[CF-Devel] skill musings.

[Yann Chachkoff]

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     ===== Original Message From Mark Wedel <
      
      mwedel at sonic.net
      
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       From a discussion on irc tonight with myself, cryo, and garbled.
     
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       This is basically a small portion of all that was discussed, and not
     
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     necessarily related to all the ideas.
     
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       The main idea was to remove the idea of experience categories and have each
     
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     skill have its own exp and level.
     
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       In some sense, this actually makes the code much simpler.  It also means 
     
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     if at level 30, you finally learning smithery, your not an expert in it.
     
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       It also means that finding an abuse in one skill, while it may help your
     
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     overall level, doesn't help your other skills.
     
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       The downside is that some skills will be very difficult to improve.
     
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       Thoughts?
     
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Basically, I'm a supporter of the "per skill" experience scheme. But as you 
said, some skills would be much harder to improve.

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       The other main idea was to make it more difficult for players to learn new
     
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     skills, so what they start with is much more relevant.
     
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       Various ideas on how to do this:
     
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     1) Player only has skills they start with.  At some point, they choose a new
     
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     class, and get those new skills in addition to what they have.  But when you
     
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     choose a new class, your exp goes to zero.
     
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     I disagree with this. I don't like the idea of 'classes restrictions' - this 
is an old souvenir from ancient RPGs from the 80'. It is not only 
counterintuitive, but also quite frustrating. It also lacks flexibility.

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     2) Put something in that you can only learn a new skill every 10 levels or
     
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     something.  Problem with this is that some skills would likely be completely
     
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     unused (I'm sure players would identify best starting race, followed by the 
     
     best
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     skills to learn after that point.)
     
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     Again, that sounds quite artificial. I don't like that either.

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     3) Make skills available by completing quests.  Level of quests can basically
     
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     determine that you can get skill XYZ until your some level.  This means 
     
     players
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     can still get all the skills, but may have to stick with what they start with
     
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     until some point.
     
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     Much better. Probably you could hire a teacher to get a new skill, too. Sounds 
also much less artificial than propositions 1 and 2 above.

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       Note to do points 1 & 3 require that skillscrolls get removed from shops 
     
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     random treasures.   Point #3 could still have them be in special quest hoards 
     
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     the like.
     
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       Thoughts?  Other ideas?
     
     Skills dependencies. Some skills may require knowledge of other skills to 
become accessible; some skills could also be uncompatible.

Well, all this is somewhat interesting.

But I'm not sure it is the best thing to change right now.

I tend to think that finding better ways to count experience gained by players 
(it is quite hard/boring/useless to try to get experience with some skills 
already) or rebalancing relative powers of all skills would give more positive 
returns than another massive change of the rules.

Y. Chachkoff
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