowing how you would want to handle RPP's or skills acquired from bonus practices, I would potentially owe you as much as 294 points for my current build.

Also, here's a quick reference chart:

levelFrom->levelTo = cost =sum of costs from 5
-----------
5->6 = 6 = 6
6->7 = 7 = 13
7->8 = 8 = 21
8->9 = 9 = 30
9->10 = 10 = 40
10->11 = 11 = 51
11->12 = 12 = 63
12->13 = 13 = 76
13->14 = 14 = 90
14->15 = 15 = 105
15->16 = 16 = 121
16->17 = 17 = 138
17->18 = 18 = 156
18->19 = 19 = 175
19->20 = 20 = 195

[Gatz]

That's what I was afraid you meant...

As best as I can tell, with the system you've described so far and not knowing how you would want to handle RPP's or skills acquired from bonus practices, I would potentially owe you as much as 294 points for my current build.

Also, here's a quick reference chart:

levelFrom->levelTo = cost =sum of costs from 5
-----------
5->6 = 6 = 6
6->7 = 7 = 13
7->8 = 8 = 21
8->9 = 9 = 30
9->10 = 10 = 40
10->11 = 11 = 51
11->12 = 12 = 63
12->13 = 13 = 76
13->14 = 14 = 90
14->15 = 15 = 105
15->16 = 16 = 121
16->17 = 17 = 138
17->18 = 18 = 156
18->19 = 19 = 175
19->20 = 20 = 195

Good point here, thanks for doing the math, I think it really helps to see it out like that. However, would it really be that bad if players gained a nice chunk of ability points? Obviously, this new system wouldn't be a simple change over from our current more but more built to balance things out. Right now, there is no real incentive not to max out stats as you go or pump them pretty high, same with skills.

However, players would also gain a great deal more ability points to make sure they wouldn't be hosed, but I don't want to just give players 10,000 ability points and let them go nuts or make it difficult for players to chart out maxing a stat's cost. I just don't feel like charging a flat amount of ability points is a good idea.

Hopefully you kind of see where I'm coming from here. I'm hoping these new system can make it easier for players to feel like they have full control over their character, but not be an exercise in math for them to do all sorts of crazy formulas. I also would like to make it cost more to pump your stats higher and higher, as well as cost more to learn skills that are higher on the skill tree.

As for bonus practices and stuff from RPP that would be a big ????? and might be one area where people getting grandfather in get an advantage, but I don't want to gum up the discussions here with how to grandfather older players in.

[Ichiro]

I think the current point costs are potentially viable as they are, but something else would have to change.

a.) Stats actually give us more per point (health and chakra at least; stamina is more than fine)

and/or

b.) Simply give more than 1,000 points. I know initially you had a lower estimate of about 1,500 (which I think sounds a lot better, but it would probably still be fine with maybe 1,300?).


I'll look at this more when I get home tonight, and crunch some more numbers on it as well.

[Gatz]

I think the current point costs are potentially viable as they are, but something else would have to change.

a.) Stats actually give us more per point (health and chakra at least; stamina is more than fine)

and/or

b.) Simply give more than 1,000 points. I know initially you had a lower estimate of about 1,500 (which I think sounds a lot better, but it would probably still be fine with maybe 1,300?).


I'll look at this more when I get home tonight, and crunch some more numbers on it as well.

Excellent, post what your thoughts are.

[Kotani]

I'll be honest, this is an interesting concept, but it terrifies me. We'll take my character as an example, if this were to go into effect, my skill tree would look something like... daibakafu, kage bunshin, solfege, and mizu hatsudenki. The rest of my ability points would be all stats, mostly int/con/wis and the remainder into hp stats... any other abilities would only be taken if the PSMs outweighed the bonus that the ability point as training points...

In a nutshell, it'd be almost no jutsu, and just raw spammable high damage.

I can't imagine what other crazy builds people would come up with. Though a doryuu taiga/mizu hatsudenki build with the same mindset would likely be unbeatable in any pvp scenario... and this is before any LSCing is factored in.

:\

*Edit: I'm not a number cruncher, so I don't know how things would actually calculate out in this regard, but I'd hope my reputation for breaking things would prove as a bit of an example for the potential abuse of a system like this.

*Edit #2: I'll try to think on this topic and see if I can propose some alternatives that follow the intent of making things a bit more newbie friendly. I admit I'm a bit biased, the current system has a lot of "intelligent design" and offers a lot of room to play for those of us that actually like to dabble around without being terribly broken in most ways. Shame this kind of balance comes from a bit of complication for newer players. :\