Traits in Character Creation for Civilians

[zoid]

Basically my suggestion is that when creating a civilian character, you give them a myriad of choices to select from as to a previous occupation they may have held that boosts a skill.

They’d be OPTIONAL to select TWO positive traits and REQUIRED to select ONE negative trait.

Alternatively we can just use TWO positive traits and ditch the negative traits.

Some examples are...
Handy
Boosts intelligence & crafting skill greatly and makes it so you find more items in trash. Before the Occupation you were an engineer, a mechanic, or some other type of trade that makes you adept at crafting and finding the material to do so.

Athletic
Boosts strength and agility, make them run faster than people without the trait. Before the Occupation, you were an athlete, a nutritionist, or some other job that required you to stay in peak physical condition. After the Occupation you have managed to keep your body as physically in shape as possible. You’ve avoided total malnutrition, for now. Even in your apartment, you do sit ups, push ups, and as much cardio as you can outside the view of the Combine to improve strength and stamina. Your efforts have paid off and you are healthier than most.

Money Maker
Boosts perception & bartering greatly and the player starts off with more credits. Throughout your life, you’ve always been skilled in the art of buying and selling, or perhaps you’re simply charismatic. Even after the Combine Occupation you’ve been smart with your money, saving up even more than traditional citizens and learning the market.

Bilingual
You know two different languages instead of one.

Medic
Boosts intelligence a little & medicine greatly, makes heal greater than other players, and the player knows all medical crafting recipes at the start. You were a doctor, paramedic, nurse, or other profession that required you to be adept in the art of medicine. Your skills and knowledge have stayed with you through the Occupation.

Culinary Expert
Boosts perception & cooking greatly. Before the Occupation you possibly went to culinary school, worked in a kitchen, or was a stay at home parent. You know your stuff when it comes to whipping up a meal.

Weapons Specialist
Boosts strength a little, guns and melee greatly. Player knows how to craft all weapons at the start. You’ve always been fascinated by weapons. Before the Occupation, your job or hobby required you to know the ins and outs of offensive weapons. Security, military, or police backgrounds fit this role.

Unemployed
HARD MODE, IF THEY SELECT THIS TRAIT THEY’RE UNABLE TO SELECT A SECOND POSITIVE TRAIT, you just start off with the points you distribute at the start. You’ve stuck to yourself most of your life, or perhaps you’ve never held a job and or only been to school. You lack experience, but living under Combine rule has forced you under circumstance to survive.


Now the negative traits..
Bad Vision
Player starts off with equippable glasses item. Makes it so that their vision gets fucked when they don’t wear glasses. Make it so that wearing full face makes like gasmasks it takes off their glasses and they get messed up vision

Weak
Negatively affects strength and melee.

Out of Shape
Negatively affects agility and stamina consumption.

Uneducated
Negatively affects intelligence and perception.

Illiterate
Makes it so you can’t read. Already a thing in the server, I know, but make it a trait.

Horrible Fighter
Negatively affects Melee & Guns EXTREMELY. If they select this trait, they’ll basically start off with Guns & Melee at 0 despite whatever points they select.

Smoker
Add cigarette items that come in the person’s rations if they have this trait. They’re required to smoke like that of food and water, if they don’t, they’ll experience withdrawals and with it their attributes will go down until they have a puff.

Hemophilia
Injuries and wounds will be more severe and players take more damage. Greater chance to bleed.

 

[Sagsworth]

If you're going to force people to take negative traits, you need to make enough that everyone can pick one that makes sense for their character. I prefer the idea that this is sorted out in roleplay than via stats to be entirely honest.

Weak
Negatively affects strength and melee.

watch 90% of femchars pick this

 

[zoid]

If you're going to force people to take negative traits, you need to make enough that everyone can pick one that makes sense for their character. I prefer the idea that this is sorted out in roleplay than via stats to be entirely honest.

watch 90% of femchars pick this

Suggest some

 

[Sagsworth]

Suggest some

If you're going to enforce this.

I don't want this - "I prefer the idea that this is sorted out in roleplay". I'm not going to help you with your suggestion for something I don't like, I'm telling you what would make it more bearable.

 

[Kappatalist]

traits that boost skills is fine, but anything else just seems like an over complication of something that should be roleplayed instead. Having traits that don't affect gameplay though would be neat, like how Terranova used them.

