[MUD-Dev] Moving away from the level based system

[John Buehler]

msew writes:

> Agree and disagree.  Taking EQ as an example, you are a lvl 60
> warrior.  Your skills are not maxed.  You go and con the ghoul lord
> in lguk.  He is green.  He can kick your ass and then some.  You
> should have a chance to gain some skills and exp from him, if you
> are fighting him.

EverQuest's 'consider' system is not something that I'd cite in
talking about skill systems.  It does not take into account an NPC's
speed, strength, armor class, weapons, magical resistance, etc.  All
of those things are usually very high on NPCs in order to make them
more of a challenge to players because NPCs have no brains.

A Ghoul Lord is a highly-skilled, strong and fast opponent.  It's not
an example of a 'novice' by any stretch.  The green 'con' is a lie.
As many who tried to solo him found out.

> Saying that a master fencer is not going to learn anything EVER from
> a newbie fencer is not a correct statement at all.  Certainly the
> chances are lower but he should still get something out of training
> against the newbie.  Or killing that lvl 45 mob.

Killing a level 45 NPC when you're a level 60 character is not a
novice/master comparison.  In any case, I'll stick to my statement
that masters don't learn from movices.

Note that the skill system that I have in mind is complex.  Opponents
have skills that compete with yours, and if you throw a skill use at
me that is near or beyond my opposing skill, then I might learn
something from the encounter.  Because there are basic skills and
advanced skills, you might have a very good basic skill and lousy
advanced skills, suggesting that you are inept.  But when you make
your inept attempt with an advanced skill, you may do it so quickly
that it surprises me and I learn something.  The 'quickness' of your
skills comes from a basic skill.  I oppose that skill with my basic
skills.  So you may push up my basic skills, which in turn have an
effect on my advanced skills.

So I'm accomodating your scenario, but not the way you might want.  A
newbie character is not able to advance *any* master's skills.  All
newbie characters come into the world completely vanilla.  The things
that they want to do, they start doing, and their character adapts to
that role.  That's because as they challenge their character, their
character's skills advance in response.  Spend lots of time dodging
arrows?  After being a pin cushion for a long time, you'll eventually
build up your speed.  You may never actually be able to dodge an arrow
(depends on the dictates of the world), but you'll be able to dodge
things well.  You can't parry, you can't lift heavy objects and you
can't do magic, but you can dodge really well.  And you can do
whatever else doing lots of running around dodging things gets you.
Maybe your ability to see small fast objects is improved.

The usual reaction to this is that if I'm doing strong actions, then
my strength goes up.  And that means that all warriors will be big,
burly guys and all mages will be frail.  For the most part, this will
be true.  No character gets an advantage on actually developing
particular skills.  This is because I don't want anyone feeling
obliged to discard their character because they picked the wrong body
type at the beginning of the game.  There can be wiry strong fighters
and big fat mages.  These are choices that players can make, usually
for roleplaying or uniqueness reasons.  But for the most part they
will not affect the way that the character acts.  Unless the mage
works out in some way, he doesn't get to be strong.  A travelling mage
will be able to travel well, of course.  A travelling mage who carries
a heavy pack *will* get strong.  But a heavy pack will inhibit his
ability to move quickly, and that will be a problem for other reasons.
And round and round we go.

JB

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