DayZ - Creating Stories, plus a few other bits

[Darkimage 3]

DayZ is about creating stories, how you survive, playing with your group, making it on your own, meeting people and living through it.

One thing that comes to mind is that each one of us has unique experience and skills, in real life, that would be useful to a group. Currently in DayZ this added 'life' isn't there. Lets just think of some examples before we tackle what this may mean....i apologise for the potential coming wall of text.

1). Your in a group heading north. You bump into another group, without warning a fire fight erupts. Your team survive...but take casualties. One has a bullet lodged in his thigh. You can't get it out. His artery was hit. You don't have long...but a bandage isnt going to fix this. The artery needs fixing and that bullet must come out, or he will die soon or from septicemia or infection later. You heard of a group with a vet...not ideal but you need his skills now. You load your friend on a car and the search is on. Or maybe the other group had a doctor and you spared him. Or you know of a group selling medical help. Or you have a doctor at your camp but his is off with another team somewhere. You find another group with a doctor but they arent willing to help....what do you do? Kidnap them? Hold them up? Trade with them? Plead? Or maybe there is nothing that can be done....put him down now.

2). Your group finds a helo. Its a bit banged up but nothing a repair can't fix. Unfortunately your group doesnt have anyone with a clue about fixing a helicoptor engine. Where do we find someone who does? Maybe a new spawn on the coast has some skills? Who could we find and trade for?

Here are just two quick examples of events that could affect and trigger different player interactions, the world and the stories we create. Makes the sandbox more sandbox and interesting.

The obvious one is the medical implications and medical system required for more reaslistic results from fire fights. The big issue here is consequences. Currently i get shot. I bandage and eat some cow. Magically fine. If i get shot bad...bloodbag. In reality:

Shock (blankets, drugs, heat to fix)

Organ damage (major surgery)

Arteries (surgery)

Internal Bleeding (surgery, triage, tornequet)

Other broken bones (Splints, drugs)

Infection (Drugs, varying degrees of infection and reoccurring)

Permanent disability (limp, loss of limb)

The consquences mean you enter combat with huge risks.

At the moment a large number of people play Kill On-Sight. In reality you would consider the following things (the order you think them in is probably a measure of the player you are) before pulling the trigger:

1). Are they a threat to you.

2). Are they a hindrance to you.

3). Are they useful to you?

4). Could they help you?

5). Could you help them?

6). What gear might they have?

So what does this mean.

I think players should have some Profession when they spawn - which is what they did in real life before Day ZERO. This profession gives a couple of skills. You profession is %age chance based on the real % number of that profession in society. That means doctors will be relatively rare. Some examples of professions would be (but there will be many, many more):

Engineer (more efficient at building structures)

Mechanic (more efficient at vehicle repair)

Medic (more efficient at triage)

Surgeon (more efficient at other life saving things – see medical)

Doctor (better at diagnosing illness and treating them).

Electrician (more efficient at building certain structures and repairing gadgets)

Labourer (more efficient at building certain structures)

Machinist (more efficient at making parts and repairing mechanical items)

Chemist (more efficient at making certain chemicals and explosives – lets face it at some point we really will have to start making our own ammunition).

Hunter

Vet

My gut feel is don't stop anyone doing anything. Just someone trying to fix a helicoptor may not be very successful, use lots of materials up and do a poor and quickly broken repair. Also there is a chance of failure, where the materials are used up for no gain, and even a chance you make it worse. But skills need to valued, traded for, taken, defended etc.

I also feel strongly that these types of skills are none-combat only. Target them at the medical, survival, construction and crafting portions of the game.

Could you learn them? Not sure. If the apocolypse did arrive lets face it - some skills we need to rebuild society would be lost. We could regain them through books. Could you find certin books to learn or improve you skill? Obviously any improvement/learning is lost on death...no negotiation on that.

