Re: CF: skill categories and sub-skills

[Mark Wedel <>]

Doug wilder wrote:
> 

> Agility:
> disarm needle 230,000 exp
> disarm pit     40,000 exp
> 
> Mental:
> literacy       55,000 exp
> find traps    100,000 exp
> 
> i don't know that we need to have multiple disarms as i think disarming
> traps is pure mechanical knowledge anyway. Meaning that if you understan
> mechanics you understand most of the traps. Magical traps however might be a
> different story. We may want a seperate catagory for them or not. They could
> be explained differently and may even fall under Mental.

 disarming magical traps is always sort of odd.  How does someone disarm that
rune sitting on the floor?  Presumably it is not being triggered by some
mechanical means, but rather by someone touching the rune.

 You could change this by needing to use spells to actually get rid of runes. 
You could still jump and fly over them safely, and this may actually give more
reason for players to use those skills.  Some maps are just chock full of runes
however.

 While I can see some rationale why find traps and disarming them fall into
different skill categories, it seems that they should be related somehow.  AD&D
certainly did this - it is one skill.  It just seems odd that you could
theoretically have a player that could disarm any trap, but can never find them
to disarm them in the first place.

Tenwit wrote:
> I haven't got the suggested skill tree handy, but for play-balance-
> affecting skills which theoretically could or should be improved
> through use: don't do it.  Go with the teaching method, where you can
> use money paid for training as a play-balancer.  There are two ideas I
> can think of that would implement a compromise:

 Many games give you some set of points after gaining a level, and you then divy
them up amongst your skills.  They don't really work in the sense that you may
not have used that skill at all, OTOH, they probably improve the game some in
that some skills may simply be unworkable (to failure prone with deadly
consequences) to improve by use, so you need some other way to improve them.  I
don't know if we want to go that way.

> 
> 1) Use/lack of use gives a skill bonus/penalty.  Just a small amount,
> no more than 5% or so.  It's fun to work to maximise the bonus, but
> it's not crippling or unbalancing to leave it degrade to a 5% penalty.

 I'm still not convinced that diminishing skills really adds anything either.  I
think it will end up being unpopular, and players will just find workarounds.  I
think it also adds complication - should performing the action just once reset
the timer (ie, climb one mountain and you are safe again for 5000 ticks?)


> 
> 2) Have the max %age for the skill be taught, with the usual teaching
> costs for play balance, but have the "real" %age work the way you
> suggest.  When the player hits his 75% skill limit that he's paid for,
> there's no point in jumping up and down on the spot to train the skill.

 Certainly something more than just money is needed for advancing in skills? 
While it is easy to justify that with enough money you could learn anything,
that doesn't seem to make for a very heroic game.  I think it would also
penalize some class (spell casters) more, as they tend to be spending lots of
their money on spellbooks.

 I remember some game (eamon maybe) in that your chance to improve your skill
was taken as a percentage of your chance at failure.

 So if your chance of success was 20%, and you succeeded, you had an 80% chance
of that skill going to 21%.  however, that was a text based game - in crossfire,
I think after the first adventure, you would see that fighter with a 90% skill
in combat.

 Also, how to deal with spells get a little more complicated.  I guess you could
say that each spell adds a 5% penalty to successful skill usage (which means if
you do use it, it is 5% more likely your skill will advance).  In this way, some
skills would have 200% or even higher probabilities.  But then how do you scale
damage for the spell?  I think that may be a bigger question on any skill system
- combat skills and things like disarm traps are pretty simple to deal with, but
how do we deal with the spell skills so that they make sense?  Currently, damage
scales with level, but if we get rid of level in teh skill, what do they scale
with?

 Note you could do like might & magic and have a spell casting skill for each
spell path or major school of magic to spread out the load so to speak.
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