PC Thoughts on book mechanic improvements

[Gamepalooza]

Here is a thought that could lead to some more realistic and exciting game play.

What if anything that is readable (books, magazines, schematics) had a quality and every time you did a read action the quality dropped one level. Also, what if quality levels were associated with a chance to learn the skill or do the action in question. At the highest quality you have a 100% chance to learn the skill or build an item, but drop one quality level and the chance goes to 80% and so on. Intelligence could help boost the chance of being successful. Lower quality items could even result in longer action timer. The lowest quality item would turn to paper after a read action rather than drop a quality level.

Here is the reasoning. Lower quality books, magazines and schematics are assumed to be missing pages, have smudges, have burns or whatever. The highest quality item would be brand new with no missing information.

What I would find exciting about this is more role play immersion with a chance to gain skill, the chance to buy and sell back to a trader, and a chance share a learning item with your team of friends. The decision points on what to do with found your items would be totally pimped out fun.

 

[meganoth]

A great idea. Because you could make books drop more often and still it would take a looong time to learn a series. And lower quality book-parts could be combined to get a higher quality book. I sense a deja vu ;-)

And a bad idea. Bad because it is pimping mulitplayer even more compared to singleplayer. Find a high quality book and more than one can benefit. While for a single player the book becomes nearly worthless after learning was successful (yeh, sure, sell it or learn it for xp, that is just a consolation prize)

 

[Khulkhuum]

Let me get this straight, you want to make all of the books in A18 have 100% chance to learn skill only at the highest quality? This would make not only finding a book really hard, but you would have to pray first to RNGeesus to have at least medium quality and pray for the second time to learn the skill itself.

Imagining very bad RNG, you found around 40 different books up until player level 50, but learnt like 5 skills. Even considering combining books, first you need to find multiple books, but how that would work? Lvl 1 + 3 = 4? Taking into account higher drop rates, it doesn't mean higher quality or specific books that you need.

It's going to take a lot to gather all the sets in A18 vanilla, but you want to make it even harder and more frustrating. Thanks, but no thanks.

 

[Gamepalooza]

Really appreciate such candor and see what you mean.

I think my true ambition here is to really ask that books do not disappear after you read them which exceedingly unrealistic. I'd like to buy or find a book, read it and then either sell it back to the trader or give it to a team member to read.

The other thoughts about having quality was just a potential way to balance the game with that being introduced. Another hope is that TFPs could just balance however they see fit in terms drop rates, typical quality values and percent chance to gain skill percentages.

 

[Khulkhuum]

Making books not disappear after reading them is an interesting idea, especially as we will have tons of books in the future. It's a different when you get a skill which will not advance further when reading again. An alternative was to gain a skillpoint, to which i agree the book should vanish. Similarly, gaining any equipment or skill levels (as in some mods in A16 LBD, where after reading a class starter you would get some levels in various fields) is different, but what we will have in A18 is different from what we're used to.

An interesting mechanic in my opinion is gaining an xp bonus from a particular source after prolonged reading of a book. Something that Project Zomboid does, although they make it so skill based xp is learnt faster (and so are the levels). This doesn't directly give you the skill levels, but enables you to learn them faster. As you mostly start from scratch there, it's vital to read the books to get the levels fast. Even so, reading the books takes a lot of time (even considering each covers gaining 2 levels and there are multiple books for different levels), making it an interesting mechanic, yet not too OP.

Considering we have quite a few sources of xp, i would see that as a couple minute (up to an hour) buffs, with the % gained dependent on book quality (or perhaps different books), allowing only a single buff to be persistent from a given category. The problem i see is that we don't have a prolonged action for reading and implementing that would make the game slow down at various times (not to mention you would have to sit through the reading process, as we don't have any way to fasten time). Adding it would also be a precedent among other mechanics, but perhaps we need something like that amidst waiting for ores to be smelted, as well as ammo to be crafted?

 

[eXSe]

I hate the mechanic of reading for temporary buffs, same with disappearing schematics. It just makes no sense to me, feels like my character has Alzheimer's

On the other hand, i could live with the Gamepalooza's idea of "quality reads". I kinda like the idea, even with the chance of RNG ♥♥♥♥ting all over me They could even make it funny in the descriptions with missing letters and such