Scars

I think scars shouldn't lower stats or should only be inflicted after serious heavy damage, not some random critical hit from a hedgehog through valpurium armor. Seriously, it seems every crit has a chance to inflict a scar regardless of protection and that's just not right.

Also, since they're applied as penalties rather than a direct decrease to the relative stat, it means it makes training harder. For example, say you have one scar in each leg and your resulting agi is 16 (with no equipment penalty showing 18 on the right grey number), training it from 16 to 17 will be like training it from 18 to 19, since your true agi is 18. So, given that there's a point where training agility gets ridiculously hard and there's no way to remove the scars, you'll end up with less agility just because. On top of that, now that school food doesn't train endurance, the only reliable method left is stepping on broken bottles and running in the wilderness to heal, which most likely results in scars on the legs.

I think the idea is good, but it's just not implemented properly.

Scars are made to make your life harder. That is their purpose. In my experience, scars are inflicted pretty rarely, usually in the early game when I stepped in a bear trap or a hedgehog has jabbed me after I hit him with my bare hands. Scars make players more careful, because if you are not, then you get penalised for it. You are over exaggerating.


That is intended.


Agility training is not very useful tbh. Also, I doubt that 1 point of agility really matters.

You can remove scars. SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.

EDIT: But we probably should implement some way to cure scars. Maybe priests can cure them for a very big price, or praying to Seges while having a good relationship with her...

Wow, I haven't thought of intentionally losing a leg and then regrowing it through healing to remove scars. That's actually a solid way to bypass those penalties. I'll definetly do that in my next run.

I have to disagree about their frequency, though. In my experience, scars tend to appear quite often and mostly after 1 damage critical hits by weak enemies, which is rather annoying and again, doesn't make any sense at all. Take a look at the screenshot I'm uploading. I achieved a high priest win with that char and through the course of the game I got around 15 scars, and 90% of them were inflicted after 1 damage critical hits from enemies that didn't stand a chance. That's ridiculous. I wouldn't care to get a couple scars from really damaging hits, ie from those situations where your torso ends up bleeding really badly and you barely survived. That would make sense but it's not the case unfortunately.

Also, agility training is very important. Outrunning enemies is an advantage that cannot be ignored and can save your life in dire situations. Also, it's crucial to defeating some particularly dangerous foes, such as Ur-Khan for instance, and you'll want as much agility as you can have to be able to kite them safely.

In any case, training stats for a natural limb run is already pretty boring as it is. Since just by dungeon crawling you won't increase them enough, you need to at some point train them. Why make that more of a chore than it already is? Going natural limbs is already harder than artificial, so why penalize that?

Maybe scars should only affect HP, and not other stats? I never realized they affected agility if they were on legs.

Then the frequency of scars wouldn't have to be altered.

That I could live with. Still, it doesn't make sense that any critical hit can leave a scar. I think the chance for inflicting a scar should only roll if the hit takes a minimum percentage of the body part's hp, or if said body part is already at low hp.

If it's handled on a "took minimum percent damage", be aware that virtually every blow to the head will result in a scar.

No, my idea is not that if the hit takes more than the minimum percentage set it will always leave a scar. The minimum percentage is for the chance to roll, so if the damage dealt is more than the set percentage of the body part's hp, only then it would be a chance for it to inflict a scar. In any case, it can be tweaked but the main idea is to avoid super weak monsters leaveing scars through strong armor via critical hits.

On the other hand, critical hits are critical for a reason - even a weak enemy can leave nasty wounds if they hit a nerve centre or a tendon. I think that's what crits simulate.

But through armor?

Eh there's plenty of reasons that could be argued either way. Armor has weak points, and besides, it is IVAN we're talking about. It makes sense for a small seemingly weak creature to be able to permanently scar you.

By the way were scars a CVS feature or LIVAN? I can't remember.

Anyways I am in favor of only having scars affect HP and nothing else, does anybody disagree and think that they should still impact other stats such as agility?

Definitely not LIVAN, but weren't they in 0.50 already?

050 did not have scars. CVS did.

I have an idea. Input/expansion would be nice... All numbers are totally made up and would be subject to balance, of course.

Generation: Scars are not received immediately on injury; instead, they occur during the healing process. Each time you recover a hit point, there is a very small chance you will be scarred. This chance is increased by the following conditions:
* Lower HP in that limb (before the healing happens) increases the chance linearly. So, healing from a single serious injury is more likely to cause scarring than from many small injuries. Perhaps the scale goes like 3x chance at 50% limb health, linearly in-between.
* Regenerative effects (NOT magical healing, but something like fast-healing) incur an additional 1.5x multiplier to the scar probability
* Reattaching a severed limb has a 10% chance to scar the limb and the attachment point (i.e. torso). Each scar is rolled separately, so you may end up with two scars.
* Having an attached limb of an artificial material increases scar probability by 1.5x.
So, two example cases. For the sake of argument, let's say the base scar chance is 0.25%. You take a 1-point blow to your 2-hp head. When you heal that 1 hp of damage, there is a 0.75% chance you will gain a facial scar. If you drink some trolls blood, this increases to (0.75)*1.5=1.125% chance of a scar. Now, let's say your 10 hp torso took a 5-point blow. You have two fancy arcanite arms. So, recovering to 6 torso hp with trolls blood has a (0.75)*1.5*1.5*1.5=2.53125% chance of giving you a scar. Healing to full will scar your torso about 7.3% of the time. Healing naturally with no artificial limbs reduces this to about 2.2%.
* Scabies (or, more rarely, Cruentus or Mortifer) will sometimes inflict (or gift?) scars.

