Dev Diary: Recap Episode #2 -- Skills, Arts and Characters

[Haba]

Make crafting totally based on player skill .. (like steel making) ... not through repeating the same task like a mindless automaton

You're not so clever, are you?

You have certainly picked an avatar suiting well to your personality, sir.

Let me put it in more simple terms so that you'll be able to understand.

The most common way to provide a sense of progression for players in role-playing games is to represent the character's abilities in numerical form, and then provide the player with incremental improvement upon their character's abilities. The player’s character performs a task, gains experience and improves his abilities.

H&H, with its skill and quality system relies heavily on incrementally improving skills. To some degree it is logical; you need to gain familiarity on the tools and the working process, and before you do that the end result will be shoddy. What is problematic is that it provides a linear progression with no further milestones or no natural upper limit. It is unrealistic and not very rewarding on the long run.

The reason why I picked up steel making as an example is that simply repeating the same task in the same manner does not produce the optimal output – the player needs to discover the mechanic behind the steel making process. Albeit the mechanic is rather simple, and afterward steel making devolves back to repetition as well. Fishing and cheese making contain similar mechanics.

For me, the most exiting part of the game was the early game where you struggled to learn the ropes. The learning curve was steep, but that only enhanced the illusion of “wilderness survival”. Once I got to the point where I had learned all skills and built everything available, I hit a brick wall. From the excitement of learning the game turns into tedium of grinding. Kill two more level X bears and get enough LP to improve skill with one point. Do this 30 times and you’ll be able to produce an item that is marginally better than before. Fun fun fun!

That’s why I’d much rather see a radical approach to the whole paradigm of character improvement rather than just masking it with a new name.

Rather than have a linear progression in skills, you could have a three-tiered approach that follows the player’s stage in the game. At basic stage you’d be learning how to work with different materials and produce simple tools, at apprentice stage you’d start to increase the variety of products you’ll be able to produce and at journeyman level you’d begin to innovate on totally new approaches.

So instead of the linear progression, the main difference between an apprentice and journeyman of a craft would be the fact that the more experienced character would be able to create totally new types of items and refine existing production processes. loftar already touched upon this with his ideas on baking recipes, as an example. So in order to become a true master of a craft, you'd have to travel the world, take risks and experiment on new things.

Linear progression could still be maintained with physical and mental attributes, and they could be then used to differentiate two craftsmen with equal level of knowledge.

The way that "spiritus" could work in this type of a system is that you couldn't innovate when it is on low. This would help to control the market somewhat - a smith that keeps on churning out high quality basic tools would limit his capability to develop further.

Obviously this is much more ambitious approach, and certainly the easier route would be to simply slightly rework the LP system. And I am sure that a lot of people would be more than satisfied. Just look at WoW as an example.

[Potjeh]

As you guys noted, my suggestion essentially caps player skills, with raw material quality being the cap. IMHO that's a good thing, because it means that a new player will always have a chance of catching up with the people that registered before.

That, and it makes the game item-centric instead of skill-centric, which should make the economy more interesting. Namely, it would drastically increase the volume of trade and lead to greater regional diversity. We see it now with stuff like thanes, players will keep the very best resources to themselves, which means that the best potters will be where the best clay is. With time the name of this potters' village will become synonymous with clayware, which is often found in real world and is quite cool IMHO. But the real beauty is in regional diversity. It's been stated that we will have different biomes in the game, and that means that certain parts of the world will simply be better for some production and thus lead to highest concentration of appropriate crafters in those parts of the world. For example, if you want the best bear cape money can buy, you'll need to go to the furriers of the north who have honed their skill on polar bear fur.

Anyway, I initially tied the suggestion to numen as a means of slowing the development of a character, lest it be essentially instant. But I'm certainly not married to that idea, and the more I look at it the less sense it makes. There are other ways around this, ones that would feel more natural. One is to use the work weariness thing to prevent you from studying objects. The other, which I like better, is to make resources semi-finite (IIRC Jorb said he wants to do something like that). You can do this by assigning daily production to resource spots, or by increasing the time it takes to gather when you gather (something like fruit and branches in my Trees expanded suggestion). This gives a lot more strategic importance to resource spots, makes their management full of strategic choices, and establishes a natural population cap (which may actually be a bad thing).

Pseudo-limited resources would also make for more interesting PvP. It would become possible to win wars by attrition, and wars would actually be about taking and holding resource spots. Of course, we need better defences for the resources, so a griefer can't just over-exploit your spot while you're logged off, and as a counter to those defences we need stuff like siege equipment. The murder alts become obsolete, because a loss of your (limited) resources is a loss of your resources, no matter if you put them into your main or one of your alts. Recovery after death also becomes a lot easier, which should drastically decrease the number of rage-quitters. That is, unless the people that killed you also take your land, in which case you'd have a lot harder time getting the resources you need to make a good character again. So, it pulls the teeth out of raids, but makes actual wars serious business.

[niltrias]

So, it pulls the teeth out of raids, but makes actual wars serious business.

I like both of Potjehs ideas here, but especially this. Raids, as they stand, are pretty boring. Has any community ever fought off a serious raid? I dont know of any. It should be a hard task to flatten an established city guarded by walls, IMHO.

[Chakravanti]

That's what I've been saying...