[CF-Devel] skill musings.

[Todd Mitchell]

First off I'd like to say I don't think there is anythning fundementally
wrong with the current way skills are acquired.  Skill scroll and a chance
to learn the skill based on a stat is perfectly fine way to deal with this
IMHO.  I do think that these scrolls are too easy to come by however and if
it is a difference between making them easier to get or easier to learn - I
guess I would side with make them easier to learn but harder to find.  Thing
is that if a scroll is rare and wonderful players will use rings and potions
to increase their chances of learning it.  If you already have the skill and
do find one, you now have a valuable item to sell.  BTW I think this same
argument should apply to more spellbooks too.  I don't care really if
someone sells a skill scroll to another player for 50000 pl, or a dragon
horde contains a scroll of sense magic, but I do think they shouldn't be
store items and should be fairly rare (depending on the skill of course -
literacy could be cheaply available at the libraries certainly).  It could
be an idea to make the chance of learning the skill based on different
appropriate stats.

>
     
      1) Starting skills - still have classes that determine skills, or
     
     completely
>
     
      customizable
     
     >
     
     
     >
     
      2) Gaining new skills - get one every X levels, quest completion,
     
     completely
>
     
      fixed based on what you start with
     
     
I have no problem with the class system for starting out (except the
faces...) since people like it (remembering back to the PM on this one - he
mentioned that most people choose a class even though the option is there
not to) and it helps speed up character generation.  Also with the classes
you can mixup the good and not so good so that everyone does not just pick
the most useful skills for new players and dump the others when starting
out.
Once that is aside and the character created though, I think that players
should be able to get any skill they want so that they can develop however
they like.  I don't think however that they should be able to get all skills
by level 30 and I don't think that all the skills they get should
necessarily useful for them in particular.  If you pick a class with no
magic and then want to get the 'magic' skill then I have no problem making
it a pretty tough road (or roads) to get that skill (the dread Tower of
Wizardly thought, the secret marsh of the shamen, sometimes dropped by a
Djinn)- there are always amulets and the like as well for the fainter of
heart.
I don't see a need for a complex system for this - just redeployment of some
of the resources (this is more an economy issue that a code issue I guess
I'm trying to say)

now as for skills themselves:
>
     
      3) Skill particulars - max level allowed in some skills?  Different rates
     
     of
>
     
      gaining exp in different skills (attenuation?)  Linked skills (gaining exp
     
     in
>
     
      one skill means you gain some portion in another related skill)
     
     
How about: how are xp gained for different skills?

Having the skills share xp however is something that would be good to do
away with as it:
a: makes it too easy to get good skills (since they automatically are the
level of the other similar skills)
b: keeps many skills pretty wimpy for reason a:
I do think that it would be a good idea to break out the skills so they do
not share xp as this would make them and players more interesting and allow
increasing powers in skills without so much game balance upset.  This would
only work if there were reasonable ways to gain xp in these skills (training
allows you to dump some xp into the skill from your total, or getting skill
xp for specific actions (quest rewards), and there were clear and useful
skills with increasing benefit (not 100 small one off kind of skills).

>
     
      4) Number of skills - how finely divided should the skills be.
     
     I guess this would depend on what a skill gives you.  There should be a
difference between skills that grow with xp and skills that give you a
specific ability.   How much use is having 60 levels of literacy anyway?
Even if it was really cheap skill it would be a pain for mapmakers to mixup
that many books.

It would be nice if at certain levels of a skill you would get some
additional abilities, like for example - magic lore as a skill would give
you sense magic, then the ability to identify some items, then the ability
to make some items all based on the level you have in that skill.  This
would be one way to handle different 'one-off ' skills by incorporating them
into an actual Skill.  Missile weapons skill could give you bowyer skill at
a certain level.  Unarmaed combat could contain both jumping and karate.
Making a distinction between a capital S 'Skill' with 'minor skills' would
allow for some measure of Skill development while still not screwing too
much with lots of racial and specality skills.
That being said, the skills would have to be modular enough to support the
race/class type distinctions (or some of them anyway) without overlap (or
maybe some little overlap).

Also I add - no rush, lets talk and figure out the best soluton.