Fire starting base skill increase on failure


octavian

Recommended Posts

As I've said in another thread, your fire starting base skill should increase on failure to start a fire, not a success.

This is not only because at the moment you can easily train your fire starting skill for dirt cheap; even if that would not be the case, it would still be the case that, as you start fires, you get better at starting fires, and as you get better at it you're more likely to get better at it.

If they changed it so you increase in fire starting skill on failure, what would happen is that at the start of the game you would increase in skill but as you get better, you'd be less likely to get better. An 80% chance to start a fire would mean a 20% chance to get better at starting fires. Now, it means an 80% chance to get better at starting fires.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't think that your skill should improve on failures, largely because it just "feels wrong" to me.

What I would like to see however is a system based on the possibility of failure. So for example: if you have an 80% chance to start a fire, when you DO start a fire, you have a 20% chance of gaining a skill point. If you start a fire with a 95% chance, you only have a 5% chance of gaining a skill point.

This way if you use books/lighter fluid/etc to make it "easy" to start the fire, you're less likely to learn something in the process. But if you succeed in starting a fire "the hard way", you have a better chance of learning something from the (more difficult) process.

So in this case you can still train your fire skill for cheap, but as you are more likely to start fires, you become LESS likely to improve further.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sure, I'd have no problem if it worked like this.

And the fact that you could still very cheaply train your fire starting skill at least to some degree could easily be fixed. By not allowing the player to start a fire from a stick for example. Or it could be based on the initial duration of the started fire. Anything below cedar won't ever increase your skill, something like that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I support the idea that your fire starting skill should rise rather fast at the start of a game and slow down as the success rate approximates 100%. Like a good old biological saturation curve. ;)

I personally wouldn't mind learning from failures, but I'd be happy with DarkUncleBoh's suggestion as well.

Anyway, the possibility to artificially push your fire starting skill by starting fires with a single stick doesn't seem to be a lot of fun or fit "the spirit of the game".

In my opinion using sticks as fuel should lower your chances to get a skill point increase considerably so you'd statistically have to "waste" a lot of sticks to get the same chances for a skill point increase like from a piece of firewood.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sure, I'd have no problem if it worked like this.

And the fact that you could still very cheaply train your fire starting skill at least to some degree could easily be fixed. By not allowing the player to start a fire from a stick for example. Or it could be based on the initial duration of the started fire. Anything below cedar won't ever increase your skill, something like that.

IMO that wouldn't be as necessary.

Keep in mind that with my suggestion, going from 80 to 100 firestarting skill goes from needing to build 20 fires successfully to (on average) 360 fires successfully AND you can no longer force automatic skill points by using books/lighter fluid/etc to get 100% chance -- that's not including the failures you'd get building all of those.

Personally I don't have a problem with that being possible even with sticks. If someone wants to grind it, let them - I'm less concerned in a single player game with disallowing others to grind the skill if they want to, and more concerned with making the skill not starting at 100 be relevant (ie, taking time to develop and having an actual gameplay impact beyond the first couple of days) on those of us who aren't interested in just grinding out a skill.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

+1 Lots of great ideas here. I like the idea of getting better through failure, or through being a beginner ( DarkUncleBoh's idea), and difficulty in mastery. I also really like the idea of sticks not counting as a firestarting fuel. Some people have suggested that sticks should be able to be "bundled", and maybe in order to start a fire with them, you have to use a bundle (4 sticks? Whatever makes them have at least as much burn time as reclaimed wood?), but you can add sticks individually to a fire that's already roarin'.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.