Skills

[Okud]

Wow! So I see there are skills!

I had a suggestion prepared for a longer time, I should post it now or never. I'm very interested in everybodys opinion about it.

Here it goes:
1) Characters have skills. Those are specific skills, like "Manufacturing a stone hammer",
or more general skills like "Farming" or "Cooking".

2) Starting value for skills is a different constant for each skill, usually a negative number.

3) Total skill your char uses for a project is a weighted average of several skills, i.e.
if you harvest potatoes the applied skill depends on your "Harvesting potatoes" and "Farming"
skills.

4) You cannot start a project unless your total skill for that activity is positive. It would
make sense to not even see it on your "tech tree" if you cannot start it.

5) The speed of a project depends on the average of the skills of all participants.

6) The participants on a project improve all their involved skills (learn) proportionally to the speed of the
project.

Example:
you're a newspawn, totally unskilled, which means you receive following skill settings:
Farming = 0
Collecting blackberries = 20
Harvesting potatoes = -30

For a blackberries project your combined skill is:
(40*Farming + 60*Collecting blackberries)/100 = (40*0 + 60*20)/100 = 1.2
You can start a Collecting blackberries and while doing this project you improve your "Farming" and
"Collecting blackberries" skills.

However, you are simply too incompetent to start a potatoes project, or to work on it by yourself,
until you improve your farming skill enough to outweigh your -30 in potato harvesting.

The easier way is to find a mentor, someone good at farming, and to join his project.
This way you will learn much much faster (depending on how good she/he really is).
Since in the beginning your total skill is negative, you will actually slow down his project
(a dumb helper) until you learn enough to not be in the way.


Pros:
- if your char is a weaponsmith, the char him/herself will be valued and not his tools.
- learning from a teacher lets your character bond. (no need to RP a child:)
- combined with item deterioration, you could have an item deteriorate slower if the skill involved in producing it was greater.

[Revanael]

Jos just said we already have skills.... So why suggest more? =P

Oh wait, I see what you mean. Still a bit late, eh?

[Okud]

never too late. Actually I'm very much interested in finding out opinions about it. Implementing such changes is maybe far fetched.

[colonel]

Jos just said we already have skills.... So why suggest more? =P

Oh wait, I see what you mean. Still a bit late, eh?

Rev, my good friend, you have been hanging around me to long eh!
And now I understand what you are talking aboot!

[SekoETC]

It sounds like splitting hair that there would be a different skill for making every damn item and picking different sorts of food... but dividing them into classes is good. That one could not use a hi-tech harvester as a newspawn is a very good idea. Also that one could not work alone on forging projects. Ok after thinking more, newspawns could not work alone on any manufacturing project, but the easiest ones would be learned quickly by participating. Nice idea.

[myst]

I like it. Provided that the general skills can - eventually - overcome all initial minuses. So if nobody has ever farmed a potato before, by generally farming other things you can get good enough to start on potatoes, and then teach other poeple how to do it quickly.

I'd also say that the additional speed of someone should be 1 + (skill bonus) where skill bonus could be negative but probably not less than 1. Even useless people don't really slow you down, they just don't contribute much.

Of course it may already work quite like this!

[Pürkel]

This is an excelent idea. And it is also quite realistic: it has learning from example by participanting in another project, using past experience in similar projects (improving the super skills, such as farming).