[CF-Devel] New Skill System

[Tim Rightnour]

On 04-Dec-02 Mark Wedel wrote:
>
     
        I don't generally like the idea of skill gems or other 'spending'
     
     >
     
      mechanisms 
     
     >
     
      for the character unless they are not done as objects.  The problem I see as 
     
     >
     
      doing objects the character spends are many fold: 1) They could give them to 
     
     >
     
      other characters.  2) They might lose them, drop them, sell them, whatever
     
     >
     
      else. 
     
     >
     
        3) The idea of gems just magically showing up in your inventory just seems
     
     >
     
      a 
     
     >
     
      bit odd to me - it just smacks as too much a way to shortcut writing some
     
     >
     
      actual 
     
     
I really like the idea of skill gems, or whatever you want to call them for a
number of reasons:

1) You can tie lots of things to them.  For example, in my mud, players would
get skillpoints for going up a level.  The could then walk into the guild, and
the guildmaster would teach them spells and skills. It was a fun process.  When
you got your level.. you would sit there in the guild and debate..  "do I want
to learn this spell, or that spell? which would help me out more now?"

2)  It slows down the aquisition of everything.  You can't just start out with
the whole pile of books and know everything there is to know.  You have to
level to get the skillpoints to learn the skills.

3) It's a physical indicator to the player.  They look in thier inventory and
see "3 skill gems".  They know exactly what that means.  They can't drop them,
they can't pick them up.  It's just a visual representation, which makes
perfect sense in this game.. as everything is an object.  They expect it.

4) I'm loathe to start radically changing the client.  I know we shouldn't not
progress.. and this reason isn't justification for not doing one system over
another.. but really..  if we break the DX client completely.. 60% of our
players will only play on older servers.

---
Tim Rightnour <
     
     root at garbled.net
     
     >
NetBSD: Free multi-architecture OS 
     
     http://www.netbsd.org/
     
     
NetBSD supported hardware database: 
     
     http://mail-index.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/hw.cgi