A new Idea

[Mike_Cuzins]

Maybe, but with no visible meter.

yeah, i agree; but i DO think it's worth experimenting with...

[Glabbit]

Worth experimenting with, most certainly. I also suggest you check outthis thread, which is quite similar, however less visited. =)

[Tosh]

I have a system moderately similar to this in a flash game I'm working on at the moment. Rather than luck it's based around stamina; when you have full stamina and you get hit there's a very low chance of being stunned or knocked out, but you will lose a quantity of stamina in proportion to the strenth of the hit regardless. Then as you lose stamina the chance of being stunned or knocked unconscious for a while gets much greater.

I also don't need the bars that some of you seem to hate so much, because I'm using (extremely crude) procedural animation, so the amount of stamina left is apparent to the player simply by observing how sluggish and weak their character's movements look. I'm not sure how appropriate this would be for Overgrowth, or whether it would fit in at all with the combat system the team is currently devising, but I just thought I'd throw it out there =]

[Striker21]

This sounds similar to the Psyche meter in Metal Gear Solid 4. Psyche represented your mental awareness AND morale. As you strained your body, you became less agile, stealthy, and your health bar didn't recover nearly as fast.

Perhaps this "luck" could actually be renamed to "Stamina" or "Fatigue" and have its value correlate with the amount of damage you receive.

[Mike_Cuzins]

I have a system moderately similar to this in a flash game I'm working on at the moment. Rather than luck it's based around stamina; when you have full stamina and you get hit there's a very low chance of being stunned or knocked out, but you will lose a quantity of stamina in proportion to the strenth of the hit regardless. Then as you lose stamina the chance of being stunned or knocked unconscious for a while gets much greater.

I also don't need the bars that some of you seem to hate so much, because I'm using (extremely crude) procedural animation, so the amount of stamina left is apparent to the player simply by observing how sluggish and weak their character's movements look. I'm not sure how appropriate this would be for Overgrowth, or whether it would fit in at all with the combat system the team is currently devising, but I just thought I'd throw it out there =]

that's pretty impressive, give us the link when you are done.

[Zantalos]

Assassin's creed uses something like this. You don't normally get hit in that game, but whenever you do get hit and don't block, you block anyways until you run out of free block points, and then when you get hit and you don't have any free blocks left, you just die or get really really injured.

Even though you can die in real life by getting hit in the artery I would not like to leave something like that in my game to chance, or if I can help it in real life either. I don't think it would be fair to get hit with a simple punch and then die because you happened to get that 1% chance of getting instantly killed. If I die in one hit or get one of my limbs broken I want it to be because I got hit really really hard and went flying into a rock or something, not because I got unlucky and died from a punch that barely knocked me off my feet.

[Striker21]

I want it to be because I got hit really really hard and went flying into a rock or something, not because I got unlucky and died from a punch that barely knocked me off my feet.

That's exactly what we meant. You get unlucky and die from a punch that DOES knock you off your feet. A quick summary would be a punch in the face has a 0.1% chance of hitting your temple and killing you instantly, or a 5% chance of breaking your nose and causing massive bleeding, etc...

[Ozymandias]

Assassin's creed uses something like this. You don't normally get hit in that game, but whenever you do get hit and don't block, you block anyways until you run out of free block points, and then when you get hit and you don't have any free blocks left, you just die or get really really injured.

I could have sworn I mentioned this in my post X_X but yeah...

[orwellnow]

I think that rather than having a low luck meter, you just rolled a critical failure when you dropped that axe on your ankle.

[Ozymandias]

you just rolled a critical failure

Overgrowth will be a paper/pencil RPG so this works perfect!

[orwellnow]

The whole problem with odds and stats with a fighting game is that it takes away from the skill of the player. If you make a mistake (like dropping an axe on your ankle or stumbling and falling off a cliff) it is from personal error. If you mistime a sword swing and leave yourself wide open and get a blade between the eyes that can be done without having to pile on any crazy luck or stat scheme.

However, I do like the idea that as you fight and get hit your vision can get blurry and/or the controls become a bit more sluggish. Getting whomped on in real life tends to have that effect. Your motor skills decrease with fatigue and injury. The whole scheme of visual representation of your physical condition in Lugaru through visual effects and fatigue/injury animation was a fantastically fresh idea that was well implemented. Tampering with that in a bars and stats way would be a crime.

[d3ath_fly]

Wow, the world is screwed. I can just see it now, the man laying on the floor with both legs broken after jumping out of the second story window, screaming "But my luck bar was full!"
I don't know about you, but usually when I'm bleeding profusely I don't think about realistic implementations of damage in games...
Other than that, I think with a more fleshed out implementation it could be cool. Maybe a mix of the two, where you still have HP, but where the invisible "luck" meter effects a random damage calculator that outputs a random value of damage from 0 to a maximum damage amount for that kind of attack. If you wanted it to really be like luck, just generate a random number from 0 to the max, and then it will truly be like real luck.

[Skofo]

Really. There is no reason to implement this. Regular luck works perfectly. There are cases where you'll get "lucky" and have 10 amazing things happen in a row right in front of you, and vice versa. You don't have a higher chance of winning the lottery every time you lose. Why should you in this game?

[mphasis]

I like your idea, in theory.
But let's look at it in practice, has anyone played Morrowind?
It's incredibly frustrating to get a killer hit and not have the other person get wasted(or get hit at all in Morrowind), and because combat in multiplayer is two sided, we have to consider both sides.

Also consider Wolfire's combat design philosophy, they want you to make your own luck, there were no dice rolls in lugaru.

How about instead of luck, you wear armour in different area's of your body like Vegas 2, the more armour you wear, the more you are weighed down and slowed, so you may choose to only wear one shoulder (Plate?).

This would increase/decrease the chance of damage in certain areas that is not based on any luck meter.

Injuries could also accumulate in various game modes, making you less effective in combat, so whilst you gain a damage advantage for using the same moves over and over, it's at the cost of making your moves easie to predict, and less effective in general if the damage setting is high as you could hurt your own leg until you can't use it anymore.

It would also have you run away and bandage up your injuries(Left 4 dead), wating a short amount of game time for your wounds to heal up, then getting back in combat.

I feel this would make Lugaru more tactical and includes the good elements from the "Luck bar" idea, whilst removing the bad.

[Groveller]

It's no stranger an idea than hitpoints, is it? The main complaint about the idea seems to be that you've called it luck. So... er... don't call it luck, i guess.

The end result (that as you take damage you become more likely to take more damage) is good, but I think for Overgrowth this should be achieved by making you less effective in combat (broken limbs slow you down, etc) rather than stacking RNG odds against you. Randomness tends to affect the feel of a game, and players resent a negative random effect.

That said, I think a system like this could be useful in another situation. If your bunny is dealt a blow strong enough to kill, your luck stat - or rather any general-bunny-fitness-and-condition stat - could give you a chance to take organ damage, or something*, instead (hooray for internal bleeding!). You're still probably screwed, but you get a last chance. People don't usually mind a random effect that acts in their favour. Funny, that.

Oh, and d3ath_fly? It's far more satisfying to imagine the man landing safely, saying "Yay! Luck bar, for the win!"

*Maybe a collapsed lung, coupled with an adrenaline surge. I like the idea of a deranged berserker bunny battling on despite tripping over his own entrails.