How to bring some logic into skills

[SekoETC]

Expertise - This is the skill rating that we currently have. It's different for each individual skill

The traits
Dexterity (hands/accuracy)
Agility (body/speed)
Strength (body/muscle) - we already have this one
Perception (vision and other senses)
Concentration (mind)


Building:
expertise 35%
dexterity 30%
strength 25%
concentration 5%
perception 5% - mainly spotting if elements are straight

Burying:
strength 70%
agility 20%
expertise 10% - this is mainly the knowledge of picking the right spot, how to dig without making the walls collapse etc.

Carpentering
expertise 60%
dexterity 17%
concentration 10%
strength 8%
perception 5% - seeing if things are straight and all

Collecting

dexterity 35% - how fast you can pick
perception 25% - noticing the things when you run into them
expertise 25% - knowing where to find the good spots
agility 10% - mainly is your body fit for bending over and squatting in the bushes
strength 5% - pretty much the same as above

Cooking
expertise 75%
perception 10% - noticing when it starts smoking
concentration 10%
dexterity 5% - mainly for chopping stuff

Digging
strength 55%
agility 40%
expertise 5% - finding the good sources

Drilling
expertise 95% - knowing how to use the damn thing
dexterity 5%

Farming
expertise 65%
strength 20%
agility 15%

Fighting
Divided into categories

Light weapons and barehanded fighting
- knives, clubs, rapier

expertise 35% - knowing where to hit
agility 20%
dexterity 20%
perception 10% - noticing the gaps in enemy defense
concentration 10%
strength 5%

Heavy weapons
- most swords, battle axe, mace

expertise 35%
strength 25%
agility 20%
dexterity 10%
perception 5%
concentration 5%

Long range
- bows, bakh nagh, boomerang

expertise 40%
perception 25%
concentration 15%
dexterity 15%
strength 5%

The importance of expertise could be debated. Some might say that it matters far more than 50%, but in my opinion, even a total amateur can manage pretty well if they're naturally dexterous and agile.
And concentration might in reality matter much more than proposed here.

Fishing
expertise 50% - knowing where the fish tend to stay at different times of day and year
perception 25% - in line fishing: noticing when it's eating; in spear fishing: noticing when a fish is swimming by and aiming accurately
agility 20% - in line fishing: pulling up on the right moment; in spear fishing: hitting fast enough not to let it get away
strength 5% - being able to haul up even the biggest fish

Foresting
strength 60%
expertise 20%
agility 20% - mainly for climbing to gather fruits

Gardening
expertise 75% - recognising the species, knowing what they need to grow
dexterity 15% - not breaking them while you gather, and also gathering speed
perception 5% - finding them
agility 5% - as with collecting, how your body tolerates squatting in the bushes

Hunting
expertise 40% - knowing how the animals behave and where they move
agility 20% - running after them, moving nimbly so that they wouldn't hear you coming
concentration 10%
+ the weapon usage skill that would be used when attacking a person: 30% (Note, this includes a lot of skills, some of them repeating ones we have here)

Manufacturing
expertise 50%
dexterity 30%
concentration 10%
strength 10%

Manufacturing machines
expertise 65% (because machines tend to be complicated)
dexterity 15%
strength 15%
concentration 5%

Manufacturing tools
dexterity 50%
expertise 30% - most tools are rather simple
concentration 10%
strength 10%

Manufacturing vehicles
expertise 60%
dexterity 30%
strength 10%

Manufacturing weapons
dexterity 45%
expertise 40%
strength 15% - because many of them require smithing

Mining
expertise 40% - recognising ores, knowing how to dig a tunnel without having it collapse
strength 40%
agility 20%

Smelting/Refining - These should be merged into one skill called Metalcraft
expertise 50%
strength 40% - pumping the bellows
dexterity 10% - not spilling molten metal all over the place

Shipbuilding
expertise 50% - knowing how to do it
strength 20% - for lifting planks
+ Carpentering 30%

Tailoring
expertise 50%
dexterity 40%
concentration 10%

Walking
strength 50%
agility 40%
expertise 10%
- This skill shouldn't affect as much as some others do


Comments?
Endurance is not included because it's pretty much covered by a combination of strength and agility.
Things like intelligence and strength of mind are not included because those hardly develop during one's lifetime and a player cannot play smarter than they are themselves. People should have a right to rp them as they wish. Concentration covers some for mental abilities but it plays only a small role in things. And expertise in certain skills can also be seen as wisdom, even though it's limited to one field of knowledge.

