Camouflage is a broken skill tree
By which I mean:
- It's essentially useless at low levels and in many of the places we regularly play
- It's godlike at high levels, and in locations such as Little Abington
These both strike me as flaws in the design of a skill tree. So I'm thinking about how to replace and rehash it into a fixed state.
Aims in a replacement
There are three main thematically cool things "Rangers" tend to do with their camouflage abilities, I think:
- Ambushes
- Spying
- Disappearing in case of SNAFU
So a new replacement system should work well for all 3 of these.
It should also satisfy my two key features of a TT skill tree:
- The starting levels should be powerful enough to be interesting, meaningful, and a non-stupid choice to take
- The top levels should not be so powerful that low level characters are useless by comparison.
Potential features
Things that might be interesting to throw into this:
- Hiding durations? Instead of the current binary state of "hidden forever" or "visible", could we allow hiding only for a couple of minutes at a time?
- Ambush skills - relatively early in the tree
- Time to hide: Needs to have a not too huge basic value - 30s? and a not too small best value - 10s?
- Movement: Stationary camo is generally a bit sucky as a PC ability. Sprints are way good.
- Terrainless hiding to deal with GM lack of cover?
Proposed tree
So here's a very rough tree:
- Hide in terrain in 30 seconds. Remain hidden for up to 2 mins. Stop hiding in 5s. Move at a slow sneak while hidden.
- Can hide on flat ground without terrain, such as grass or the like. No movement permitted on flat ground.
- If hidden in terrain, can now break cover in 0 seconds
- While hidden in terrain, can move at a walk. On flat ground can move at a slow crawl
- Hide in 20s, not 30s
- May hide for up to 5 minutes
- While hidden in terrain, can move at a jog. On flat ground can move at a fast crawl
- Hide in 10s, not 20s
Thoughts
Do we even need a camouflage skill tree? Answers on a postcard please...