Dev Diary: Skills

I'm not convinced a traditional "talent tree" would be right for Card Hunter. Jon's already stated that the game is solely about the cards. I initially thought maybe talents are for things outside of combat? They might affect the way you deal with shopkeepers, (Merchant Upbringing) or open up completely new shopkeepers, (Shady Associates) expand your keep in some way, (Family Butler), allow you to transmute items (Transmutation) or even allow some sort of crafting to take place? (Blacksmith) I'm pretty sure Jon said there is no crafting in the game on release, but I'm just throwing ideas around.

However, Jon said:
"OK, then what’s a Talent? I don’t have time to fully explain them this week, but you can see them in the item illustrations above. They’re represented by the little glass beads next to the item names and they determine which items you can use. I’ll run through more exactly what they are and how we came to adopt them next week."
That seems to suggest that talents are very basic. Race and class could even be talents. Maybe "Spearmaster" could be a talent, and certain spear items have the additional prerequisite that they can only be used by characters with the "Spearmaster" talent. It seems basic enough. The confusing element is the glass beads. We can see at least 2 different types of glass beads in the pictures above and they don't seem to correspond to the level of the skill. *shurgs* Guess we'll have to wait and see.

 

I like the absolute freedom in the deck-management (Items and Skills).
I wonder how Talents could affect deck building.

 

I guess... the diary is limited, yeah? So of course I don't see the whole picture. But when I finally got to the end of the Dev Diary I couldn't tell the difference between skills and items. Skills maybe have some unique cards and... provide fewer cards than items? I think? And they are all race- or class-limited whereas only some of the items are? As soon as they become reequippable instead of permanent, skills are just smaller, more narrowly focused, slightly different items. Those aren't meaningfully unique from regular items. They're just other equip slots.

I have to be missing something here. That can't be all they are, but that's all I'm seeing. Which doesn't interest me. Permanent skills I get to choose when I start a character and then improve, or even that I find and then decide to equip, binding it to the character, does.

I... I understand some of your arguments against it, but personally I'd really rather have skills be permanent. I'd love to be able to just pick a group of skills at the beginning and then upgrade them as a character levels up; as in choose the skill battledancing and then as you level up you upgrade this first to Novice Battledancing and then to Trained Battledancing, Expert Battledancing, and eventually Master Battledancing. So individual "levels" of a skill are not locked, but the base skill in and of itself is.

Yes, you end up "stuck" with the battledancing, flexibility, thread necromancy, and deforestation skills on that character for as long as you play them, but... that's what makes the character that character. I don't mind limitations as long as they make sense and enhance the game. Permanent skills is a reasonable constraint, and I really don't see the added difficulty to deck building.

Being limited to only playing one deck with a character would be be too strict and not any fun. But being able to mix and match nearly everything within one character is too generic. It takes away the depth from the character that you were originally trying to add by introducing skills. There has to be some limitation beyond just race and class. If every human warrior can be built the same way, then every human warrior is forgettable. Ultimately, identifying him as a unique character is pointless because he can be replicated en masse by everyone else in the game with only the bare minimum effort. Suddenly there really is no difference between having this character that is represented by a deck of cards, and just holding a plain old deck of cards in your hand.

But, yeah... maybe I'm missing something obvious and skills are more than just slightly more limited items.

I hope so. :|

 

Well, judging from the titles of the skills, it's possible skills level up, which would make them different to items.

 

How about this: You always only find a skill card with novice level. Instead of somewhen finding an expert level of that skill, you have a chance to increase the level of that skill by using it. That way you'll get better with a certain skill, but you can also use every skill you like. And now your characters matter again, but you're not limited to the skills you have. You can reskill by selecting a different novice skill and level that up.

 

If I may, how about a little disambiguation. One point I took from the diary is that there are a few words that the devs are using to mean specific things that we observers have not always distinguished, particularly item vs. equipment.

Item refers to the components used for deckbuilding, equipping them on a character adds a suite of cards to your deck.
Equipment refers to the subset of items such as swords, armors, etc. that are physical objects carried around.
Skills refers to the subset of items representing less tangible stuff, such as an ability to run fast or to target multiple enemies with a single spell.

I suspect there are a few further differences not yet mentioned. For instance, the diary hinted that skills may be more difficult to acquire, in that if you want to get one you have to play the appropriate adventure. There have been references to stores selling equipment; but how do you stock a skill on a shelf, or sell one if you don't need it any more? For that matter, can you pack them on your media-savvy mule? Skills might not be permanent in the sense of being forever bound to a character, but you might have to make do with your choices for the duration of a mission.

I agree while disagreeing. Not about the first sentence I quoted: of all the diaries explaining how the CH team started with one idea and ended up with another, this is the first choice that I feel loses something deep in the interaction between the players and their characters. But even with permament skills there would still be a finite number of permutations. Zoorland and mightymushroom can believably choose the same set of elf cleric skills when both are making a behind-the-lines healer/buffer. Does that mean when we meet in a duel we would accuse each other of copying? I hope not.

As I know from my own expectations, the obvious influence of classic roleplaying on the Card Hunter style and story can obscure the fact that it's really not an RPG. The rules underneath the artwork are those of a card-playing board game. Though I might wish differently, it never was the case that a character is represented by a deck of cards, it is the case that the synthesis of a given deck implies a character.

Look at it this way, though. I don't see anything about the system that forces you to change skills at every turn. Everyone is quite free to creatively interpret their own party: giving them a unique "personality" is our responsibility, not the programmers'.