[tiddy ogg]

You've obviously gone to a lot of trouble over this. I agree some more rational skill allocation is needed, but it is surely up to the programmers to tell us how difficult this will be.
And, no doubt, there will be countless arguments over the proportions of each attribute required.
It'll be interesting to see the reaction of those who'll have to implement it.

[Nakranoth]

I like it... a lot... it helps nature choose what a charecter will be. If we see it implimented in its entirety though, the charecters that already exist need attributes based on their current skills so as not to make experts suddenly much less adept at thing they were masterful at.

[west]

I actually think this is a pretty good idea.

[mikejacobs14]

Hell yeah, cantr would be interesting with this thing, why not even add damages you recieve to a certain part of body hinders you? For example if you got cut on hand dex goes down

[Wilmer Bordonado]

Seko, I do like your idea. Certainly, skills system is not actually made the most of it. But -please don't feel as I'am underestimating it- I think skills system should be defined and undestood on a clearer way.

I mean, something like this: (NOTE: I don't know which are the possibilities the following stuff could be programmed)

I will use an example and I will take only three skills on the list just to make it graphically: 1) Hunting 2) Fighting 3) Farming.

So every newspawn (or re-spawn) comes to the Cantr World with the three skills (here at the example, but IG them will be spawn with the whole list of the skills ranking at 0%) at level 0%. Just like a baby.

We're using a status bar to measure them.

There are two ways to increase charries' skills.
a) Staying on a place where everyone's doing a certain activity and LEARN from them. For instance, you're spawn or you come to a place where there are four ACTIVELY farming spinage. So your charrie learn a piece on how to do it, just form "watching", staying, let's say 2 IRL days on that place, and increasing a 0.1% on his/her "Farming" status bar. (Promoting travelling)
b) Staying on a certain place and making an activity for charrie's own. For instance, a charrie who's 0% on "hunting" would increase his/her "hunting experience" on a 0.3% everytime's he/she's killing an animal. Every charrie who's collaborating on a certain skill would receive a similar amount of experience, related, for instace, to "Manufacturing tools", FI.

Wilmer B.

[Nakranoth]

I think what he's really trying to accomplish is getting sortof skill synergies, so that despide being expert in one skill, and awkward in another similar one, you'd be able to do both closer to the same net ability by using attributes as a blancing agent.

[DELGRAD]

Seko good idea. The only problem that I see is the amout of database work that would be needed.


Sorry Wilmer, but skills should not be 0 at spawn. That would put newspawns at too much a disadvantage. How often is fighting done? Learning from those around you limits your ability to move elsewhere. Primaraly remote areas that need residents. One of my characters spawned in a location that had and still has 0 characters. Some areas are hard enough to populate as it is.
Skill LVL should still be asigned as they are now.
Yes I could see this happening if there were enough charachters in a town to perform all the skills needed and enough to defend the towns, but I just can't see this working. I only see the dominant becoming more dominant.
You need to think of it this way. Characters are 20 when they spawn and in those 20 years they must have learned something or their parents were retards. If their parents where retards they would not have survived long enough to have children.
Harsh words I know...

[Nosajimiki]

I kind of like it, but won't all these extra coeffeciants lag the game out even more.

[DELGRAD]

I kind of like it, but won't all these extra coeffeciants lag the game out even more.

That would be my second consern. After the datbase issue.

Side note. I tend to type, submit, edit, submit, edit, etc...

