Random Skill related events?

Started by MrDemonic, October 29, 2013, 05:03:24 PM

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MrDemonic

What do people think of having certain events happen that relate to whether a player has a really high or low skill in a particular field? They can be positive for colonists with high skills and negative for colonists that have really low (or minus) skills. From the way it looks on the Backstories page on the RimWorld wiki, it looks like you can have negative values in skills. Though if not then I apologise. Hard to tell without having the early version of it!
A few examples:

High cooking skill - Sometimes the colonist will have a random surge of culinary genius and create a meal/dish that is to everyone's taste. Making everyone who eats the meal more happy.

Low/Minus cooking skill - An off day? Or a experimental meal gone badly wrong? The Cook prepares a god awful meal and the colonists who eat it become very unhappy and dissatisfied.

High social skill - The colonist feels particularly confident all of the sudden. While the colonist feels this confidence flowing out of his mouth with the words they speaks, they are able to convince any prisoners to join their cause in very little time.

Low/Minus social skill - The colonist can have a number of events happen when they have a very low social rating. Such as getting depressed and becoming less productive in most/if not all tasks give them him/her. They could have a mental break down which could stop them from being able to work all together and having them locked in their room while they recover using a high social skill colonist. Hell you could even have one "snap" and go on a suicidal rampage, taking a weapon from the armoury and shooting everyone in sight until they are killed or restrained.

High shooting skill - During a fire fight, the colonist manages to land a well aimed head shot on a raider and becomes "in the zone", which causes their shooting accuracy and damage to be increased for a short period or time or for the rest of the time they are fighting.

Low/Minus shooting skill - Unsure of the proper use of weapons, the colonist fumbles around and drops the weapon, causing it to go off as it hits the ground (The projectile will go off in a random direction, maybe hitting a friendly colonist or enemy raider).

These are just some examples I made up, but you can more or less make up any of these events that can have short term effects on the colonists (and/or colony). Perhaps even some long term ones, such as characters who get depression from a low/minus social skill will take a long time to recover. Any skill currently could have a small or major event written for it. They could be triggered at random moments or whenever the character is doing the task/job they have the high or low skill in.

I would love some feedback or suggestions on this. Maybe the AI Storyteller will already have something like this in place, maybe not. But I'd like to hear what people have to say on the matter. Maybe even write some events down in this thread for any of the skills I didn't mention!

AspenShadow

I'm liking it  :)

As far as I know it's not already in the works and hasn't been recommended, or at least not in such a concise manner, before on the forums.

Colonists cannot have negative skill, it ranges from 0 to about 20 for the moment. The idea has merit but as the voice of mercy I'd like to hope that the skill required for the lower negative events is <2. It's also possible to have a much rarer chance of something good coming from a low skilled colonist, such as someone not understanding something's supposed to be impossible and accidentally managing it lol.

MrDemonic

Possibly could be an interesting way of creating more in depth characters by allowing stats to have negative values to allow you to add those values to another stat.
Because we all know people who usually suck horribly at particular tasks no matter how hard they try (like my mother. Who will always be very slow and unsure when it comes to computers or technology no matter how long she spends on them). So it may be interesting gameplay and story wise if negative values were introduced.
Having a negative value for a stat could make them less effective while perform the stat relating task. Say the default building speed is 1 if they have 0 skill points in the construction skill(for example), and a colonist's construction skill is -1. That could mean that if that particular colonist tried to build something, they would build at a speed of 0.75 instead if 1. The higher the negative value, the slower they'd build and they'd have a higher chance of getting a negative related event such as the building being constructed has less hit points because it had shoddy structure or whatever.

Just a thought :)