P.S. Plus we still have Talents to look forward to. With absolutely no basis, I would speculate that talents are some sort of limit (we know from Rudolpho there's a "talent counter") on the variety of items you can equip at one time. So, it's easier for your warrior to equip three kinds of battle-axe than to equip an axe and sword and crossbow. The latter requires a lot more "talent" in handling different weapons. Such a system would certainly encourage you to stick to a specialization for your characters, but it's purely a guess.

 

I agree with everything mightymushroom just said + infinity. You literally took every word from my vocabulary and used it. For that sir, I congratulate you.

I do want to emphasize the need for non-strictly-you-have-this-and-can't-change-it deck building mechanics because then multiplayer would suck, and that's where all the fun will lie once you milk single player for all it's worth. Just saying. Soul bound to characters might be interesting and not mess things up, but skill trees would make it impossible to play against other people because if you build just the wrong way, you'd have to restart your characters from scratch and do everything again just to redefine a couple points that severely weakened your deck. Long live multi-player!

EDIT: I don't want to be level 30 only to realize I screwed up putting points in at level 5. That doesn't make me feel like my character is developed, it just makes me angry that I'm playing a card/board game that has the interface of a dedicated single-player RPG. Plus, I imagine it takes quite some time to level up.

To note, I'm not against having multiple parties, but I don't want to have to make 3 different parties just to move a couple skills around. And if you could 'respec' then there would be no challenge to collect the cards. It is a CCG after all, not an MMO. There shouldn't be "Skill tree builds" for this game, that doesn't make any sense. It's should be about the fun of collecting/finding new cards and integrating them into your existing party to define them in new direction and help them evolve.

 

As a person who really enjoys the "building" aspect of these kinds of games (call it "deckbuilding" or "character building") and likes to frequently go back and tinker, I'm all for the flexible approach. I'd hate to commit hours and hours, only to find the ideas I thought were neat are completely unviable or don't work as I intended. This goes double for multiplayer, where a healthy metagame is probably best defined by flexibility--think about how most successful PvP RPGs lets you respec, or how MtG lets you bring any (legal) deck to a tournament no matter what you played yesterday.

Further, as a person who has less and less time to game these days, the chance to quickly alter my characters is very appealing over the alternative of going back to square one every time I want to (or have to) rebuild. Maybe this will be fixed after awhile when the "optimal" builds are figured out and new players will be less apt to make early mistakes, but that process is so horribly dull. Even with limited time to play, i'd rather try a level two or three times with my own tweaks than slowly march through some wiki's build list.

Now, about the skills seeming indistinguishable from the equipment, that's exactly what impression I got from reading the dev diary. While that did make me wonder why both existed in the same game, I wouldn't want to make skills "worse" (i.e. more inflexible) just for the sake of differentiation.

 

Personally, I think there is a difference between skills and equipment and that difference comes in the form of talents. The skills obviously allow you to do things with talents (As referenced in the diary), and that could be an important thing because it has also been mentioned that talents affect deckbuilding. This could mean that skills --> talents --> equipment restrictions

So in essence, skills would help to determine how you built based on the talents those skills allowed you to use. So, yes, they act the same as equipment card-wise, but they might have a deeper underlying meaning that we haven't been told yet. I would wait to see how talents fit into the whole process before making any rash judgements about what skills are and if they're distinguishable from swords, armor, etc.

 

I wouldn't mind having single-player characters that had made permanent decisions. But for PvP I want the flexibility to quickly adjust according to changes in the current metagame. One solution would be to allow players to create PvP characters which are restricted to PvP only and cannot be used in the single-player campaign, but can be built in 5 minutes. They'd still have to use items found in the single-player campaign though.

 

That's an interesting idea, but my complaint with it would be that it would feel like your single player characters were only useful and meaningful to you. I mean, it takes away the RPG aspect from multiplayer and makes it soley about winning (kind of like MTG), which makes it more competitive. I think I'd like it better if I could use my own characters for both. Otherwise it would be like playing an MMO and having 1 character for questing and then whenever you fought another player, you had to switch characters. Sure, they may look the same and have the same items, but they aren't the same, you know? Maybe it's just me, but I like the idea of building heroes in single player and developing them and then taking that to other players and going "Let's see who's stronger." Kind of like Pokemon and trainer/gym battles. You caught YOUR pokemon and gave them moves and advanced them in single player and then used that to fight other people who did the same thing. It just seems more exciting and meaningful if the things you do affect your battles and the way you see the game by connecting single and multiplayer.

I'm still against any sort of permanent locked-in decision, by the way. That's what that wall of text is about.

 

There would be nothing stopping you from using your single player characters in PvP. Just PvP characters can't play single player.

 

No, there wouldn't be anything stopping me except the fact that I couldn't change any permanent choices on them, and if I could, then they wouldn't be permanent. By not being able to change them, it effectively makes them useless for PvP because of the reasons we've already discussed.

 

Given that we now know about the talent beads and their respective levels (clear, bronze, silver, gold), this was an interesting discovery:



Trained Battledancing is a uncommon skill that needs a bronze talent. Checks out to me.



Apprentice Flexibility is an uncommon skill that only needs a clear talent. Sure, maybe this one is less powerful.

But...




The other two talents make a very interesting small sample size. First, I'm going to safely assume that rare and epic make these skills harder to find than uncommon. Also interesting to note is the reoccurrence of the "trained" adjective--maybe there are levels of each skill: apprentice -> trained -> master. But, most of all, these two rarer skills only cost a clear talent. Maybe rarity is not a good indicator of power? Maybe part of their value is their low talent cost? Either way... interesting stuff here...

 

But, but... rarity always equals power! I can't think of one single time where I'd prefer something common over a wonderful rare!