[new.vogue.nightmare]

Yeah, don't start skills at zero. Then Cantr will likely degrade into a generic MMORPG, with people going around trying to level up their skills.

[SekoETC]

Concerning traits

Traits would be given initial values in a similiar fashion that skills are currently assigned. (Two characters of the same language group on the spot are randomly selected and their genes along with a random factor. It would take much less room in the database than having a gene for each skill. Now only 5 would be needed.

I'm not sure how traits could be assigned to existing characters without messing things up. Fortunately there's the expertise part which is individual for each skill. One thing possible would be to allow players to sort out their character traits on their own as long as the final skills would remain the same. I should try calculating this with one of my characters to see if it could be done.

Concerning expertise

Expertises would not be bound on genes. Expertise is something that's learned by experience. Example: if someone proved out to be a gifted carpenter straight from spawning, most likely it would not be because of a vocational skill but because of their high dexterity.

No one should be spawned with full expertise in anything. It would be easier to have expertise values as 0 for newspawns, but if people are totally against this, some initial values may be given.

The initial values for expertise (if we choose to include them) would mainly depend on the local resources.
Examples
- forest spawns would have some inits in foresting
- mountain characters would have inits in digging and/or mining
- hunting expertise would depend on the local animals/people ratio
- For technological things such as Metalcraft, it should be recorded if there are any smelters present and wether they have been used lately. This might be hard to track, especially if you had to do it for the last twenty years. Near impossible even. But I don't think anyone should have expertise just because there's a dusty old smelter standing in some corner, which hasn't been used for half a century.

I'm trying to avoid the word skill here because skills in this system are a sum of a number of traits + the expertise value. Naturally hunger and damage would also have an effect on things.

Other modifiers

mikejacobs14's idea about damage affecting dex is a very good catch - that would make things much simpler than applying a damage modifier on every skill separately.
- Sickness could lower agility (at least if it makes you feel faint).
- Tiredness could temporarily lower strength
- Some sicknesses could lower perception (we could have ones that cause hallusinations or blindness)

Teaching/Learning
How well a person can teach another one depends solely on their expertise level, not the traits. This would give an advantage to old people who have worked on something for ages. Later we could implement traits deteriorating with age, but expertise would NEVER deteriorate. This way old people can be important through their experience, just like in real life.

Newspawns should have a higher learning rate than the old ones. This way if you concentrate on something, you would be able to train at least up to skillful even if you started off as awkward. This might encourage people to choose a career path instead of trying to do everything themselves.

The "skill points" gained would be divided into traits and expertise according to the same ratios used for defining the skill level. This way you could for example train your strength through burying, digging and mining. Nowadays almost no one wants to bury the corpses because it's not productive, but this would make it the most desired pass-time along town guards!

Things like perception and concentration would be the hardest to train because they mostly have only 5-10% meaning in tasks. We might include a meditation project that you could do anywhere - this would help you in archery.

[Nakranoth]

Well, if you're going to spawn someone at age 20 and use this method... then they should obviously gain the "experiance" of having watched their "parents" for the past 20 years... but that would of course mean that every person's actions would need to be tallied for 20 years... and as that would be hellish on system resources... you should really just be basing their new expertise off of their parrents like they are now using the assumption that a child can become at least as talented as their parents by age 20. Or perhaps even better is grabbing random vaues from anyone in the town for expertise... so you could have picked it up anywhere...

[SekoETC]

The problem with picking a skill from someone random is that it's well possible that the person has learned it out of town and has never utilised that skill in that location, so the newspawn might have never seen it happen in action.

Besides, how can you have an implied childhood when you cannot pull any local knowledge from it (ie. the names of people, location, laws)? It would be much easier if everyone started without any expertise. (Exept maybe some in toolcrafting, since that's universal.) It wouldn't be drastic, even though no one could spawn with an expert, the enhanced training would help you pick up the skills needed.

[marol]

And what about already existing characters?