Game Mechanics Vs Game Ideal

[Surly]

Meh, it's years on and I've still not heard a decent justification for skills the way they are implemented now. Nearly all the people I used to know back then are gone... go figure.

I really miss the game I used to play.

[psymann]

Front Page:

It's not really related to skills. The front page says you can be absolutely anything, but really there are some limitations. These depend more on your location and the facilities already there and the demand for what you want to do. Being a tailor on Omeo where people are struggling to stay alive and just want healing food, is going to be pretty damn hard.

Maybe it could do with a little rewording.

Skills:

[quote=vazalco]Yeah, well, the skill thing is unfair and creates incredibly unbalanced game. In other games it's different. Let's take D&D for instance. Your character may not be very strong, but this would balance out by having a good score in some other attribute -- perhaps dexterity or intelligence. Whereas in Cantr, there is nothing to balance out a low strength score -- you're either strong or you're screwed. Unbalanced and makes for a very unfair game.[/quote]

I do think you've missed the point of the game a bit here. Cantr isn't a game you try to win. It's not a game where you try to get onto the highscores, or get a record for most animals killed in a week, or something. You just interact with people and have fun doing so. It can be every bit as enjoyable to play an inept character who keeps getting into awkward situations as a town/army leader. There is no requirement or benefit to having all characters equal at birth.

I don't really have a strong opinion for or against skills. On the one hand, being awkward at something makes it harder to choose that role for a profession. One of my first characters, I wanted to be a tailor. I had my fingers crossed that she wouldn't be awkward at tailoring. Fortunately she was efficient when spawned and is now expert after years of tailoring.

But on the other hand, the skills difference is very minimal. Being awkward at tailoring doesn't mean it is impossible for me to make a complicated turquoise bracelet or dress shirt. It just takes a bit longer. For something like digging potatoes, that makes sense, but for things like tailoring, manufacturing, shipbuilding etc, it would make far more sense if there were some projects you simply couldn't start unless you were skillful or better. How can an awkward shipbuilder possibly hope to build a Galleon without help? At the moment, many people ignore their skills, just do whatever they wanted to do, and don't care if it takes a couple of hours longer.

For my tailor to do well, she should really be able to use her expert skills to manufacture clothing that others could not make, or make them to a higher visible quality, so that there's a reason to use her. At the moment, the main way she gets trade is by trying her best to monopolise the clothing resources - because that's about the only way to force people to use her, rather than just making their own which conveniently look just as good as hers, and take them slightly longer instead of costing them slightly more to give her a profit.

So skills, I don't really care for them or against them. If they were to work properly, they need to have far more effect, and as Seko (I think) said, they need to make sense together so that you can't be expert at manufaturing weapons and awkward at manufacturing tools. But in working properly, they'd limit the amount of scope any single character has for what it could do well, and put people off who want to be something and find they can't.

I suppose those conflicting things are why we have a sort of in between system that doesn't really give the best of either world.

[Doug R.]

Cantr isn't a game you try to win.

Winning is subjective. All of my goal-oriented characters (i.e., anyone that's not just a laborer) are trying to "win" something, even if it's just in their mind.