Character random Skill affinity: proficiency and deficiency.

[qipoi]

In the Hot, Uncaring world of Kenshi, people should not be born equally.

Basically the idea is, chosen at random, NPC's can have unchangeable proficiency and deficiencies to learning certain skills. This is determined upon their creation, so the player cannot influence any of these. A bonus would be shown on the character stats screen as a + or a - within a circle. A H within the circle represents that they are a potential hero: they possess better genes than the average cat. These characters are exceedingly rare, tend to be faction leaders (hence how they managed to rise to prominence), and the player character begins as one, making the first player character a bit more of a precious resource than he/she was before.

Basically:
bonus=2X skill learn rate
malus=1/2 skill learn rate
The bonuses and maluses are completely random and cannot be influenced by the player. Such is the cruelty of fate.


An idea of the chances of NPC's having these:
Jack of all trades:(no bonus or malus): 20% (roughly anyway)
1 skill (1 positive and 1 malus) 20%
2 skill (2 positive and 2 malus) 20%
3 skill (3 positive and 3 malus) 20%
4 skill (4 positive and 4 malus) 20%
5 skill (5 positive and 5 malus) 20%
Hero: (2X Learn rate to all skills): .1% [1 in a thousand] (the first player character starts as one of these, faction leaders tend to be these)
Fool: 1/2 rate to all skills: 1% [one in 100] (obviously once the player discovers this weakness after hiring them the character will probably be used as cannon fodder or a pack mule)

This would add a bit more excitement/variety to recruiting new characters, as well as make each of your characters unique in some way. The player could look at what they are good at and plan accordingly to develop them into the role's that they excel in.

This also gives some minor advantage to the main character/first character you make, and make you want to be careful about the use of that character.

It also can lead to interesting situations where you find a unit that has bonuses to all combat skills and maluses to all non combat skills, and the player has the opportunity to train that character to their full potential, while having other characters cover for their weaknesses.

It can also lead to situations where you have soldiers with weaknesses to their fighting style: some soldiers might be bad at blocking, but have great strength, allowing them to compensate their weakness with armor. Others might have bad strength, but great combat skills otherwise, making them a more nimble fighter who wears lighter armor.

What do you think guys? Would this add depth to Kenshi's gameplay?
Do you think it would add an interesting variety to the NPC's?
How severely would you like this potential feature to affect NPC's?
Would you like this to be a toggle able option when you create a new game, perhaps with a slider bar to determine it's influence on gameplay?

[PnzrNorm]

I foresee problems with this system that will cause chars to gain levels in skills too quickly, which will make them godlike in comparison to a "clone".

I think that this system would be a lot more balanced if you replaced each instance of a "multiplier" with "maximum level".
I'm going to replace OP's arbitrary numbers so that they actually add to 100%:

• Jack of all trades: 70%
  1 skill/deficiency: 10%
  2 skill/deficiency: 7%
  3 skill/deficiency: 3%
  4 skill/deficiency: 1%
  5 skill/deficiency: 0.5%
  Fool: 8.4%
  Hero: 0.1%

Taking these arbitrary numbers for example:

• 70% of all chars encountered will have all their skill levels max at 100.
  10% will have 1 skill max at 110 and 1 skill max at 90.
  7% will have 2 skills max at 120 and 2 max at 80.
  3% will have 3 skills max at 130 and 3 max at 70
  1% will have 4 skills max at 140 and 4 max at 60
  0.5% will have 5 skills max at 150 and 5 max at 50
  8.4% will have all their skills max at 50 (yet another arbitrary number representing the fools, the rubbish, the washed up, and civilians equivalent to peasantry)
  0.1% will have all their skills max at 150 (representing the heroes, leaders, dragonborn, what have you)

This way, chars that have bonuses to their skills will not level up any faster than chars that have no bonuses at all, the only difference is chars with bonuses will take an even longer time to "realize their full potential" while at the same time will always be worse than a jack of all trades when it comes to their deficient skills.
This also prevents "heroes" from being more powerful than other chars so long as they don't live to "realize their full potential", and even then it will still take a really long time in order to get a single skill up to its maximum level thanks to the current skill experience system (I haven't reached 100 in a single skill across 20 chars yet).

Now to ponder if the player should be allowed to know if their char(s) are part of the abnormal 30% (through indicators, icons, etc.) or not.

To answer OP's questions, I have always liked the idea of creating some kind of "personality" system that would add more dynamics to a char's behavior, skills, combat, etc., but none of the threads I've read so far mentioned how their proposed systems could be implemented or how they would affect gameplay, whereas you went the extra distance to mention these specifics, and for that, I applaud you.
If the RNG is done right (which, if considered, it would likely have to be fine-tuned extensively), this could add a lot of variety to chars, both playable and non.
Or, to remove the RNG entirely, a set of player-controlled sliders at the start (or import) of a game that defined the parameters for world creation would be sufficient (I'm thinking similar to Dwarf Fortress and the player-controlled parameters when creating a region).

[azuchisamurai]

+1 to this