Some other thoughts

Gear – first off I think gear needs to wear out over time or get damaged/destroyed to prevent players becoming too much of an accumulator of rarer items. There are some simple mechanisms that can deal with this. If you shoot someone their gear will take some damage and the quantity of gear destroyed/damaged should depend on how you killed them. For example a .50 cal round will crack an engine block, therefore when used in an anti-personnel role – it’s a one shot kill but also most of that targets gear is wrecked (say a simple percentage – 80% of each piece of gear being unusable). The damage done should be related to the damage reach round does on a sliding scale and how many times you ‘plug’ them. If you keep shooting their cold dead bodies then don’t expect to find much still in a working condition. A player who dies in a helicopter crash or an explosion (rocket launcher/vehicle crash) is unlikely to have useable, recoverable gear. This would make player farming less of reliable source of gear.

Gear will probably wear out over time as well, especially as I haven’t cleaned my rifle since I found it (yes…I’m slacking I know). Most rifles need a lot of TLC to keep them working and suffer barrel wear and fouling. In DayZ I would expect most of us thrown into our situation haven’t got a clue about how to clean them or maintain them properly (so they will wear out pretty quickly or at least start suffering stoppages), we are just picking them up and using them. Obviously certain skills/equipment will let you repair/maintain gear to stop/reduce these effects. Weapon stoppages when they occur can be easily cleared using the mouse wheel action menu – but takes time. So if you weapon starts wearing out – pick your encounters carefully. You don’t want a hoard of zombies to fight off with a gun that is starting to jam. Maybe we could find cleaning kits that extend the life of a weapon (but does not reset it to factory fresh).

Vehicles – are themselves resources, I think the way it works now is pretty good, although they are a bit fragile. I like the idea of being able to craft upgrades/bolt on armour (zombie plow, sheet metal armour, spot lights (moveable), armoured fuel tank, reinforced hull etc) or different fuel/power sources for them. You should also be able to weld on or bolt on some fixed weapons (take a door gun off a helo crash for example)…lets face it you see this in lots of real life militias…so it would happen.

Fuel – maybe this is split down as far as diesel, petrol, avgas?? Needs different separate containers (and has different storage tanks) to avoid contamination. I think there are standard colours for containers (the military ones have a colour coded cap/collar). Again each tank has a large but maybe limited supply of fuel. We may also have to scavenge from the tanks of other vehicles that are wrecked. IT might be a long time until we run out….but those tanks further afield would need to be visited and we may have to finally, somehow either give up vehicles or convert them (In the 1920s and 70s people did this themselves and came up with steam/wood fired vehicles – time to rebuild and get inventive people).

Base Construction

Obviously Rocket has stated that underground base construction is what he is planning to do. I also loved the Xcom series and something akin to this would be awesome. Bases for clans/groups need to be hidden but once found could be fought over, stormed, defended, abandoned. There may even be some existing ones to find, or neutral ones to trade at etc. Some of the elements that spring to mind are:

• Barracks/Sleeping Areas
  
• Generator rooms (once you find one)
  
• Showers/Bathing/WC (gonna need plumbing and piping)
  
• Storage Rooms
  
• Armoury
  
• Canteens/Rec-rooms
  
• Entrance structures/disguised/false ones/traps (doors lockable? Pickable? Cutable? Blowable?)
  
• Pill boxes/Scout holes/Defence Points/Choke Points/Traps/Periscopes etc.
  
• Labs
  
• Workshops (for lathes/saws etc if you can move them)
  
• Radio Comms rooms (needs ariels? How do you hide them, can you pull them down? Retract them?)
  
• Operation Rooms
  
• Hospitals/Surgery
  
• Vehicle Garage (entry by hidden lifting door – I would expect the tech for lifts is beyond us (you could get the hydraulic rams off excavators, piping and parts…might need several?)
  
• Tree walkways? (maybe too hard)
  

Each of these require time, labour and resources to construct, requiring different skills and resources. Of course group bases will be larger scale than lone-wolves who might scrape out a small hide-out, but those are the benefits of grouping. Bases should be hidden and disguised so you accidentally come across one or have to track groups back to them – obviously groups with vehicles may be easier to track (again risk reward or maybe even a separate garage base)

I apologise for the huge post. Thanks for reading.

