[MUD-Dev] Re: skill system

[Jo Dillon]

Andrew C.M. McClintock (andrewm at tiger.hsc.edu) spake thusly:
> I've been mulling over some ideas for the skill system in my mud (at
> this stage still no more than a fantastical whimsy) and thought I
> would bounce the ideas off the list.
> 
> For each skill there would be:
> 
> Knowledge (book learning/education) -

[snip]

> Practical application (experience) -

[more snip]

  Presumably you would want to limit the influence of book learning
over practical application for some skills; trying to learn swordfighting
from a book would likely not get you very far, the only way to learn it would
be by practical experience (or would tuition by a fencing master go under
education? It seems more logical to me to use the same mechanism for
a fencing master's training bouts as for real fights). Rather than
using book learning to set the maximum you can learn by actual practise,
I'd probably have a default maximum value for each skill which would exist
without book learning, and then allow book learning to give you a small
amount of practical skill (depending on the skill in question) and raise
that maximum by certain amount (again depending on the skill in question).
So for instance, swordfighting would have a high maximum, and learning
from a book would give minimal practical experience and wouldn't raise
that maximum. Alchemy, on the other hand, would have a very low initial
maximum, and book learning would raise actual experience and maximum
experience by large amounts.

	Jo