On Fri, 12 Apr 1996, Mark Devlin wrote: > Before I get into something I might not be able to get out of, what's > involved in junking all the classes and levels and making a skill-based > system? I'll tell ya how we did it on my mud, it may not be the best or most efficient way, but it works for us... Without levels, you need some way for people to get skills and improve them... practices are difficult, how do you award them without levels or experience to go by? We decided to ditch practices as well, and let people learn skills in 3 ways; 1) learn by use 2) learn by being taught 3) learn by study (books/tomes) Except for some basic skills like riding or swimming, we only let people learn by use or be taught if they already have some knowledge in that skill... this keep everyone from being a super-man. The idea is, you pick 4 skills when you create your character out of a bunch of possible "beginning" skills. You can mix up casting and fighting type skills, but in game-play, you're probably going to be better off by specializing in a certain field by choosing related skills. This way people can customize/make their own classes and call themselves whatever they want. The main way people learn is by using their skills..at the end of skills people can learn, if they fail, I make a random roll (1 in 1000 or 10000 usually, depending on the skill) then do some checks to see if they have over 0% and under 95% in the skill, if they have any slots opened for learning (we keep a linked list of the char's recently learned skills, they can learn up to X skills based on int and wis, each one is time-stamped. They can't learn the same skills again for 15 minutes, or different skills over their alloted amount until the 15 minutes on one of the slotted skills is up), then if they pass this whole rigmarole, I up that skill by number(0,2) and give them some bonuses for high int/wis. I make a check each time a skill is learned, to see if it is within a certain range, (around 85% for most stuff) if it is, and another skill, or several skills branch from it (a hugely inefficient switch statement involved there) then the char gets +1% in the new skill(s) as well, this is how you get skills other than the one's you pick when you create your character. Subsequently, some of these newly aquired skills will lead to yet other skills. Not all skills lead to others, some are top level skills requiring you to master 4 or 5 others before you even get started in it, and we try to keep them all fairly related... re: burning hands->fireshield->fireball. Its a little messy, but I like the system myself. We're still working on extracting classes from the mud, but thats basically just going to be fiddling the menus, because if you just setskill someone in some low branch skill, they'll be able to go on from there and learn the skills that follow. Hope this wasnt too confusing :) If ya wanna come by and chat sometime about skill systems, or see it in action, we're in perpetually not-opened/always-revising/beta mode at; ifconfig.intserv.com 4000 -Sky
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