Let's just kill successful chars and be done with it...

[Schme]

No, it's more likely that his older characters actually are in the practise of doing things.

(That is too say, manual labour, or self defense.)

That is not rotten luck. This is how he built them up.

These new things ruin it.

[SekoETC]

Yeah I agree though that it is stupid one can be awkward in something they've been doing for 10 years or something. It would have been cool if people could have defined a main skill for each of their elder characters (over 30 perhaps? After ten years of living most Cantrians should have some clue of what they're good and what they want from life). Ok sometimes there's reasons to play that it's logical you're clumsy in something even though you've been doing it for a long time, if you are clumsy in general, ok some people don't get better. But most people should be at least efficient in something if they've been working on it for several years.

And lets say you could only assign certain type of skill to one or two of your characters, that you couldn't make them all good in fighting people etc. And chars with bad skills would be under special watch so that we can spot if someone is trying to farm experts and getting rid of the poor ones.

Your character wouldn't necessarily be expert in the main trait you choose, there would be for example 5 chance to be just novice, 15% chance to be efficient, 60% chance to be skillful and 20% chance to be expert. Attacking skill boost might be offered only to those who have attacked someone with a weapon in the last two weeks.

You might also have to select a poor trait or a two, and no they shouldn't be just rare ones like fishing or gardening. It should be in the group of farming, digging, hunting, attacking, tailoring and foresting. When you pick something there would be... 50% chance to be awkward, 40% chance to be novice and 10% chance to be efficient.

Ok how to process this then...? Things should be checked manually. But anyway, surely there's not that much characters over 30? And maybe it could be over 35? Or 40? Or on special request? "Dear Programming Department, I beleive a great injustice has happened! My character, X, who's been actively working on Y for the past Z years..."

Then again I have characters of whose skills I couldn't care less, and it's not because I would hate them and was planning to get rid of them. I love (almost) all of my characters, though some more than others. But for some it would just seem fitting that they were overall clumsy and others are more sensitive about their skills. Almost all of them have found at least one skill to be happy about.

Ok I could keep babbling on forever but you're probably getting bored already so until next time.

[Schme]

I agree that it would be much more fair and sensical to give the characters who should be skilled a things the skills. But that has potential for abuse, and I doubt that they would do it anyways, as it would be alot of work (I think.).

I can't say I really like the idea of choosing skill very much, but I'm opposed to the whole skill system of anyway, so I suppose I'm sort of biased against any suggestion for improvement.

[Nick]

ALL HAIL THE MAD PLANET AAARDVARK!!!!!!

and then be done with it

Hey, at least I get that joke.