Difficulty levels

I think this was mentioned in a couple threads, so I thought I'd give it one of its very own.

mouser wrote:

Completely unrelated, but today I learned that giving the Blood Guardian in Gallery Noir decent stats and 735 health makes him one tough SOB to take down. Actually not totally unrelated, a lot of the NPC's in the game could use a bit of a boost...

malkav wrote:

That's an option only if I find a way to make it player selectable.

-

I was thinking about this, and how I handled ramping up the difficulty of my game (can't wait to get to Ming - her health is OVER 9000!!!!  sorry, couldn't resist...):

For player choice, probably the easiest way would be to use the 'histories' box. Either ditch the 'normal' histories, or make them with labels: Easy, Normal, Hard, Freakin' Insane. You could also use a setting in a config file, but then you're asking the player to get his hands dirty...

Dots at character creation: Do it the same way you do for music files, just change the relevant value in the stats file.

Experience Table: another file rewrite.

Enemy health: Use a scalar that multiplies all the current health values: 1 for normal, 0.75 for easy, 2 or 3 for hard, 4 or 5 or 10(!?!) for insane.

Enemy stats: Give them all (or at least the combat ones:strength, stamina, dodge, firearms, etc... why do they all have dots in computers, anyway?) a base value then add or subtract to it. This one I'm not as crazy about because it lends itself to uniformity unless you really keep the base stats different for everyone. There's no question though that changing their dodge value from 1, which just about everyone has, to 3 or 4 really changes the fight.

Blood Pool could be handled like health or by addition. You could probably even give the big bosses some new disciplines while you're at it.


Part of what makes this game so replayable is having pretty much all the archetypes represented: the brawler, the swordsman, the gun bunny, the thief, and the mage. Adding difficulty levels adds another level to that: am I good enough to beat the game as an <insert clan> on <insert difficulty>?

I haven't really tried using it in combat, but this might make sneaking an actual worthwhile stat to have if you can use it to 'duck out' of combat for a bit and heal up... I know obfuscate works if you can break LoS.

Yep, I was thinking about different file versions for different levels as well. But I want to avoid file copying if possible, because that always is a potential error source.

And if we do it the dificulty levels need proper names like
-Thinblood
-Toreador
-Brujah
-Malkavian...

- 

Newbie Fledgling (EDIT by Malkav)
Neonate
Ancilla
Elder
Claudia (mouseless)
Malkav

Thinblood or "Mommy please hold my hand."
Childer or "Can I go out and play now."
Kindred (normal) or "World of Darkness, eh? Needs curtains."
Elder or "Bring 'em on; I've got fangs!"
Antediluvian or "Rivers of blood are tasty and nutritious"
Sired by Caine or "I am an armed and angry God of War!"

To give some more idea how my game is going - I had to up the damage from melee weapons.

Disciplines work great so long as you have blood, but even a bloodpool of 48 runs out quick - and then you're in real trouble. Tremere would probably do better with their blood salvo's - or the Animalism discipline that does the same thing: I'm testing with a Malk now.

Firearms were pretty much the same way - great while you have ammo, which generally isn't that hard to come by. You can always kill cops for glocks if you're really desperate (ammo costs from $5 to $10 a round - another good candidate for adjusting by difficulty, problem is each gun is its own file).

The issue with melee is you get too close and get whacked a lot. Also, their higher defense really makes a difference to most weapons. Blood heal helps a lot (is it possible to make it activate only out of combat?), and doesn't really drain your blood pool. Hiding seems to be a good plan. I'm just about to do Hollywood, so I'll start to see how long stretches of mooks go.

Could you can turn Grout's place into something other than a Stealth-Kill-O-Rama? Stealth kills ignore health and defense, so they're wicked powerful. I don't have the slightest idea how you would do that though. Would adding one mob that sees you cause everyone else to wake up? Is there a flag that makes them stealth killable. If so, turning that off on the hardest difficulty (not for everything) would make a big difference - and not just in Grout's place.

One other idea I've been playing with is giving stats to the clothes, so it isn't an automatic wear the next suit in line. Anything you assign to light clothes won't take effect until you switch to something else then switch back though, so using them to counteract stat boosts in character creation (to limit dots) wouldn't really work as far as I can tell.

Okay, with proper vocabulary order

Thinblood
Neonate
Ancilla
Elder
Methuselah
Antediluvian



But my lol version is better XD

Claudia wrote:

Okay, with proper vocabulary order

Thinblood
Neonate
Ancilla
Elder
Methuselah
Antediluvian



But my lol version is better XD

You forgot Fledgling  

It's not really a generation/age status
Fledgling would be a "title"

Fledgling
Harpy
Primogen
Prince
Archon
Justicar
Inner circle



Shovelhead
Sabbat
Priest
Bishop
Priscus
Archbishop
Black hand
Seraph
Regent


Would work too


But the lul version is funnier :-?

I liked Malkav's idea actually. It reminded me of the Touhou danmaku difficulties, which were Easy (insert mocking quote here), Normal(insert meh quote here), Hard(insert suprised, but inspring quote here), and Lunatic (insert "the fuck are you doing here?" quote) mode.

So in a sense...

Degenerate (Go ahead, indulge in the fantasy of unstoppable vampires, you Twilight fan you~)

Rabble (Another face in the crowd. But still make sure to watch out for beer bottles thrown at a force that can break walls)

Blue Blooded (The world is tough. You're tough too. You might just make it if you play everything and everyone right)

Lunatic ((see wut I did thar) No. FUCK NO. NOT THIS. ANYTHING BUT THIS. WE'RE DOOMED, DON'T YOU SEE!?)

Claudia wrote:

I cannot look at any image of this fucker without seeing something like this: