Adds Skills

[SapphicOverload]

Documentation

Adds a skills system that affects various aspects of the game. On the start of the round players are given a base skillset depending on their role and a set amount of free points to allocate to whichever skills they want. Skills can also be gained over time, which gets exponentially slower the higher your skill level becomes.

• Physiology - Medical knowledge and surgical precision. Affects tending wounds and surgery success rate.
• Mechanics - Construction and repair of structures and machinery. Affects the time taken to build, repair, and deconstruct things, as well as fix external damage on IPCs and cyborgs.
• Technical - Electronics, robot maintenance, and piloting. Affects identification of certain wires when hacking, internal maintenance of IPCs and cyborgs, and piloting exosuits.
• Science - Knowledge of various scientific fields. Affects the use of scientific machinery and tools, identification of plants, and slightly increases research point generation.
• Fitness - Physical prowess and accuracy with weapons. Affects carrying speed, punch damage, resistance to melee attacks, and gun accuracy. Increases hunger.

Icons were made by @UselessTheremin

Why is this good for the game?

Currently there's nothing stopping a single person from doing everything perfectly. There are already modifiers that increases tool use speed based on role, such as engineers welding things more quickly, which is a good start but having them hard-coded based on your character's job is boring and restricting.

This skills system also significantly improves character customization by allowing players to specialize further within their role in ways they couldn't before. For example a roboticist can go all in on technical and be really good at piloting and fixing robots, or put points into mechanics to repair exosuits quicker, or physiology to install cybernetics more easily, or science in order to help with research. Skills can also be used to add detail or backstory to a character, such as a captain having mechanical skill because they used to be an engineer.

Wiki Documentation

Soon

Changelog

🆑 SapphicOverload, UselessTheremin
rscadd: Adds a skills system
/:cl:

[Beeper-Skeeper]

We can finally insult someone with "skill issue" and have it be IC

[UselessTheremin]

very good pr

[Mqiib]

I would think the captain should be able to do anything on the station at least a little bit, and suggest they get low rather than no skill across the board, save for fitness.

[Mqiib]

Also I can't say that the CMO being forced to put all their extra points into physiology and science to be able to do all parts of their job is that great

[ToasterBiome]

Looks good

[Junkyshell]

nice

[neeshacark]

I've made my stance on skills very clear over the years - especially my stance on skills that affect combat, which I think are just plain bad.

Nothing is more unfun than "well I have to invest all my shit into combat or I'm just worse than other people at fighting because they do more damage, take less damage, and shoot more accurately." Combat should be entirely based on how good a player is at it - not what job they picked or how many points they invested into a skill.

[ynot01]

Really beautiful, I'm a huge fan of this PR, but there will obviously be balance problems to work out. This will have to be testmerged. Also, finish Wiki Documentation section <3

[ynot01]

I'd also, personally, like to see health analyzers get certain sections omitted when not above certain skill levels, but I might be alone in that opinion. Maybe fit for a future PR

[N3D6]

my opinion on this has arrived

the top right "unassigned skills menu" button doesn't seem to work for me but the bottom one does

overall i don't really care about this one way or the other i just feel as if we need to make them easier to progress, i just went through a full 2 hour round doing stuff and none of my skills improved at all

[dcxgame]

I have a few concerns:

• The average crew role has 6 total skill points, but the baseline is 3 total. This causes not only assistants to have less skills, but also all service roles besides botanist, as far as I can tell. I get the desire to differentiate people's capabilities by role, but there's nothing stopping you from at least allowing these roles more free points, to let them choose what skills make sense for their character's background.
  In addition, security officers and the warden only get 4 skill points, and most of them are focused on fitness. There's a comment that officers "don't really do much" explaining this, which strikes me as you, similar to service roles having low skills, deciding the details of someone's character for them through the code.

• Head roles get 9 total skill points, except for the captain, who gets 8, and the head of security who, with the same logic as above, has been given 5.
  If the reason for this is simply that their character has a higher social standing than the other crew members, does that satisfy a want related to game design, or simply "make sense" in a subjective sense?
  Or, if the logic is that they're at higher risk and have higher responsibilities, and therefore need to be more proficient, doesn't that effectively give players who by and large have a higher game knowledge a mechanical advantage on top of it, and wouldn't it be more appropriate in the context of a cooperative game if they matched their department's skills, and therefore had to rely on their department more to stay safe? The captain having one less point makes me assume a decision was made based on them having the best gear or the most game time out of any head, so I don't see why this relationship of skill points vs other advantages wouldn't be consistent all the way down.

• The hunger increase from fitness is an excellent check on the combat buffs associated with it, but I didn't see HUNGER_FACTOR modified within this PR, so it appears that, on average, this PR is also a global nerf to food, to the order of hunger being made 150% faster on average.

• I'm sure you anticipate this, but any sort of mechanic involving progression is going to lead to players choosing to waste some amount of the round grinding it. This isn't so much a problem for me, because a mechanic causing fun that isn't conducive to the quality of the round is pretty entertaining to me, but besides it just lowering interaction, there are also a lot of ways it can encourage players to spam clicks, as I've encountered while testing.

• I don't quite understand why you chose botanist out of all service jobs to elevate to 6 total skills, or why you gave them fitness low, but that does signify them as being the only role besides heads or security that can obtain fitness genius within 10 minutes of the round starting. Personally, I would have given that point to mechanical, since the botanist often wishes to rearrange their hydro trays, or technical, since you defined technical as including botany tasks in the comment directly attached to it. I don't know if botany needs another aspect that combat-focused players would want the role for.

• Finally, I can appreciate the sentiment that you don't want every single role to, say, be able to perform advanced surgery, character-wise. However, if you make a system like this too relevant to the success of a task like that, you run into a lose-lose regarding new players: Do they, A) use the assistant role for it's intended purpose, and risk either misunderstanding the skill system and failing at the task they intended to learn today, or using it and being unequipped to do anything else that round, or B) pick the intended role for the task they're learning, using up a slot in that department and possibly ending up one of the only members, lowering their chances of being properly coached?

The best case scenario for this system is that it seems to reward players who already know everything about the game, but will greatly diminish the experience of players who don't know anything. I personally enjoyed myself in testing, but my testing took place in a round with a relatively decent population, and I can tell that I ended up not really contributing to it.

[JamieD1]

Oh lord

[teh4565]

Alert alert bug report
round 54327 time 54:00
DNA scanner T4, science level 2
DNA console's joker cooldown becomes 0 seconds