Post by Charles on Nov 16, 2008 1:27:53 GMT -8
Skills
Blacksmithing is now working in version 01.57. As I said previously, it doesn't do much yet and I still need to fix the graphics on it, but it works. It was possible in the most recent session for someone to have learned blacksmithing, but I'm pretty sure no one did. It's not easy to find someone to teach it to you, but there is a character who has the skill and will teach it to any friendly person who asks.
Currently blacksmithing only allows you to make two items. Before I increase that, I want to change some other aspects of how it works. Before I do that, I want to get player input on my plan.
I want to explain the ideas that Drew and I have been discussing for how skills will work. This will also be much the same for magic spells. Combat skills will work similarly. If players object for some reason or suggest improvements, we may do it differently, but I think you guys will like this approach.
Gaining skills.
The basic idea is that you will have a skill level for each skill just like you do now with spearfishing skill. If your skill level is zero, you don't know the skill at all. To increase your skill from zero to one, you need someone who already has the skill to teach it to you. That can be a soulless character (NPC) like it works now with Farin teaching spearfishing and Asha teaching cooking. Or it could be a player using the teaching skill to teach another skill to a player.
Chance of Success
A low level of skill would only give you a small chance of success like it does now with spearfishing. Every time you get near a fish, there is a random chance of spotting the fish. Then, if you spot it and if you try to spear it, there is a random chance of spearing it. The chance of success is based on your skill level. So with a low skill level, you'll not even see most of the fish and when you try to spear one that you do see, you'll miss it most of the time.
The more you use a skill, the higher your skill level will get. This will increase your odds of success. This is how spearfishing works now. Unfortunately, it is not how anything else works now. I plan to change that. I want basically this same system for almost every skill. For example, now, if you try to cook something, it gets cooked right every time so long as you have cooking skill. I want to change it so that sometimes it will burn and be ruined and other times it will be undercooked and have to be cooked again. If there are multiple ingredients, sometimes the wrong amounts of ingredients will be used and the food will be inedible. Even when you succeed, sometimes it will be a poor quality result, especially if you are low level. This will be true of cooking, blacksmithing, many magic spells and combat moves. On the other hand, there will be a chance of a high quality result as well. Instead of just an ordinary fish, you might cook it perfectly and have it be worth more than an ordinary cooked fish. A blacksmith might be able to make not just an ordinary sword, but a sword of such perfection that it's legendary and extremely difficult to be copied by other blacksmiths. A warrior might carry out a combat move so well that it does far more than normal damage. A "low blow" attack to an enemy's legs might succeed so well that it not only slashes his leg, but cuts it off. A wizard casting a thunder spell might get anything from a distant rumble and a little damage to a whole lightning storm that kills a dozen enemies to a miscast spell that turns him into a lizard.
It will all depend on your skill level versus the difficulty level of what you are attempting. To go back to fishing. So far, everyone is catching the same kind of fish. Imagine that there is more than one kind of fish. I've been planning to add that for some time, but it's not a priority. Spearing the easiest kind of fish is not dangerous. Maybe there would be some slight risk of spearing yourself or stepping on a stingray and gettings its spike stuck through your foot. But all these would do is inflict a few points of damage that would heal soon enough. Spearfishermen with higher level skills might be able to spot larger fish and try to spear them. They might be able to go out on boats and attempt to spear much larger fish in the deep. They also might face greater dangers from failure. A large fish that is misidentified might turn out to be a shark that you would then have to battle. A fisherman on a boat who falls overboard might have all sorts of problems such as losing his boat.
I hope I'm not talking about the failures so much that it scares you guys. In the fishing example, inexperienced fishermen would be able to minimize the risk, by not attempting to spear large fish and not going out in boats until they are more experienced. Inexperienced wizards could choose to cast only easy spells where the consequences of failure are minor.
One of the advantages of this approach is that as you use a skill, you are able to accomplish the same thing faster and easier and you also are able to do new things with the same skill that you couldn't do at low levels.
Forgetting Skills
I am thinking of having a system where if you don't use skills, you start to forget them. This would be achieved by subtracting one skill level from all skills from all players once in a while. If you are using that skill, you probably wouldn't even notice and you'd quickly regain the skill level and keep increasing your skill. For a player who wasn't using a certain skill, it would not be going up and it would keep having levels subtracted until eventually it was forgotten altogether. This is realistic. It also prevents people from maxing out all possible skills. It would ensure, for example, that the professional blacksmith would tend to be more skilled than the "jack of all trades" who tries to be an expert in every skill. The subtraction of skills would only occur when you are playing the game. You would not forget skills when you aren't even playing.
Teaching
I'm also thinking that the teaching skill would work the same way. Someone with a teaching skill of zero couldn't teach anything. Someone with a teaching skill of one would have a chance of teaching someone a skill so that the student would have a skill of one in the skill they were taught. A highly skilled teacher might be able to raise a students skill level in cooking or blacksmithing or magic nearly to his own level, however high that might be.
Magic
Right now there is an attribute called "magic". It doesn't do anything yet. I'm going to change that. It either needs to matter or it needs to be deleted. Right now, each magic spell is a separate skill and they are not connected at all except that some require mana. I'm thinking they would continue to be separate skills, but in addition there would be a general magic ability that would also be taken into account. The issue I'm undecided on is whether the magic ability would be a skill that can be increased easily with use or whether it would be an inherent ability that you are born with and doesn't change. Or maybe it does change, but not easily. Someone (William I think) suggested that there be some ability to change other attributes such as strength and dexterity, perhaps through training. I'm open to that idea. Certainly they could be changed by magic.
There could also be a general combat skill that is separate from skills for individual weapons or tactics. It would be similar to the magic ability above.
The Plateau of Diminishing Returns
I think that one of the biggest problems with most MMORPG games is that people with a high combat level are just invincible to normal mortals. That's unrealistic and also results in some strange consequences and arbitrary limitations by the game software to keep the consequences from getting too far out of hand. For example, the limitations on PvP are usually necessary because of the fact that high level characters can attack low level characters without any worry whatsoever that they will suffer any serious harm.
I don't plan on having combat experience increasing your health. The real world doesn't work that way. I don't want this game to work that way either. Another thing is the huge difference between combat abilities of different level warriors. I think that there is a huge difference between a civilian with no knowledge of weapons and a trained soldier. There is also a similar difference between a trained, but inexperienced soldier and a combat veteran. But, as I've said before, after you've fought your way through World War One, the additional combat experience you would gain from fighting your way through World War Two as well would not make you twice as good a soldier.
So I think that with combat skills and other skills, that there should be rapid increases in ability at the lower levels and then it should level off into a plateau of sorts where you can continue to increase your ability, but at the higher levels, it takes more to increase the level and the benefits are less. Spearfishing already works this way. Even at the highest levels, there would have to be a sort of reality check to make sure people weren't gaining impossible capabilities. Obviously magic will be an exception since the entire field of magic seems to be pretty much impossible in real life, but that's one of the areas where the game deliberately parts ways with reality.
That's the thinking so far. Any comments?