Skill Resdesign thoughts

[Peter]

I'm not sure how much of the current skill system is permanent. Here's my thoughts:

Obliterate leveled skills, and split the uses of those skills into stats and regular skills. Limit Q by stats, perhaps combination of stats- for instance, some wood crafts might use dexterity and perception to determine Q, while perhaps a sword would take strength and intelligence. Similarly, using specific weapons and maneuvers would tie into specific attributes. This is because the FEP system is unique and has a lot of potential; making it the drive the game would be a bold departure from normal kill-centric XP-based design.

Then, split up the various skills so that there are several sub-skills. Rather than metalworking unlocking virtually everything you can make with metal, have Forging, Tinkering, Blacksmithing, Coppering, Tooling, Casting... so that you can gradually develop a number of skills while remaining specialized. As it is now, It costs far less to learn how to craft metal from scratch than it does to learn how to very slightly improve your grain harvest.

Make it so that specialization is attractive by having self-reinforcing cycles- for instance, having most fishing gear gain from being used with high intelligence; but encourage diversity and trading by having at least one other requirement such as perception, constitution, agility... which is best collected from other skills. Having only one of these either makes trading unrewarding because you can just keep cycling your own skills up endlessly, or making specialization impossible since you never have the resources you need to increase in skill enough to trade for the resources you need.

Consider granting FEP from non-food activities; anything from daily rituals involving items to perhaps quest rewards. This would help make it possible to make more self-reinforcing cycles; metal trinkets might be needed for a Morning Meditation of Strength ritual, for instance.

Now, currently leveled skills do have one use: they act as one endless LP sink. Unless LP reward was decreased or some other sink introduced, claims would tend to grow a bit more... but I'm sure that an elegant solution could appear. Perhaps LP itself could be removed as well somehow?

[ImpalerWrG]

I like just about all of that, I've been saying the leveled skills need to die from day one for no other reason then they are terribly terribly confused with the singular skills.

An alternative means of combining stats for crafting would be a kind of 'lowest common denominator' in which a particular action is considered to use/not use a particular stat and the lowest stat amongst those used is taken as the limiting factor rather then a summation of the stats. More complex crafting actions use more stats, so for example while a basic carpentry task might be Dexterity and Strength, while metal-crafting could be Dexterity, Perception, Strength and Intelligence. This would both encourage more mixed stats and provide for a simple interface ware the player sees the used stats and has the limiting one highlighted to show them what they need to raise.

An alternative 'deep' LP sink could be adding a set number of 'mastery' type skills into the tree. A series of these could cost exponentially more LP (10k, 50k, 250k, 100K...). These could act to modify the LCD stat upward by some percentage (10%, 20%, 30%...) and provide much the same game play effect as the old leveled skills but without the degree of confusion as the player must first unlock the basic skill before "Journeyman Carpentry" and "Master Carpentry" become available. Their could also have a much narrower focus, "Master Silk weaver" or "Master leather-crafting" so you can continue to specialize even after having basic 'access' to all skills. Their would be room to absorb LP into the range of millions.

This change could even be implemented now without wiping characters, just refund all LP spent on leveled skills and allow the players to re-spend it on these new skills.

[Thijssnl]

This change could even be implemented now without wiping characters, just refund all LP spent on leveled skills and allow the players to re-spend it on these new skills.

Loftjorb implement the idea, LP rollback. Everyone is happy with the new system and - SERVER CRASH -

... and its gone!

[theTrav]

Loftjorb implement the idea, LP rollback. Everyone is happy with the new system and - SERVER CRASH -
... and its gone!

You really don't understand how computers and software work do you...

[Peter]

Everybody gets to complain about one rollback. It's the rules.

[Jackard]

Everybody gets to complain about one rollback. It's the rules.

tradition