This article collects information regarding the conceptualisation of the gameplay of The Mana World

This proposal has been accepted

The development team has discussed the contents of this article and has decided that it should be implemented as described. But the implementation is not finished yet. You can help to bring the features described here into the game.

Attributes

At the moment, ElvenProgrammer and Bjørn agreed to have the following 7 attributes:

Name	General effect
Strength	Increases damage and max inventory weight
Agility	Increases chance of evasion and walking speed
Dexterity	Increases chance to hit and missile accuracy
Vitality	Increases health and stamina regeneration rate
Intelligence	Increases mana and mana regeneration rate
Willpower	Increases magic defence
Charisma	Related to bartering, getting information, getting into fights, diplomacy skills

Derived attributes

Derived attributes are the ones that are visible to the player, representing certain necessary concepts. These include:

• Your maximum health, mana (or magicka) and stamina (or fatigue)
• Damage dealt on hit (usually comes with min and max)
• Chance to hit when attacking
• The amount you can carry (encumbrance)

Skills

Interesting notes about possible skill systems were made at skill system, skill system 2 and at the master skill list.

I think that the master skill list is still a nice proposal, but I think we should leave out the "Stat skills". --Bjørn 11:53, 10 June 2006 (CEST)

I tweaked the skill system 2 propoal to work together with this article. I hope you like it better now. It shouldn't be left out because it is the first well thought out proposal for exp gain of skills. The "1 exp per action" concept of the skill system is just too simple to work. When you want to have some skills from the master skill list you should think about how the concepts of skill system 2 can be applied to those. --Crush 15:34, 31 August 2006 (CEST)

Deriving level from skills

Several choices will have to be made. For example whether we'll have character levels at all and how skills and attributes are increased. This section describes a possible was to derive the character level from his skills. In Daggerfall, this was done as follows:

   (A - B + 28)/15 = level.

      where  A = All Primary Skills + The 2 Best Major Skills + Single Best Minor
             B = the starting value of these same skills.

In TMW we do not have a distinction between primary, major and minor skills. However, if we want to derive the character level from his skills it is important that its not easy for the player to increase his level simply by training his not so popular skills. Crush and Bjørn discussed another way of doing this, but with less arbitrary numbers and without any assumptions about the skill category.

We could simply multiply the skill level by a factor based on to what extend the skill is one of your top skills, and devide the sum by a given amount. When n is the index of the skill in the list sorted on skill level, 0.9^n could be the factor. An example with 10 skills for a typically average trained character (with skills and level going from 1 to 100):

0  1.0 * 78 = 78.0
1  0.9 * 65 = 58.5
2  0.81 * 53 = 42.93
3  0.729 * 40 = 29.16
4  0.6561 * 40 = 26.244
5  0.59049 * 38 = 22.43862
6  0.531441 * 33 = 17.537553
7  0.4782969 * 23 = 11.0008287
8  0.43046721 * 20 = 8.6093442
9  0.387420489 * 15 = 5.811307335

Sum of factors: 6.513215599
Sum of skills * factors: 300.231653235
Character level: 46.0957646298544 (level 46, 10% progression to next level)

The best thing the character can do to work towards the next level is to raise his highest skill. The downside to do this that this will be the hardest thing to do because it will be exponentially harder to increase in a certain skill.

From level to character attributes

I think when you increase level you should get a fixed amount of points that you can use to increase your attributes. Let's say attributes go from 1 to 100, and start at 20. With the current number of attributes, that's 7 * 80 = 560 points necessary to get the theoretical maxed out character. The character goes from level 1 to 100, so per level increase we need to get 560 / 99 = 5 points. I said "theoretical maxed out character" because with it being exponentially harder to increase your skills as they come closer to 100, we can easily make it virtually impossible to actually achieve this. When starting with attributes at 20 seems too high, we can also start with attributes at 5 and go for 6 points per level. --Bjørn 17:13, 10 June 2006 (CEST)

Crush has noted that he'd like players to be able to decrease their attributes as well, in order to increase others and thereby allowing the players to "correct their mistakes" if they think they have previously made the wrong choices when deviding the points for their attributes. As a solution we could choose for a system where for each level increase, one or more points can be substracted before proceeding with distributing points amongst attributes.

More refined, the idea is now that for each level increase you get a certain amount of '-' points and a certain amount of '+' points. The '-' points can be used to decrease an attribute, and results in the gain of a '+' point. '+' points can simply be used to increase an attribute. To make sure that players cannot collect '-' points in order to make big changes to their character attributes later, the maximum amount of '-' points you can have is the amount you gain on a level increase.

Attribute increase rules

This article is currently only a proposal

The features or design guidelines described in this article are only a proposal made by one or some persons. It has not been evaluated or accepted by the core development team yet. Feel free to add your personal opinion about them or make counter proposals.

To avoid unbalanced characters player should have some restrictions when distributing the stat points. Without any restrictions a level 18 character could already have one stat maxed out under the conditions mentioned above. To make this impossible I would suggest to use one of the following restrictions (or a combination of several):

1. The game design has to be made in a way that every character type needs a bit of every stat so unbalanced characters are unplayable (I would not suggest this because it is a) very hard to realize and b) very hard to combine with encouraging character specialisation)
2. The highest attribute may not be higher than all other attributes together (not that good because it would work against single stat specialisation but not against double stat specialisation)
3. Add a special penalty for unbalanced characters (I think this would just feel too artifical)
4. Making attribute increase cost more points the higher the attribute is (That's the way Ragnarok Online does it. And as Ragnarok Online shows this works against maxing stats too early but not against one-sided characters)
5. No attribute may be higher than the character level (would require all characters to start with all stats on 1)
6. No attribute may be higher than double as high as the lowest attribute
7. The difference between the lowest and the highest attribute may not be larger than the character level (I would favor this solution because it means more choices the further your character advances while inexperienced players with low characters have no possibilities to ruin their character and it is a good compromise between allowing specialisation and maintaining balanced characters)

I think number one isn't hard to realize at all. Diablo 1/2 did the same, you got like 5 points each level and of course you could choose to maximize one of your attributes, but this wasn't particularly useful. A very strong character (strength) isn't useful when it can't hit anything (dexterity) and neither when it has very low health (vitality) or is hit all the time (agility), and I think this should go for any case where you max out just one attribute. Another reason not to max out just one attribute was that many items came with a minimum demand on a certain attribute before you could equip them. The problem with most of the other restrictions (except 4 and 5 I'd say), is that they're hard to communicate intuitively to the user. --Bjørn 14:03, 26 March 2007 (CEST)