Lair Larrikin
Posts: 26
Joined: Tuesday, 21st February 2012, 14:46
Replacement for the skills menu
Motivation
Skill allocation involves spoilery information and is subject to min-maxing. It is the area of crawl where the player feels the most in control; players are rewarded for paying attention to it. Yet, the system is probably too granular: a fair part of the time spent pondering whether Armour should be raised to 14 or 15 is ultimately lost in vain. You need to make some decisions (auto-skilling only gets you so far), you can make fairly precise decisions, but finding out the optimal allocation is spoilery. Moreover, the way this system is accessed (through the 'm' menu) is not in line with how the other systems of crawl are accessed (interacting with the dungeon and items). This last point is what, for me, makes the current skill system detract from the experience of crawl.
On the other hand, skills play the indispensable role in crawl of making character development irreversible, and thus strategic. Without skills, a mage could become a tank just by fully changing their equipment (and at some point, they will have found all the necessary pieces of equipment in the dungeon). With skills, they lose the xp they have invested in magic, thus making this transition worse than levelling up as a tank from the start.
The proposal is to reduce the cognitive load of skills by deducing their value from irreversible actions taken by the character. From this, we get an "affinity" of the character for each skill. The effective level in each skill at each instant depends on their xl and their affinity with each skill. Affinity is derived from reading strategic scrolls as well as learning spells. There is no victory dancing as there used to be with training, since there is no xp pool (just like in the current system).
Some generalist skills are folded into existing stats or become stats themselves, thus raising the relevance of the stat system (which has a lighter cognitive load than the skill system, but could gain from being more present in the game). I don't think this requires more frequent stat updates.
Proposed system
The skills are the same as they are currently. The level of each skill, however, is defined as skill level = x * xl * aptitude * (affinity / total affinity) + y*(manuals read). Total affinity is the total affinity of all skills, so each increase in the affinity of a skill comes at the price of a decrease of all other skills; x and y are suitably chosen numbers.
Affinity is calculated as follows for each skill:
- Fighting: proportional to (free spell slots / total spell slots)
- Stealth: folded into dex, or proportional to (enchant armour and identify scrolls used on 0-base AC armour)
- Shields (enchant armour and identify scrolls used on shields)
- Armour: proportional to (enchant armour and identify scrolls used on non-0 base AC armour)
- Dodging: folded into dex
- Spellcasting: folded into int. The distinction between int and spellcasting is covered by mutations as well as species like Ogres getting special abilities.
- Invocations: becomes a stat, which is never picked by random stat upgrades
- Evocations: proportional to (id scrolls used on evocables)
- Weapon skills (except unarmed): proportionnal to (id scrolls and enchant weapon used on a weapon of that class)
- Unarmed combat: constant. This means that the share of unarmed combat will only go down as other affinities go up. This goes into the trope of Martial arts as a discipline to which the character must devote themselves exclusively.
- Spell schools: memorised spells of that school.
Starting skills
Starting affinities are either flat or (better) derived from the background. In that second case, it makes sense to give the melee classes a +1 or +2 hand axe instead of a war axe and so on (and count affinities as if they had read an enchant weapon scroll to get that weapon)
15-rune games
Skills become capped at xl=27. This affects extended. So be it. Increase the generation of manuals in the late branches if need be.