It depends on the type of game personally. Games like Fallout and Diablo II i expect that and understand, because i'm not literally trying to aim and blow his head off.

Now, when were talking FPS its a different story. In Morrowind/Daggerfall, it always annoyed the hell out of me that i can aim perfectly and still miss 10,000 times in a row. Aiming is exactly how your supposed fire a gun but some mystical skill-stat says i suck. The two forms of having the player aim and skill based chances at success don't complement each other because it requires the player to have twitch skills and can inevitablly frustrates him because of RPG stat success ratio's. If you were to implement a skill/RPG system into a FPS, you'd be far better off making it un-obtrusive to player skill like in System Shock 2. Or even making skill effect COF as in Deus Ex.

* * *
The man in black flees in terror as justice comes. Rounding the street corner, he takes salvation within his favourite bar. Sadly, it's after closing time and only the bartender remains to clean up.

The man in white enters the bar, having watched the man in black enter moments earlier. He's ready for the showdown, but finds the bar empty. "Odd... I could of sworn I saw him go in h...". His thought is cut off as gunfire erupts from behind the bar. Adrenaline pumps as he takes cover behind the closest pillar, ducking out every now and then to return a few rounds. Remembering the grenade on his belt, he unhitches and lobs it behind the bar.

The two behind the bar run out from behind the bar in terror, greeted by the bullets of the man in white's rifle. The quick death of hot lead justice has won again.

* * *

This is the kind of combat I'm looking for. Intense and adrenaline-pumping. Even two (or more) on one is winnable from an amount of skill, strategy and a little luck.

I'm getting more and more sick with [next target] [attack] *wait 30 seconds* [next target] [attack] *wait 45 seconds for this 'tougher' opponent* [repeat]. This is even worse in Player versus Player combat. I couldn't even fathom equal level players going 3 on 1, or even 2 on 1. The odds are so slim.

However - your concerns about the character's skill level versus the player's skill level and various degrees of being "pissed off" by the limitations, makes a lot of sense as well.

What sort of alternatives do you think are viable in those situations?

I could slow the players down, but that would upset the twitch gamers. Having them too fast, would upset the dice rollers. I suppose this is the sort of hybrid that requires a lot of balancing - or an audience of hybrids instead of an audience of two extremes.

EDIT: I'd also like to throw in here that bullets will actually travel through the air, although very fast. So a shot 3 degrees off from a skill level of 50% still has a chance to land. It's not an instant "hit or miss" calculation.

Why not turn the problem on it's head? Have an adjustable-strength aimbot which varies in effectiveness with your skill with a particular weapon. For example, say your skill with a pistol is 20. That means that if you shoot the pistol within 2.0 degrees of a target then it will hit. When your skill is 45, then you only have to aim to within 4.5 degrees to score that hit. That way you *could* still hit people every time with a skill of 0, if you are one of those freaks who's godly with FPS games, but if you're an average gamer who's practiced lots and got their pistol skill up to 150, you can get the same hit rate without being inhuman. :)

1) Each level should be only slightly more powerful than the previous level. The relationship doesn't need to be linear, but power shouldn't equal 2^Level or something insane like that. A good progression would be something like Power Relative to Level 1 = (Level * ln(Level) + 200)/200. That doesn't have to be the progression rate, but if progression is faster, it needs to add depth and breadth instead of directly increasing combat

2) Make combat require interaction - clicking isn't the best way to do this probably. Personally, I kind of like the direction City of Heroes took, except that the different options don't really do anything different. A NICE option might be the CoH interface with maneuvers from GURPS combat (things like dodge, parry, move and attack, all out attack, retreat, feint, deceptive attack, and many others). This way you're not only interacting during combat, but you're making a difference besides deciding when to run away.

3) Make combat deadly and uncertain. Eliminate safe zones (beyond maybe a single newbie city that you can't enter after a certain level), and make it entirely possible to lose to somebody lower level that is making better choices in combat (related to the previous two). Diversify things so that there is no One Way to win a battle, and for each strong method there is a good counter.

4) Fix what is broken. Set up some method to monitor what options players choose for their characters, and if everybody is picking the same few abilities or long-time players that pick ability X do much better than those that pick other abilities, you need to closely examine those abilities with that in mind.

5) I'm sure I left something out, but I can't remeber it right now.

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Original post by GroZZleR The man in black flees in terror as justice comes. Rounding the street corner, he takes salvation within his favourite bar. Sadly, it's after closing time and only the bartender remains to clean up. The man in white enters the bar, having watched the man in black enter moments earlier. He's ready for the showdown, but finds the bar empty. "Odd... I could of sworn I saw him go in h...". His thought is cut off as gunfire erupts from behind the bar. Adrenaline pumps as he takes cover behind the closest pillar, ducking out every now and then to return a few rounds. Remembering the grenade on his belt, he unhitches and lobs it behind the bar. The two behind the bar run out from behind the bar in terror, greeted by the bullets of the man in white's rifle. The quick death of hot lead justice has won again.

This sort of thing happens all the time in PnP RPGs. It takes the form of sixty-two dice rolls and a clever DM and some decent role-players. They sit around the table, play the scenario out, talk some trash, and then go have a beer and retell the story in real-time to their buddy who just showed up.

All those dodges and skill tests and rolls to hit take place in game-time, which is slow and methodical. But the players, through their characters, bring it to life as a seamless action sequence. The computer version has all the random numbers and other factors tabulated, but the player has to add in the immersion.

I think you just lack imagination. Just yesterday I was playing Diablo II on my Buddy's LAN, and I started a new character. My level 6 Paladin was out adventuring with a level 12 Assassin, and we got into some trouble in a dungeon. A bunch of those Death Clan goat-men were after us with some kind of aura enhancement, and my partner was not up to the fight. So I equipped a bardiche and the prayer aura and took up a defensive position in a doorway, which I was able to hold until the other player had healed up and prepared some traps to finish off the monsters.

It took the form of a few dozen mouse-clicks and some hotkeystrokes, but after we mopped up the dungeon, we sent out characters back to town, then he and I went to the kitchen, got a snack, and retold the story, with advantages. I was, of course, far more instrumental in my retelling than he was, and he did it all himself, and rescued me to boot, if you ask him. But it's that sort of self-imposed narrative that puts the R and the P in RPGs.

If you try to model everything in-game so that it looks like a movie, you're going to have to sacrifice a lot of gameplay, or else do a ton of work that won't actually be appreciated by most gamers. The game is in the numbers and the challenges. Everything else, from graphics to animations to sound to voice acting, is just window dressing, an attempt to electronically fulfill the role of the DM.

I don't like the idea of artificially messing up someone's aim. If you're aiming a firearm in a certain direction and fire, the velocity of the shot should be true to physics. Bullets exiting the barrel of a rifle at a 30 degree angle relative to the barrel demonstrates it's time to get a new rifle; it doesn't signify the user's skill level.

Skills have their place, but the thing is, as far as the mouse is concerned, twitch IS the skill when firing a weapon..

What if the mouse isn't controlling a crosshair? What if it's controlling a cursor that's used to designate a target for the character to attack? If you make that clear to the player, it might be okay.

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Original post by Kevinator I don't like the idea of artificially messing up someone's aim. If you're aiming a firearm in a certain direction and fire, the velocity of the shot should be true to physics. Bullets exiting the barrel of a rifle at a 30 degree angle relative to the barrel demonstrates it's time to get a new rifle; it doesn't signify the user's skill level.

Artificially messing up the aim — which I assume to refer to the idea of having the character skill introduced into the hit probability — is not really all that artificial at all. It is easy to aim with the mouse; the mouse is a light and accurate device. However, if the character is jumping around with four suits of plate mail in his inventory (ok, so I'm exaggerating again, especially as plate mail and rifles are somewhat of a silly combination) and trying to shoot at the bad guys with his old, weather-beaten rifle, he'd have to be quite a fakir to actually be able to hit the broad side of the barn on the first few shots. The player, however, would have no problem aiming with the mouse, and thus the perfect aim of the player in the hectic situation of the character is not really appropriate. You could try to redeem this by introducing the problems relating to the accuracy by restricting the movement of the cursor (adding noise to the actual cursor position and limiting the maximum speed of the cursor on the screen or things like that), but that is really pretty much the same as showing the cursor as normal and just effecting the accuracy using the character skill.

Still, I would consider the more important question here whether you want to make a player-oriented game or a character-oriented game. In a player-oriented game you would want to base the accuracy on the player's skills. In the character-oriented game you'd base the accuracy on the character's skills. Usually RPGs are mostly character-based, but an action RPG would usually be something with more emphasis on the player's skills. Still, it'd be a different kind of game. Personally I don't like games that put a lot of emphasis on the player's reflexes (especially since in most of the cases the controls are cumbersome).

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Original post by fractoid Why not turn the problem on it's head? Have an adjustable-strength aimbot which varies in effectiveness with your skill with a particular weapon. For example, say your skill with a pistol is 20. That means that if you shoot the pistol within 2.0 degrees of a target then it will hit. When your skill is 45, then you only have to aim to within 4.5 degrees to score that hit. That way you *could* still hit people every time with a skill of 0, if you are one of those freaks who's godly with FPS games, but if you're an average gamer who's practiced lots and got their pistol skill up to 150, you can get the same hit rate without being inhuman. :)

The problem with this approach is that if you happened to be a mere mortal with a framerate that would make you miss half the shots no matter how much you practised, you'd never be as good as the demigod player playing on Deep Thought who could fire a headshot from a parsec away while being blindfolded. The demigod player could always ignore the firearms skill on all his characters, thus having more skill points to spend on other skills or whatever; the main point is that the players with better coordination and hardware will always have an advantage in such a system. Of course the problem exists in the original suggested system as well, or indeed any system where a combination of skills of both the player and the character is used.

Then again, what's the point of having character skills in the first place if they don't represent the character? I mean, how could a character with a firearms skill 0 have never missed a shot (in the case of a very skilled player)? The skills would become more of a handicap for the lesser aimers, not really character attributes.

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Original post by Grim The skills would become more of a handicap for the lesser aimers, not really character attributes.

Well said. That's the problem with this hybrid: You don't have the sum of player skills and character skills, you have their intersection. In any given situation, one is hindered by the other, and neither is ever aided. It's a cripple.

FPS players are used to the idea of bots "cheating" by having their x,y,z (or a muddied aim profile variant which introduces noise).

If you provided both models in the same game, would either player feel cheated?

First, you clearly separate the two players (into clans or disciplines).

You make their leveling different, but still allow them to go directly head to head.

The character-skill players increase the effectiveness of an aimbot, but at some cost. The player-skill characters come as they are, but don't get something cool that the character-skill guys get.

For polish, you add some good, believable in-game context that makes all of this normal and natural. Maybe character-skill players train in "the Gun Kata" while player-skill players are of the prestigious "Wild Arm Discipline." Maybe character-skill players get Predator style aiming gear, while player-skill characters get motion-tracking radar.

You might get both audiences, but you'll have to do twice the work for it (this might be worth it if you'll get twice the audience).

EDIT: Just remembered - The smartgun in AvP vs. normal arms is like this problem. But for this example, one class would get a leveling smartgun, while the other would use normal arms.

Maybe you could build the difference in players directly into increasingly expensive weapons. Smart weapons might give a different reward than dumb, player guided weapons. It would be a more organic and natural division in players that way.