NItems

New Weapon/Armor/Item/Skill lists

New skill list
An addition to the guns issue: Not everyone has guns. Perhaps we could replace one or two weapons with a bow and crossbow. The ammo items would be "quivers of bolts" or "quivers of arrows", and the weapons would be single-shot. That way we could have some good low level weapons other than guns.

So, i think that we could replace two or four items with a bow/arrows and a crossbow/bolts.

Whaddya think?

Instead of 'Thrown weapons' as a skill, we could do 'Primitive weaponry' and put those as well as spears and throwing knives in that category.

I've also been thinking about changing grenades to an 'ammo' based weapon with 4-8 'clip' bandeleros. If grenade throwing attacks were linked to brawling (i.e. lvl 7 Brawl = 4 grenades) and the damage of them was tweaked, allows you to carry more grenades, as 10 of them 'should' fit in the space of a LAW or RPG.

Efforts will be made to avoid some of the engine exploits, but it will be up to the player for some unavoidable ones (Skill check XP and -Skill Points) Some skills may be similar to combat shooting in that no library has them to avoid the -SP cheat, but they will be used in-game to allow for normal leveling.

Thoughts on combat skill consolidation.

Seeing as in many cases there are only 2 weapons in a given skill, I'm thinking of reducing the number of weapon skills to free up non-combat skills.

Drop Knife fighting and tag knifes to Brawl

Replace Knife throwing with throwing and tag Throwing Knives and Spears to it.

Consolidate Clip Pistol and Rifle to 'Single shot weapons'

Consolidate SMG and Assault Rifle to 'Automatic weapons'

Tag number of attacks for grenades and plastique to Brawling. It you can swing a chainsaw 3 times, you can throw 3 grenades or plastique charges.

Add weapon skill 'Gauss Weapons' This would include a magrifle (3 round clip, single and burst only) and gauss tubes (AT weapon with auto reload like grenades)

Add skill 'Hacking', requires 'Terminal' item for use. Allows infiltration of computer systems for security mainly (locks, alarms, traps, combat) so a high hacking skill (6) would be as effective for 'general' use (where it would be appropriate) as a related skill (picklock, bomb disarm, etc...) of 2-3 in terms of effectiveness. It would be required for a FEW optional quests, and would have specific areas of use in the main plotline. (only low skill req for required uses)

Hacking in more detail
Any point in the game that has an electronic interface with advanced routines will have the possibility of something you can hack. There will be two skill checks.

The first is the access attempt. This will generally be a 1-3 level check, depending on the overall map difficulty. There will be a limited (3) number of attepts on any single interface. If all three are failed, that's it. For required Hacking skill use (Main Plot) there will be an unlimited number of attempts, but will be low level checks to avoid skill spamming.

The second check is the permissions hack, where the level of access is granted. Say you hack sleeper base, you pass the access check, then pass a cascading skill check. There are 3 levels of access. The first is a skill 6 check, the next is a skill check that is the same level as the access check. If you pass the first check, you have lvl 3 access, if you fail you take the next check. If you pass that, lvl 2 access, if you fail, lvl 1 access. Required uses will only need lvl 1 access, but higher levels let you unlock optionals. For optional quests, only lvl 1 access will be needed, but more will be 'unlocked' with higher access.

Once a interface has been sucessfully 'hacked', it is no longer an active tile, so you can't keep retrying for more access (It WILL NOT say exactly what level you got to, just a pass message consistent with it to avoid save/reload spamming)

Maybe have a special quest that 'resets' all/some of the terminals where you can hack ?