it seems i have a whole hell of a lot of problems with this in Eternal World. Some people say its too easy, some people say its too hard, but whenever i play its pretty balanced to me, maybe im not seeing something? Anyways, i believe its REALLY hard to get a system balanced, and ive had lots of trouble with it. Lately i think ive been getting close to balance though!

I find it too easy, meself

I'd suggest putting a BYONDpoll on your webpage and linking to it within the game... that way, you can know for sure what the major opinion is!

Just be glad you don't have to write about why the macaroons and the tarantella are symbolic.

We discussed that already. =P

No, what's scary is singing a song in front of hundreds of people entitled "Turkies United!", and if you don't, you get an F and your grade is ruined because concerts are 35 percent of your grade.

My chior concert is in 3 weeks.
I may not come back alive.....

Anyway, I'm talking the nitty gritty stuff. What do you consider to be most ideal amount of time it takes for a person to get very good at the character skills in a "roleplaying game"? This includes both the hack-and-slash part of the game and the "pbag" aspect; how well you can train your skills outside of the real world.

In my opinion, the only thing that can raise your skill is by practicing something for a very long time. In my case, I believe that a few solid real-life MONTHS of playing a game will be enough to make you a master of a given profession. Of course, you would be lacking in every other skill. It would take a good year or so to totally max out your abilities.

I think it would take generally a few months to get good at something. The time involved would have to be measured online as well as offline, I think, for fairness, with offline practicing as part of a daily routine being possible. (It should be possible to reap greater gains while online, though.)

However, as everyone knows (or if they don't know, know they do!), experience is life's best teacher. By your lonesome, you can only hope to raise your experience through self-training to a level dictated by your intelligence -- the smarter you are, the more independent you can be.

Once the precious level of training runs out, you need to actually go do it. So, for example, if you enrol your character in an academy of magical arts, the level of understanding you get can only be bested by actually leaving the school and practicing the art yourself.

That's an interesting idea, but I have a better approach.
In theory I think a person could reach a very good level of skill simply by study, without necessarily having that skill tested in the field. However, the skill would have to be tested as part of the studying process. For example, if you're learning to box you have to be able to spar with someone in order to get really good.

As far as I've ever been able to figure out, one's real-life ability to learn a skill depends on several factors:

1) Dedication: Amount of time dedicated to the exercise.
2) "Smart" studying: This means it's necessary to take breaks, take up distractions, learn other things, etc.
3) Talent: Generally one's ability to pick up the skill quickly.
4) Training and experience: A source of knowledge you'd be unable in most cases to learn on your own. This includes people as well as books, but also includes observation of others using their skill who might not necessarily be teachers. (I.e., a swordsman sees a new attack maneuver and begins to contemplate how to use it himself.)
5) Innovation: The ability to make leaps in logic and move ahead. This is rare and requires insight, but generally brilliant and well-rounded characters (Renaissance Men) would possess this more thoroughly.

I think any realistic skill training in an RPG would have to be modeled on these ideas. This means you can try to learn to fight on your own, and manage a little bit, but your skill can only progress so fast or so far without better instruction. The quickest way to learn anything is to hook up with someone who knows a lot more than you, who can teach you elements to the skill that you couldn't otherwise learn. (As a bonus, a teacher may sometimes learn a new trick from their student.) Books would be helpful in filling in the more arcane gaps in knowledge. Finally, an accomplished lore-master may, through persistent study and experimentation, learn something new on their own via innovation, or brush up on some minor aspect of their skill more quickly than it would take a novice to do.

It's up to you to decide how complex to make such a skill system, of course, even if you follow roughly these guidelines. I see skills as having "dimensions", where each dimension is a different aspect of the skill, like a maneuver in fighting or a magic spell. You could imitate life and make such dimensions dynamic (i.e., new ones could pop up all the time, and they might not have a name), or make them specific sub-skills. The former would be more difficult, but could be rewarding in that the capacity to learn something new is always there.

I'll end with a small example: A master fighter is attacking some novice player, but this player has, on his own, picked up a combat move the master has never seen. The master now knows this maneuver exists; after the battle progresses a little longer, the two break off and go their separate ways. The novice fighter has just seen some incredible stuff used against him, and knows there's a great breadth to the skill of fighting, but he doesn't have a whole lot of general skill to draw on; he can continue to go it alone, but to seriously advance he needs a trainer. The master has a lot of general skill, however, which means he's familiar enough with his body to be able to consider the maneuver he saw, and develop it into a well-learned combat move rather quickly with practice; he will also have a decent idea how to defend against it.

Lummox JR

Gughunter wrote:

In my opinion, the only thing that can raise your skill is by practicing something for a very long time. In my case, I believe that a few solid real-life MONTHS of playing a game will be enough to make you a master of a given profession. Of course, you would be lacking in every other skill. It would take a good year or so to totally max out your abilities.

It depends entirely on what you're aiming for with the game. Console RPG's are typically designed to span (very rough estimate) 25 to 50 hours of game time. MMORPG's like EverQuest are designed to span months, which is presumably what you have in mind. However, if you design with months in mind, you are going to need either a great deal of variety in the game's content, or a group of players who enjoy each other's company so much that killing the same rat icon 500 times is accepted as par for the course.

The Haven Seed prides itself (and will still pride itself when it is "finished") on being nearly completely dynamically generated and supported. I have a complete economy and ecological system in the works for it. If people fudge the figures too much, the game will essentially try to return its level to its primary balance, through natural disasters and the like.

Essentially, this means that if people chop down a huge section of forest, the forest will fight back, and try to reclaim more ground to reach its equilibrium point. Likewise, if someone kills off a bunch of wolves, the rabbit population will explode, which in turn will jump the population of wolves massively, until the wolves kill off the rabbits, at which point the wolves will starve off and die. In reality, this generates a sine-wave, but in game terms I'm making it as a damped sine wave which eventually returns to equilibrium.

What I like most is that if you kill off all the rats in a region, no more rats. Rats will actually consciously look for proper breeding/roosting areas, such as caves, so genocide is an extremely difficult task.

Not only that, but creatures will also learn which species to avoid. For example, put two rabbits and a wolf in a meadow. One rabbit is caught by the wolf while the other rabbit thumps off. Thereafter, every single rabbit will fear wolves.

(I should make a listing of the various engines and features desired. Mind you, almost all of the features I have in mind are planned out on paper and not implemented yet.)

For what it's worth, I'm currently envisioning my next planned game as a "one-shot". Someone pays for the download, gets friends interested, and announces a semi-regular schedule of hours when the game will be run (in-game, the players can choose to donate BYONDimes to defray the host's costs if he's conscientious in keeping the world hosted, admins fairly, etc.). The game goes on for a month or so, after which time the world is pretty thoroughly explored, pillaged, and exhausted, and hopefully everyone goes away happy, with a souvenir of the experience (a downloadable HTML file created by the players' actions throughout the game).

Now THAT is a great idea. I like your concept of unsustainability... if you managed to make it addictive enough, you could very well liken it to pleasure drugs. Buy a world in a box, and have fun while it lasts! =P