Respecs

What is a Respec? It's the ability to reskill your stats. Basically, I'm going to be allowing respecs of stat points and affinities, and it'll be for a Rupee cost (which scales)... however, I'm not sure exactly how I want to go about this. Below is two suggestions; vote for which one you want, or make your own suggestion and explain it.

1. Full Respec
   • Reset your stats down to base amounts.
     • 2 Power, 2 Courage, 2 Wisdom, 3/3 Hearts, 1/1 Magic, and any Heart and Magic containers you have.
   • Reset your affinities down to 0.
     • You should have 1 affinity point per 5 levels + 1.
2. Per stat point
   • Subtract one of your stats by 1 and gain a stat point back.
     
   • This one is a good bit more flexible, and it'd allow you to fully respec if you wanted to.
     
   • Likewise, lower one of your affinities by 1 and gain an affinity point back.

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Something else to note - these respecs will only be buyable at the Hylian Shop. They don't stay in your inventory, meaning they're used on the spot, so you can't respec all of a sudden in the middle of a quest, unless you end up visiting the Hylian Shop during a quest.


Vote, comment, post your opinion, etc.

I do not think affinities should be fully respec'd except for the purpose of story-driven alteration; consider that many of the spells you purchased would become obsolete in doing so, and it simply doesn't make much sense, as affinity is not something I feel a character could innately change. If you are able to purchase affinity shifts, a couple of thoughts:

• Make affinity respecs a good amount more costly than a stat respec.
  
• Force a rule: make all affinity changes move through 'Arcane' as a stepping stone, to at least demonstrate that progression from one affinity to another. So, for example, if I want to respec a point of Fire affinity, I have to respec it to Arcane. If I want to respec a point of Arcane affinity, I can respec it to any of the other affinities.
  

To a lesser degree, I'm not sure I agree with a _full_ respec of a character all in one go, but a per-stat alteration is probably a better plan, and could be explained more easily from a character perspective.

On one side of things, there's story to consider. Yeah, sudden respecs don't necessarily make sense. But, from the gameplay perspective, say you want to try a completely different build, but you don't want to make a new character or you don't even have time to do it. Many Diablo-style games allow some degree of respecs, but never a full respec, which would allow players to play around with various builds a lot more.

And precisely because switching affinities would obsolete your current spells is the reason I'm not going to make it a great deal more costly. It'll naturally be higher, but by increasing it by a boatload, you wouldn't even be able to afford new spells for the affinity change, so that just makes no sense.

Also, forcing everything to move through Arcane would just make it even worse and an unnecessary change.

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Story is important, as is character development. However, I never want to forget that first and foremost, ZURPG is a game, and denying something that would give far more freedom to the players wouldn't be a fun choice. Granted, there are certain degrees of freedom that, you go too far, and the game breaks, but this is not the case here.

I similarly like the per-point approach but do NOT like the idea to respec *all* affinities. The middle-ground I would say would be the ability to respec only, say, the last affinity point placed. In any case, a scaling cost per stat allocated would be best (imho). Heck, you could even do the cost in something with interesting scaling that would make it cheaper to respec a small number of stat points and very expensive to restat a lot of points at once (so you don't have characters swing from one role to another).
OR
You could have "respec" tokens that may be bought or granted and used to respec N stat points in any town or city.

Hmm, may I ask what your reasoning is for not wanting a fully freeform respec (why you're against it, that is)?

Hmm, may I ask what your reasoning is for not wanting a fully freeform respec (why you're against it, that is)?

As mentioned above, a lot of money may already be spent in spells that require certain affinities. This could lead to aggravation. Perhaps saying you can respec affinities that do not have spells/skills dependent on them would be another compromise.

Also, IMHO, respec'ing should be to fix "oopsie" mistake times or to re-balance your character and not for completely re-inventing your character. If you want to play a completely different character, you should make another character (as I think several people already have).

Stats (should) represent your characters history, experiences, and growth. I have a hard time believing that a character that swings 20 points from "Wisdom" to "Might" would still have the same personality.

If you want to play a completely different character, you should make another character (as I think several people already have).

What if you're like me, who's at the "cap" of how many characters one can have? What would you recommend then?

Multiple Characters

You can have a maximum of three different characters. You do not have to have multiple characters, but it's there as an option should you want to create more than one.

