[MUD-Dev] Curing skill spam (was: Moving away from the level base system)

[Travis Casey]

Saturday, January 06, 2001, 3:25:36 AM, Batir <batir at frontiernet.net> wrote:
> From: "Scatter" <scatter at thevortex.com>

>> In real life, you might be bad at playing a certain piece on the
>> piano.  What do you do? You play it over and over until you've
>> practised it enough to get it right almost every time.

> In real life, practicing one song gives you greater ability to play
> that one song, and some marginal improvement in playing any song.
> Unfortunately every usage based system I've seen does not follow
> this.  Instead of being able to play one song much better, and all
> slightly better, by spamming, or macroing, I can now play all songs
> much better.

It's partially a question of the level of skill detail.  You could
have a skill for each song, but that greatly expands your number of
skills, and makes a skill web of some sort a requirement for
maintaining any degree of realism.

> If you want to curb skill spamming, make it meaningless.  In most
> usage based games, I practice my teleportation spell, not so I can
> teleport without fail, but so that my fireball spell does more
> damage, or casts without fail, or my shield spell, or any other
> spell that I need more, but can't practice in a meaningful way by
> macroing.

That's definitely silly, I'd agree.  From the sounds of things, it
seems like the game in question has just one "magic" skill.  The paper
RPGs that I've seen that had learn-by-use have had a minimum of about
eight different magic skills.

> Seems to me that if you really want to have usage based (which I for
> one particularly like, despite the current downfalls), you need to
> have a tree based skill system (not necessarily with prerequisites
> and all the other bruh-ha, though those can be included as well) so
> that macroing one sub skill has little to no effect on the parent
> skill.  At the very least it would even the field, so that a mage
> could not macro one spell to become master of all, and would require
> combat spells to be practiced in - imagine this - combat situations.

The comment about evening the field makes it sound like the system has
only one "magic" skill, but has a lot of skills in other areas.  If
this is the case, then I'd say the a big part of the problem is having
a poor distribution of skills.  If combat has lots of skills, why
should magic have just a few?

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_    Travis S. Casey  <efindel at earthlink.net>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)   


_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev