[CF-Devel] skill musings.

[Johnny Shelley]

On Fri, 15 Nov 2002, Mark Wedel wrote:

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        In some sense, this actually makes the code much simpler.  It also
     
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      means that if at level 30, you finally learning smithery, your not
     
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      an expert in it.
     
     
I think this makes a lot of sense. 
 
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        The downside is that some skills will be very difficult to improve.
     
     
I don't see that as a negative thing. IMHO the harder the game is, the
better. I wouldn't mind seeing more things being difficult to improve,
wisdom and melee come to mind first.
 
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        The other main idea was to make it more difficult for players to
     
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      learn new skills, so what they start with is much more relevant.
     
     
Again, I think this is a very good thing. The current system is rather
broken in this respect. Players tend to end up nearly identical - same
armour, weapons, skills and spells regardless of race or class (with a
few exceptions for the more exotic classes).
 
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      1) Player only has skills they start with.  At some point, they
     
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      choose a new class, and get those new skills in addition to what
     
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      they have.  But when you choose a new class, your exp goes to zero.
     
     
I like this idea to some extent. Destroying a characters levels /
effectiveness w/ his ucrrent skills because he learned something new is
really illogical.

My change to this idea would be to let the player join a new class at
any time and gain the new skills. The trade off is that while they can
use all their old abilities, they can't actually get any experience with
them. They can only earn experience using their current class's skill
set.

Additionally, it would be nice to be able to break down weapons and
armour so that while wizards still get 'melee' as a skill, they'll be
stuck wearing robes and wielding daggers. This should help offset the
benefits of starting your wizard class after 10 levels of barbarian.

This can be justified a few ways.. some of which are already in the
game. (equipment too heavy to cast properly, your god forbids all but
blunt weapons etc).

Perhaps one way to do this without much in the way of significant
changes would be to just raise the spell failure levels considerably and
apply them to priests as well but at a lower rate.

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      2) Put something in that you can only learn a new skill every 10
     
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      levels or something.  Problem with this is that some skills would
     
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      likely be completely unused (I'm sure players would identify best
     
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      starting race, followed by the best skills to learn after that
     
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      point.)
     
     
Right.. this smells of encouraging players to powergame rather than
roleplay (to what extent thats possible in cf).

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      3) Make skills available by completing quests.  Level of quests can
     
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      basically determine that you can get skill XYZ until your some
     
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      level.  This means players can still get all the skills, but may
     
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      have to stick with what they start with until some point.
     
     
Of the three proposed ideas, I like this one best, however it doesn't
seem terribly different from the current system. All it really
accomplishes is making the scrolls more expensive (but GUARANTEED).

One further suggestion I'd make is limiting how far a character can
advance in a skill based on his original class. This would allow lots of
variation in character development and still allow characters to
eventually learn most of the skills.

For instance, wizards are limited to 15 or 20 in melee, barbarians to 5
or 10 in some of the current 'mental' skills. Thieves never reach a high
level in the personality skills. Some of the classes will be fairly
balanced, while others will lean heavily towards melee or magic with
serious weaknesses. Yes, the barbarian will be able to cast healing and
burning hands, but forget about face of death and colorspray.

Perhaps have one or two of the minor things that can never be learned by
a class. Say, thieves can never learn woodlore, or wizards just can't
seem to get the hang of singing, barbarians never learn to write, etc.

I'll be the first to admit that balancing this kind of thing will be
pretty hard, but the code for it shouldn't be too complex and I think
it'd be a vast improvement over the current situation where there is
nothing more than a different image for diversity after a few levels.

And implementing it will be quite a bit easier than my counter proposal
for #1.. which sounds like a royal pain to do properly.

johnny

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