Re: CF: skill categories and sub-skills

[David Andrew Michael Noelle <>]

> From: "Doug wilder" <>
> Date: Thu, 18 May 2000 09:45:19 EDT
> Sender: 
> 
> How do you classify Moutaineering, Climbing, Woodsman.

Oh.  Those.  Short answer:  I don't.


> I see you have bargaining down but to tell you the truth i have
> never seen it do anything.

That's because it operates invisibly.  With this skill, you get a
bonus to your effective charisma score when haggling with a merchant.
Of course, since all this haggling takes place behind the scenes,
automatically, you don't see any indication of what the price would
have been without that skill, and you can't turn it on and off to find
out.  I think it's mentioned in the manual somewhere that even if you
can't see any evidence of it, this skill is "always on" and once you
know it, it automatically improves all prices in all stores.  Unless,
of course, by the time you manage to get this skill, you've already
worked your Charisma up to 30, at which point everyone's already more
than happy to give you the best prices on everything.


> personally for Mountaineering, climbing and woodsman i don't think
> they should be given experience for using these skills. As all they
> do is allow you to move faster through the terrain types. But, they
> are skills.

Are they?  Movement skills, like bargaining, don't earn experience.
They also aren't based on any experience level and don't have a chance
of failure.  Informations skills don't _currently_ have any chance of
failure, but I believe it's generally agreed that they should.  What
makes them "skills" at all?  Conceptually, they should be skills, but
that's not enough.

How are they learned, aside from the "scrolls"?  Apparently they're
inherent to some of the race/class combinations we currently have.
Once seperated, they could be either inherent (Dwarves are good with
rocks and Elves are good with trees), or taught (in a generic
"adventurers' guild" perhaps?), or both.  Is there any particular
reason you can't learn them just by practice, other than the fact that
everyone would have all of these skills, and terrain speed reduction
would be pointless?

Speed reduction could be countered partially, according to the level
of the skill, but the problem with that is, these skills don't have a
level.  What is the skill level of being a Dwarf?  Pretty easy if
you're short and hairy, I suppose, but then how does an Elf learn
mountaineering?

So, in answer to your question of how I would classify movement skills
in this proposed "skill tree":

Skill   	Category 	Learned 	Difficulty
------------	-----------	------------	------------
Mountaineer	Other		teacher		N/A: no default
Woodsman	Other		teacher		N/A: no default

-- 
            -Dave Noelle,                 
            -the Villa Straylight,  http://www.straylight.org

Disclaimer:Don't ask me; I just live here.

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