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Awareness

Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2008 1:51 pm
by Wobbler
1. Does Awareness below 95% have any effect at all, or does 94.99% equal 0%?
2. If it does have an effect, is it one that can actually be noticed by regular mortals?

Re: Awareness

Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2008 4:16 am
by Cuantar
I wrote about this on ER, but I should mention it here, too. I guess I'll just borrow Wobbler's thread...

I think awareness should be much more useful for detecting sneakers and should affect alertness in a concrete way. I suggested, as an alternative to a "definite" nosneak flag which disables sneaking entirely for some set time, that perhaps panicked sneakers could simply be made more vulnerable to the effects of awareness/alertness than usual.

There are five levels of alertness. There could be some bonus to an "effective awareness %" (just an example, I have no idea how these things actually work) for each level, maybe +5 or so. Thus, someone with 100% awareness + paranoid would have an effective awareness of 120. We can then normalize things and say that while the victim is standing and doing nothing else (or entering a room), 120 awareness (replace with whatever the max possible is) would equate to some ceiling (90%?) detection probability, and 20 awareness (from 0% + paranoid) would confer a low (10% ?) probability of finding the sneaker.

These probabilities assume 100%+ sneak. Someone who isn't as good at sneaking should be easier to detect, as is the case today.

Perception should probably be considered when calculating the bonus from alertness, but I don't know how this would be done. It's already required for awareness, so maybe it doesn't make sense to add per in twice.

Flushing/revealing/searching should work as they do already, since those are used if the detection check was already failed.

Now for the flee/escape bit. When panicked, rather than suffering a binary nosneak flag, the thief could see his effective sneak % drop by some (semi-random) % within experimentally determined boundaries. The effect should be tweaked such that sneaking is still possible, but depending on his opponent's awareness + alertness, the sneaker is much easier to spot while panicked.

I hope everything is clear. Naturally, what's actually going on in the code is probably *much* different than what I've outlined. :)

Re: Awareness

Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2008 10:57 pm
by Finwë
Yes, awareness below 95% does have a noticeable effect. It increases vision, hearing and smell. This is what is used to detect sneakers, hidden people and backstab attempts. Perception already affects these and the awareness skill, so it doesn't need triple-counting.

Re: Awareness

Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2008 11:18 am
by Wobbler
Finwë, have you actually seen someone with high awareness save backstabs at a reasonable rate?

Re: Awareness

Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2008 12:49 pm
by Finwë
I never said awareness was as effective as, possibly, it should be, or at least as effective as you might expect, vs backstab, but yes, I have seen high awareness people save backstabs at a higher rate than people without it practiced. Others might be more qualified to comment on this.

Re: Awareness

Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2008 9:23 am
by Azazello
The cumulative effect of 2-3 pracs in awareness, 1 prac in search, 3-4 pracs in sense life turns a blind, deaf mage into the pretty much good and sensitive fighter.
If you also change your alertness to paranoid in addition you can hunt those sneaky bastards in closeables at least. i.e. you see through sneak-hide.

Each option alone was not really enough. Each option simply adds a few points to your perception parameters.