[crossfire] Skill thoughts

[Mark Wedel]

On 02/21/11 01:14 PM, Nicolas Weeger wrote:
>>    I finally got around to recording my thoughts on a revised skill system:
>
>
> What is the planned implementation timeline?

  I'm always bad at estimating how long things will take.

  What I really want to do next is write up brief descriptions of the skills, 
possible special abilities, etc, they give, and probably combine some skills 
while I'm at it.

  For example, I'm think that detect magic and detect curse, as too different 
skills, would really never be worth spending points on (above getting it 
initially), but if those are combined as perhaps a general identification skill, 
it might be.  But in that model, it would be not as good as the specific item ones.

  For example, with smithery, you might identify weapons/armor of level less 
than your skill.

  With general identification, it might be items less than 1/3 or 1/2 your skill.

  Likewise, combining singing and oratory would make sense to me - it is easier 
to calm monsters than make them friendly, so same skill could have different 
effects.

>
>
> I'm wondering whether it's worth fixing (or at least trying to fix) existing
> monsters with the current system, or just waiting for the new one.

  It probably depends what is wrong with them.  While ideally monsters will 
follow the same rules for players (and thus have same skill with special 
abilities, etc), I don't necessarily know if that would be something I'd do in 
the first pass - I'd much rather get the new skill system really sorted out for 
players and then tackle adapting monsters to use it.  I'll note that many games 
don't actually make any attempt for the monsters to follow all the same rules 
for players.  But once the player stuff seems fairly well balanced, then 
apply/converting monsters to use that would start (I'm not 100% sure if it would 
make sense for all monsters to use that system, but that could get sorted out at 
that time)

  So things like hit points, damage, resistances would all be things that would 
still get used under the new skill system.  Level would still get used as a 
starting point for any conversion.

  But in any case, I do want to write up some more details - its much easier to 
spend an evening or 2 writing up some ideas and getting a better idea if they 
work than to code them up.


>
>
> Note that of course I'm ready to help implementing that, and others may be
> too.

  Thanks for the offer - the problem I keep facing is feature creep - if skills 
are going to get redone, and attributes redone, should resistances be tackled at 
the same time?  What about spells?  At some point, it ends up being a big task, 
but maybe that is also needed to really get balance/playability back - a lot of 
things currently in the game were added one by one (new skill here, new spell 
there, new artifact over here) without any real central idea of how everything 
should work together.