[Warped_Jack 16]

Stuff

Quite!

Anyway... I'll admit right now I didn't read the entire opening post. However to first main points on player skills etc.

1) There already a limited version of this scenario in the game, right now. If you get your leg broken, and neither you, or your aggressor has morphine to fix yourself up, you have exactly the situation you are talking about, but with none of the extra effort to be implemented. Granted, morphine is (fairly) easy to get once you know where/how, so an added layer of complexity might be interesting. But it might also screw people a bit too often. I think your example of needing a medical trained member, a full outfit of proper medical supplies, and to first of all SURVIVE the gunfight in the first place, and then long enough to gather said supplies, could lead to lots of death.

I generally like the realism angle, but perhaps there is a limit. (It would be interesting to see how far it can pushed, mind!)

and

2) I can never decide about skills. If they're random at player spawn (eg. "You spawned as: The Mechanic! Get bonuses to vehicles!" or "The Medic: Get bonuses to healing" or "The Tramp! Get bonuses to finding food") then the moment you get a group together who find a chopper but don't have a pilot or someone to repair it, someone will suicide and keep doing so, until they get a pilot. (Or whatever they need at the time)

If player skills are chosen before spawn, then a group would just make sure they have an even distribution of the "right" skills.

The only way I think skills could/should work in this game (if at all) is a passive - subtle - increase.

Or an idea I did like was the idea of manuals/books. Having a copy of Helicopter Weekly lets you fly that chopper right away! Find a copy of Top Gear magazine? Get better at fixing cars, making one line quips, and wearing jeans!

[starwarsfan@gmx.de 450]

We've had this discussion a hundred times over now. These sorts of skill systems are neither realistic nor ould they bring anything of value to the game. The only thing it'll do is give a huge, gigantic advantage to clans and groups organzied outside the game and leave solo players at a loss, if not even making it impossible to play alone.

What Rocket was talking about was making real life skills count in DayZ. A good example of this in the current game is navigation, if you now stuff about it in real life you'll be able to apply them in the game. If you can't read a map you're all out of luck. In my opinion that is the way to go, not adding artificial skills that have no relation to what you can do.

Other things that might work that way could be the medical system and the repairing of cars. For example, Rocket is adding an infection system where you can get sick in all sorts of ways. Now there shouldn't be an explainaition in the game saying 'you've contracted the flu' but rather let people apply their real life(or wikipedia-) knowledge of diseases and let them figure out that way what you've got and how to treat it.

As for repairing cars it might get a little more difficult, but you could make it less obvious what's wrong with the car. For example you'd have to look under the hood to figure out wether it's the engine, the fuel or whatever else it might be that's wrong with the car. I for one wouldn't know the first thing about repairing a car and would be useless in this situation.

It's not a perfect solution I'm proposing here but I think that's the way to go rather than adding these ingame skills.

Anyway, my two cents.

[Darkimage 3]

Hey thanks for the feedback , I realise it was a long post.

I understand and accept your views. What I was thinking is that society pre disaster works because of all our different skills and experience and what that brings. Grouping together is therefore driven by a couple of things survival, defence, security and maximising what skills u would have access too. Lone wolf, is possible but harder and you would have to teach yourself a lot of stuff to pull it off. I was also thinking of how this skills may affect player interactions and grouping mechanics.

The issue I think with making everything in the sim - is that you would need may, detailed, sub games. The car repair sim, the surgery sim etc. while maybe possible is it practical and worth doing from a game play perspective. Skills are a short cut to this to some degree. As I said such skills should be learnable ( from books) or if another player teaches you or from trying and failing. Just some skills failure is not an option.

I accept the spawn issue but a simple fix would be that if you died within a certain time of your spawn 10/20/30 mins, your pre game profession and skills do not reroll. This would prevent suiciding to get a preferred career, and as certain careers would be rare, protect the server from Griefers killing the only guy who spawn as a doctor. As I said tr career rarity should be linked to the real life rarity - so doctor maybe a 1% or less chance.

Hey, but these are just my thoughts - the mechanics of how it works would require a bit more thinking