However, you can only use one character in a quest at a time. That said, if there are multiple quests being run, you actually can be in them at once, provided you have a different character in each quest.

Full respecs should be available in some shape or form, unless this limitation gets abolished.

Currently, the multiple character limitation only exists due to lack of DMs being able to support it all and for the sake of avoiding "cluttering the characters forum". The latter problem is unavoidable with time and more players, so that problem kinda falls out on its own, but the lack of DM support is the primary reason for that rule existing. I think, if we get say a 1 to 4 ratio of DMs to players, we'd be able to lose that rule, because I know there are some people that just want to play "lots of different characters" without being a DM and running that via lots of different NPCs.

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As mentioned above, a lot of money may already be spent in spells that require certain affinities. This could lead to aggravation. Perhaps saying you can respec affinities that do not have spells/skills dependent on them would be another compromise.

Ehh, that actually leads to more issues, cause then you'd have to sell all spells/skills for an affinity you no longer want before you could get rid of it. And then, what if you want to come back to that affinity later? Well, you'd have to rebuy it all, and just seems silly.

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Stats (should) represent your characters history, experiences, and growth. I have a hard time believing that a character that swings 20 points from "Wisdom" to "Might" would still have the same personality.

And so what if it should cause a personality change? Heck, that sorta thing happens in real life - someone that's normally looked down on cause he's fat and weak decides he wants to work out, and some time later, wallah, he's better than everyone else. Someone starts racking in lots of money from their job and starts spending on things he'd never even consider and could possibly turn from impoverish and needy to greedy and avenging. In a nutshell, in real life, when someone gets something they've never had before, their personality changes naturally. Some people may not change at all, and that's perfectly fine. It all boils down to the person himself.

Say we transferred that to ZURPG. We then have a game that's a lot more flexible because it allows changes in personality as a result of full respecs. If anything, I'd say that brings more to the story and interactions between characters. You don't want to have a story where every single character is stagnant - as in, you meet them, and then no matter what happens, they stay that way. As a DM, I vary NPCs up by giving them backstories and goals that players may not realize initially, so their perspective of them will be different. When players really do find out about the stories behind those NPCs, they're usually surprised a bit. So what if we reversed that by giving full respecs to players? It could potentially give an extra layer of depth, because some characters probably won't expect it and suddenly, a player character is swinging with all Power instead of firing spells all day.

Also, I don't really agree with "Stats (should) represent your characters history, experiences, and growth." Well, I do in the context of D&D or World of Darkness, when you have the stats that actually make sense with the character's history, experiences, and growth, but ZURPG's stat system is much closer to say, Diablo, Torchlight, Warcraft 3, DOTA 2, and all that lot of games, and then the abilities and equipment and the gameplay system itself is reminiscent of JRPGs. Power, Courage, Wisdom, Hearts, Magic, and affinities - it's a simplistic system, yet ZURPG uses elements from much more complex games (like D&D or World of Darkness) to add depth, not so much in the battle-type gameplay, but expanding towards story elements and character interaction. ZURPG is not a clone of either side of the games that influenced it, but it does borrow many elements from those games, and it's created a unique gameplay system. Is it flawless? Heck no, it's not, but I'd like to continue finding ways to ironing it out.

Whelp, I ended up slightly sidetracking that, came out partially as a rant, my apologies, but that's my stance on things. Unless a full respec for a character would genuinely bring something bad to the game, I don't see why it should be anything less than a full respec.

Currently, the multiple character limitation only exists due to lack of DMs being able to support it all and for the sake of avoiding "cluttering the characters forum". The latter problem is unavoidable with time and more players, so that problem kinda falls out on its own, but the lack of DM support is the primary reason for that rule existing. I think, if we get say a 1 to 4 ratio of DMs to players, we'd be able to lose that rule, because I know there are some people that just want to play "lots of different characters" without being a DM and running that via lots of different NPCs.

But yet I've been seeing sessions that go ... delayed, ... because I cannot create a new character to supply the DM with ample characters for their quests. ...

I support stat re-specs costs per stat point, but the cost per point scales up for each point you re-spec. This way, it would support small-scale re-spec'ing for balancing reasons but at the same time limit your ability to fully re-spec while still making it perfectly possible to do so. There should also be a way to prevent people abusing this by making several small re-specs to get around the cost increases, like limiting the number of times you can re-spec to say once a week.