Effects: Scars have three effects. The first is dependent on location.
* Scars to the arms incur a small dexterity penalty. Something like -0.25 per scar. (Scars do make movement harder.)
* Scars to the legs incur a small agility penalty. Comparable to the arm penalty.
* Scars to the torso and groin inflict a small max HP penalty. I'm thinking -0.5 per scar. (You took a serious wound, and the injury might be permanent.)
The second is not:
* Each exposed (not covered) scar inflicts a modest Charisma penalty; facial scars count double. Gloves cover the arms, boots cover the legs, armor covers the body and groin. Cloaks count half for every body part (i.e. they half the penalty). Normal helmets cover 1/4 the head. Full helmets cover 1/3 of the head. Helmets of Attractivity completely cover the head. (Nobody really wants to look at your scarred face.)
* To offset this, charisma training is increased proportionally to either the root or the log of the number of exposed scars; again, facial scars count double. (You learn to use your scars to your advantage.)
* To offset the HP penalty, a similar (but smaller) bonus to endurance training applies with the total number of scars, covered or not. (Getting slashed with a sword isn't quite as scary after you take a spear through your gut.)
* Each scar counts as a point of Wisdom, for the purposes of piety gain with Scabies. A similar bonus applies for Cruentus and Mortifer, but reduced.
There is no offset to the dexterity or agility penalties. They're small. You'll just have to live with them.

Removal: If you are at full HP, with no missing limbs, healing liquid (or other magical healing effects, such as Seges) have a chance to remove a random scar. The check should run multiple times, so that a full bottle of healing liquid might be expected to heal 2-4 scars. Priests at altars might also remove scars. Removing scars will upset Scabies.

I think that would be better than the current system. I also like the idea of being able to remove them.

I like a lot of those ideas Izzy. Does anybody know what the HP penalty is currently? Is it 1 HP per scar?

I love the charisma penalty!

I like the alignment with Scabies, it makes sense. But I feel like that would take a lot of experience for a player to discover on their own. So that means all of the early games they play, they'll be forced to go chaotic. At the very least we would need a message that hints at the connection, or an NPC to mention it.

And yes if scars affect alignment then it should be easier to heal them. But I don't know, I personally like how scars are permanent. It's cool to see your player show some battle wounds as the game progresses. Doesn't make sense to me for the player to be able to go down through GC and emerge with perfectly smooth baby flesh.

Just realized a downside to my ideas: Poison should not cause scars, yet by my system it absolutely would.

But what if you had another check run first when you get damaged to account for the source of the damage. So whenever you get damaged, it checks how the damaged is applied (here poison damage would always fail) but the scar isn't inflicted yet, and only if a valid type of damage is inflicted, the healing process of the hp removed would have your system run. If you're healing and get damaged by poison, since this check is run everytime you get damaged, there would be no chance of scars only for those hit points lost by poison.

I don't know if this is even possible, though. I don't know anything about programming.

Btw, a scar on your face *does* penalize Charisma!

Yah, I noticed that too. Good that they don't penalize int or wis, that would suck.

Time for my annual *idea*:
I wonder if we could make scars have a 50% chance of decreasing a stat, and a 50% chance of increasing a stat?

As an extension, there could be some underwater modifier that changes this ratio to 25/75, depending on how fortunate a character is when born/spawned (sporn?)
i.e.:
VERY_FORTUNATE => 25% chance a scar will decrease stat, 75% chance a scar will increase stat
FORTUNATE => 40% chance a scar will decrease stat, 60% chance a scar will increase stat
UNFORTUNATE => 60% chance a scar will decrease stat, 40% chance a scar will increase stat
VERY_UNFORTUNATE => 75% chance a scar will decrease stat, 25% chance a scar will increase stat

I could see this - but I would possibly implement it differently. The scar always decreases a stat (dex, agi, str, cha, maybe int/wis?). But, it also trains stats (usually Cha, I would think; sometimes int/wis). Basically, a big facial scar makes you ugly and people will shy away, but over time you learn to use that to your advantage. How effective that training is might depend on the scar, and your natural abilities.

Also, just wanted to point out that this topic has been viewed over 2000 times... not bad for a thread of <20 posts. I wonder if that's the highest view-to-post ratio on the forum?

Mmm, I have a different idea. As you get more scars, you get more used to recovering from damage? So your health gets lower, but you heal faster. Basically trading off stats for survivability. Could use that as an incentive to wear heavy armour to make tanking viable.

I think it would make more sense to have scars give you inherent armor rating. They make you skin thicker so you take slightly less damage when you have them

Sorry but that's an idea I have to shoot down. Heavy armour is obsolete as is, if we make scars give armour we may as well remove heavy armour from the game entirely.

I like chao's idea best

fejoa what would be increased when you get a scar? Would it be the same stat that's increased/decreased or different stats?