The Guardian is the only who drags along all the heavy weaponry. I am interested what roleplaying reason you have to assign the 4 strength to the soldier and instead ut the guardian at max endurance?

If I understand the idea correctly, then the choices I have a level 1 are different from the choices at level 2 (and lost forever if I take a different path), right?

Regarding your comment on grinding: Will there be any grinding possibilities?

What are the reasons for providing skill increases both by "pick one of three" and by "assign skill point"?

If each character's (or class') specialization tree is different, and offers viable alternatives and not just ways to gimp yourself harder, it might be interesting. If they're all the same for every character, you would only ever stray outside what's most effective for your class for the experiment's sake, and it would mostly be a waste.

For what it's worth, I think that having separate advancements is coolest, but make the "pick one of three" be abilities that are not necessarily directly related to basic skills - fx unlocking special moves (choose between powerful single target/medium multi target/weak but status inducing multi target), weapon/armor unlocks and specializations, or whatever your devious minds can come up with. Skill specializations are also possible, such as choose between a massive bonus to hacking, lockpicking or repairing.

Ahh ok that's how you intended it I don't know, I think having only 3 choices at all each level up might cause some players to complain...

So coder come up with an interesting idea, and after some careful thinking I found a way that could be integrated into the game level up system.

As you know (or maybe not, I don't remember anymore if I already posted about this), there are 12 skills, 4 x 3 areas of interests.

1) There are the Weapon Skills: Light Weapons, Heavy Weapons, Energy Weapons, Sniper Weapons

2) There are the Attribute Skills: Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Psionic

3) And lastly, there are the Personal Skills: Charisma, Science, Medicine, Sabotage

I would call "Psionic" "Willpower" or "Mental power" in the attributes, and put "Charisma" as an attribute as well.

I would also separate "attributes" from "skills" completely and have the player determine the attributes upon character creation (and make them very hard to raise, i.e. by training only or as special quest rewards). And higher value of certain attributes would lead to higher value in certain skills (for example high Mental Power giving boost to medicine/sabotage, high dexterity giving boost to chance-to-hit and dodge, etc.).

As for character development, either manual skill insertion each level or character skill tree is fine by me (I've seen both in many RPGs); either character development system can be accompanied by choosing a perk every two or three levels.

There is something though that bothers me with the current skills. Four of our eight skills are weapon skills. The chance that only raising one of them per character is the best strategy is pretty high, maybe even certain. That leaves us with only 5 skills or in other words 125 empty points, if we have 90 points to distribute plus starting points...

If we add that some characters have no need for the Psionic skill, this gets down to 90 points for 100 possible. Actually some classes may even be able to max out those four skills since they have something like 10 starting points in these skills.

The end result would be very similar builds.

While we certainly could simply reduce the amount of points per level the problem with only 4 sensible skills per character remains.



A different option would be to include the other four skills into the combat skill total. But that has different repercussions. If we could make all these skills useful in combat as well as out of combat the problem would evaporate. But I'm not sure if that's realistically possible.



So in conclusion, I doubt that the current skill system will add much depth to the game, aside from creating the illusion of depth.

Hmm I never thought about this, but you're right. I'll think in the next days if there could be another solution. I mean there will be the choice tree and some unique skills for each character, but still there should be more customization.

I see two ideas:

1) the choice tree will have some perks that require certain level. Like sharpshooter that will require sniper skill at 10 and so on.

2) I replace the weapon skill with generic fighting skills. So no more energy, light, heavy and sniper weapon but some skills like Accuracy, Reloading, etc (have to think better about it). Generic skills that can apply to various kind of weapons, so players could choose if to have a character that can use two pistols and fire faster, or just one but each shot be a critical hit, something like that. But of course won't be easy to design

That'd leave Charisma and Science, which... are a bit harder, oof. You could maybe use Science as a minimum on some of the more alien weapons in the game? (Not only do you need Heavy Weapons to use that Marada Swiss Army Knife, you also need Science to figure out how the thing works in the first place! ) Couldn't use that too often, since you wouldn't want to overshadow the weapon skills, but it could come into play sometimes. Or maybe you could research and build better weapons with the skill, but that gets away from actual combat a bit. Charisma could maybe give a passive bonus to the whole party, but that could get complicated in a hurry.