Crypt Cleanser
Posts: 723
Joined: Monday, 9th June 2014, 13:39
Tuesday, 22nd July 2014, 04:29
Proposal: Skill Training Expansion
This idea has been percolating in my brain as I've struggled to learn the "intricacies" of skill training. I made it a weasel word in quotes because it all seems so rather arbitrary, to me.
I think part of the problem I have with it is the lack of realism. My solution for that is to propose implementing something I call training atrophy. When you stop training a skill, your skill will begin to atrophy, as it would naturally, albeit at a much slower rate than which it was learned. This will discourage the pumping of single skills, and the piecemeal building of a "finished" character via skill training.
Oh, I know, the autotraining implementation was probably designed to encourage that behavior, but it's much like a parent saying, "Mmm, look, yummy medicine!" to an unhappy child, who would much prefer the chocolate bar sitting right next to the bottle on the counter.
Let's say atrophy works like this: You train skill X until it reaches 6.0, then stop training. Over a period of time, (specifics to be determined), the 6.0 will have decreased to 5.0, while the character focused more on training other skills. I also propose that the atrophy will never decrease all of the training, but only weaken it, sometimes significantly. I would propose that it could never go below one-third of the highest it had ever been trained. So the 6 could only ever fall to 2 if it were never looked at again. The highest permament training level that could be achieved, under this condition, would be 9. There is already piety loss, so why not skill atrophy?
I also think that different skills should have different weights as to how much they atrophy, and I also propose a solution for that. Fighting, naturally, atrophies relatively rapidly upon cessation of training. If you cease training fighting for blades training, there would be less atrophy than if you went more toward the books, and if you stopped training fighting altogether, and hit the books to fighting's exclusion for a long period of time, then your muscles, reaction times and skills in that regard are going to atrophy big time. Likewise, if you are studying constantly, and you move to another subject that still in books, your mind can remain engaged in the similar material, but if you were an academic and then you abandoned the books altogether and went all superjock all of the sudden, probably much of the minutiae of your academic learning would be lost in your new focus. In this way, groups of skills affect skill atrophy rates, so that as long as some similar training is achieved, other skills in that group atrophy more slowly.
Ultimately, if such a mechanism were implemented, one would be forced to spread out their skill training, that thing that no one seems to like to do, because, really, no one has to.
Of course, it would also raise a ton of balance and power considerations, and cause an awful lot of good people an undue amount of extra work to try making it function without breaking things, but I think it's a neat idea worth considering, so here it is.
I think part of the problem I have with it is the lack of realism. My solution for that is to propose implementing something I call training atrophy. When you stop training a skill, your skill will begin to atrophy, as it would naturally, albeit at a much slower rate than which it was learned. This will discourage the pumping of single skills, and the piecemeal building of a "finished" character via skill training.
Oh, I know, the autotraining implementation was probably designed to encourage that behavior, but it's much like a parent saying, "Mmm, look, yummy medicine!" to an unhappy child, who would much prefer the chocolate bar sitting right next to the bottle on the counter.
Let's say atrophy works like this: You train skill X until it reaches 6.0, then stop training. Over a period of time, (specifics to be determined), the 6.0 will have decreased to 5.0, while the character focused more on training other skills. I also propose that the atrophy will never decrease all of the training, but only weaken it, sometimes significantly. I would propose that it could never go below one-third of the highest it had ever been trained. So the 6 could only ever fall to 2 if it were never looked at again. The highest permament training level that could be achieved, under this condition, would be 9. There is already piety loss, so why not skill atrophy?
I also think that different skills should have different weights as to how much they atrophy, and I also propose a solution for that. Fighting, naturally, atrophies relatively rapidly upon cessation of training. If you cease training fighting for blades training, there would be less atrophy than if you went more toward the books, and if you stopped training fighting altogether, and hit the books to fighting's exclusion for a long period of time, then your muscles, reaction times and skills in that regard are going to atrophy big time. Likewise, if you are studying constantly, and you move to another subject that still in books, your mind can remain engaged in the similar material, but if you were an academic and then you abandoned the books altogether and went all superjock all of the sudden, probably much of the minutiae of your academic learning would be lost in your new focus. In this way, groups of skills affect skill atrophy rates, so that as long as some similar training is achieved, other skills in that group atrophy more slowly.
Ultimately, if such a mechanism were implemented, one would be forced to spread out their skill training, that thing that no one seems to like to do, because, really, no one has to.
Of course, it would also raise a ton of balance and power considerations, and cause an awful lot of good people an undue amount of extra work to try making it function without breaking things, but I think it's a neat idea worth considering, so here it is.
it gets slowly "drained" (Almost identical in effect to getting drained in exactly that one skill). Training it, or using it causes you to restore the levels you'd lost in it. (Naturally training it also increases the max level it will be 'restored' to.)
)