 

[Pawlu]

Basically my suggestion is that when creating a civilian character, you give them a myriad of choices to select from as to a previous occupation they may have held that boosts a skill.

They’d be OPTIONAL to select TWO positive traits and REQUIRED to select ONE negative trait.

Alternatively we can just use TWO positive traits and ditch the negative traits.

Some examples are...
Handy
Boosts intelligence & crafting skill greatly and makes it so you find more items in trash. Before the Occupation you were an engineer, a mechanic, or some other type of trade that makes you adept at crafting and finding the material to do so.

Athletic
Boosts strength and agility, make them run faster than people without the trait. Before the Occupation, you were an athlete, a nutritionist, or some other job that required you to stay in peak physical condition. After the Occupation you have managed to keep your body as physically in shape as possible. You’ve avoided total malnutrition, for now. Even in your apartment, you do sit ups, push ups, and as much cardio as you can outside the view of the Combine to improve strength and stamina. Your efforts have paid off and you are healthier than most.

Money Maker
Boosts perception & bartering greatly and the player starts off with more credits. Throughout your life, you’ve always been skilled in the art of buying and selling, or perhaps you’re simply charismatic. Even after the Combine Occupation you’ve been smart with your money, saving up even more than traditional citizens and learning the market.

Bilingual
You know two different languages instead of one.

Medic
Boosts intelligence a little & medicine greatly, makes heal greater than other players, and the player knows all medical crafting recipes at the start. You were a doctor, paramedic, nurse, or other profession that required you to be adept in the art of medicine. Your skills and knowledge have stayed with you through the Occupation.

Culinary Expert
Boosts perception & cooking greatly. Before the Occupation you possibly went to culinary school, worked in a kitchen, or was a stay at home parent. You know your stuff when it comes to whipping up a meal.

Weapons Specialist
Boosts strength a little, guns and melee greatly. Player knows how to craft all weapons at the start. You’ve always been fascinated by weapons. Before the Occupation, your job or hobby required you to know the ins and outs of offensive weapons. Security, military, or police backgrounds fit this role.

Unemployed
HARD MODE, IF THEY SELECT THIS TRAIT THEY’RE UNABLE TO SELECT A SECOND POSITIVE TRAIT, you just start off with the points you distribute at the start. You’ve stuck to yourself most of your life, or perhaps you’ve never held a job and or only been to school. You lack experience, but living under Combine rule has forced you under circumstance to survive.


Now the negative traits..
Bad Vision
Player starts off with equippable glasses item. Makes it so that their vision gets fucked when they don’t wear glasses. Make it so that wearing full face makes like gasmasks it takes off their glasses and they get messed up vision

Weak
Negatively affects strength and melee.

Out of Shape
Negatively affects agility and stamina consumption.

Uneducated
Negatively affects intelligence and perception.

Illiterate
Makes it so you can’t read. Already a thing in the server, I know, but make it a trait.

Horrible Fighter
Negatively affects Melee & Guns EXTREMELY. If they select this trait, they’ll basically start off with Guns & Melee at 0 despite whatever points they select.

Smoker
Add cigarette items that come in the person’s rations if they have this trait. They’re required to smoke like that of food and water, if they don’t, they’ll experience withdrawals and with it their attributes will go down until they have a puff.

Hemophilia
Injuries and wounds will be more severe and players take more damage. Greater chance to bleed.

If you're gonna add smoker why not add Alcoholic which will affect some of your combat skills and is meant to give off the effect that you're drunk however you become less easily drunk by drinking. (Also I'm writing this on my phone so expect some errors which I'll edit later)

 

[registry: brush him]

I was gonna suggest the "smoker" trait screw up your stats in an arc - as in, the debuff gets worse and worse until the debuff slowly starts to decline, until eventually the trait is basically removed (you get over your addiction)

But that'd be... complicated, to say the least, to implement

Anyway, I really like this idea, but it seems a bit too specifically Fallout. Too many people are gonna abuse this sort of thing to get better scripts and make the server more grindy than it already is.

I think you're on the right track though, and I think something like this should definitely be added, something that lets you choose your pre-war career or present-day skills.

 

[RedHotGinger]

The issue with ideas such as this, is simply that you can never account for each individual boon/debuff that characters will have. Given how diverse and completely unique they can be from one another, you would have to present a list that is a mile long in order to satisfy all hands.

The game that did the best, that I have played, was a small one known as Project Zomboid. The list was fairly exhaustive and provided pretty much any trait you could think of, but even then, truly unique concepts were not supported due to limited amounts of options. It will all feel fairly arbitrary, especially since you need a way to change these traits as time goes on, which adds even more complexity. This is what made the trait system of TN so useless. It was stagnant.

Ex. Someone out of shape wont always be out of shape by default, which means you have to account for that, which is not as simple as it may sound. People will try to game the system, and the system will feel like its gaming them.

 

[Maroon]

You can just do the TN thing and have them there as a 'reference' for yourself on how you initially planned to play the character. I was quite fond of that.

 

[RedHotGinger]

You can just do the TN thing and have them there as a 'reference' for yourself on how you initially planned to play the character. I was quite fond of that.

I honestly wasn't. Simply because you were stuck with what you chose literally forever. My loyalist was considered 'rebellious' through the whole thing. Having stagnant character qualifiers goes against the very nature of Character development. I guess it could be another thing GM's could change, but why quantify infinite developments through limited icons?

 

[Sagsworth]

I honestly wasn't. Simply because you were stuck with what you chose literally forever. My loyalist was considered 'rebellious' through the whole thing. Having stagnant character qualifiers goes against the very nature of Character development. I guess it could be another thing GM's could change, but why quantify infinite developments through limited icons?

My understanding was that there was a process to change these in development, but there was nothing compelling you to follow these and you can simply inform GMs if these were no longer appropriate. My character went from easy-going to paranoid but this never caused an issue for me.

 

[RedHotGinger]

My understanding was that there was a process to change these in development, but there was nothing compelling you to follow these and you can simply inform GMs if these were no longer appropriate. My character went from easy-going to paranoid but this never caused an issue for me.

There wasn't. But the issue I draw with them is that they are entirely arbitrary since they do not effect anything. It's pointless and stagnant without admin intervention which just makes it an extra chore.

 

[Sagsworth]

There wasn't

 

[RedHotGinger]

I'm not talking about TN. What I meant was there wasn't anything compelling you to them.

That's why they are pointless though. It is an arbitrary window-dressing that does not have any real presence. The only person who can see them is you, and you will know your character well enough that you wont need pointers in how to play them. You cannot account for everything, and TN demanded you use them, even if you didn't want to. They added nothing and arguably took away a little.

Point is, they were useless at best, restrictive at worst.

 

[TheDeNuke]

This sounds like a similar quagmire to Smuggling.

I mean, I doubt it would be that hard to setup traits but similar to Smuggling and the crafting skills it would take a very long time to actually balance them correctly unless someone wants to go through and write a long guide for both Citizen and Vortigaunt traits.

We should also avoid things like "Weapon Specialist" or any trait that would give someone a easy road into becoming a rebel. I'd focus on having a traits system similar to what Fallout New Vegas has and make them all have positives and negatives and be completely optional:

Fallout: New Vegas traits

Traits modify aspects of gameplay, granting a benefit in one area at the cost of hampering another. With the exception of Wild Wasteland, which has a less direct effect on gameplay, each trait modifies (and hampers) the Courier's statistics in some way; this can include SPECIAL points, skills...

fallout.fandom.com

 

[cunt]

I'd personally prefer it if traits were relied on entirely to what skills you go into

i.e;

primary trait: medical professional (large boost to medical, something like +15 & minor boost to crafting +10)
secondary trait: speedy gonzales (+5 to running, +5 to melee)
ideological trait: transhumanist - big fan of OTA and shit, no stat effects
passive RP traits: dumb, smart, clumsy, aggressive etc

of course you could add in negatives and the like

 

[Nova]

Athletic

you could make this one a "neutral" trait by adding so if they are hungry or below some percentage of food/drink, they will lose the buff they get from the trait due to them being malnourished.

Unemployed

How is this a positive trait if its a hard mode thing? I think this one should be in Negative traits.

Hemophilia

You could add so they can not passively heal aswell. They must get medical help.

But overall you put all traits together and make each of them have one positive and one negative effect. That could work too. But this one is good too.

 

[Atle]

Hello!

We were considering a system with traits/perks pretty much like Stellaris/Project Zomboid. @RedHotGinger led the charge on this one and concluded such a setup would have its own cons such as forcing you to pick negative traits etc which isn't ideal for a roleplay situation. Not only that but it would take a long time to develop and create quite a bit of spaghetti code to maintain