Skill system thoughts:

Atrophy: Very bad. With the time scale (usually 6/1, 6 in-game hours for every RL hour, or a game day every 4 RL hours), it''s still unreasonable to start having atrophy as quickly as it usually starts. The only reason that I see to allow skill atrophy is because you have a skill cap. Without a skill cap, there is little (or no) reason to have skill atrophy. Yes, skills will slowly atrophy, but how much will they atrophy? Are you saying that someone who hasn''t really used Algebra in a year or two will have forgotten how to do it? I can still do algebra and I haven''t taken any math classes in over a dozen years. I may be an exception in that I can do probabilities and statistics in my head and never took a probabilities and statistics class.

Either way, Atrophy in games happens too fast and there isn''t any compensation for already having gotten a better level of ability within a particular skill. I''ve already attained a 125 in 1h slashing, but it''s atrophied down to 80, how is it compensated that I already have attained 125? Unless you give the player a double rate (or more realistically higher rate) of progress until they hit at least 90% of their previous skill level, you''re just punishing the player for not perpetually using the same skills over and over again.

Exp higher for failing:

What the heck are you thinking? I covered this in the other thread. Regardless to say, rewarding someone MORE for failing will end up with not a murder based system, but a SUICIDE based system. People will only actually succeed when they have something to gain by winning, such as phat lewt. My friend is sitting here telling me that if we kill each-other over and over we''ll be uber inside of a week. Go attack Vox over and over and over until you''re uber. Wow, that taunt didn''t work, I guess I got better because I don''t know what does work with that guy? Duh...

Success teaches you one method that does work. Failure teaches you one method that doesn''t work. Since there are many more ways that don''t work than do work, you can theoretically fail forever and never get any better at succeeding, since you have no reference point. Learning more from failure implies that you already have a great amount of experience from which to work from and an even greater number of formerly successful methods which to go through. That''s a dangerous assumption.

I don''t think that killing should be the only way that you reward people. As a matter of fact, I think that there should be different implications for killing and not killing an enemy, but if you beat them down to almost dead and let them go as opposed to beating them to death, there should be no difference in the exp or skill gains that you get. The humans should like you more for killing the Orc and the Orcs should like you less. That doesn''t mean that a ''green weenie'' orc should jump you just to commit seppuku on your sword, but he should definitely go get his 120 buddies and drag you down like a deer running from a bunch of wolves, or maybe a shark getting whupped on by a school of dolphins.

I agree, getting worse in skills you don''t use shouldn''t be part of a game. People don''t forget that fast. Of course, they don''t learn as fast as characters in RPGs do either, but at least it''s fun to get better. It isn''t fun to get worse. And after all, people DO learn faster than they forget (otherwise everyone who didn''t constantly train everything he knows every day, would get more and more stupid.)


About getting XP for both failure and success:
I agree that "Success teaches you one method that does work. Failure teaches you one method that doesn''t work. ".

I do think that it''s a good idea to give XP for both cases though. In my system, you get a number of Training Points (Which are basically XP in each skill) in a skill when you use it. The amount of TPs you get is equal to 1/(the probability of success) if you succeed, and similiarly 1/(the probability of failure) if you fail. There is a max amount of TPs you can get for each try, and you need to get over a value (I think 1.5) to get TPs at all.

This way, if you succeed with something you had a 95% chance of succeeding, you won''t get any TPs because you didn''t learn anything new. On the other hand, if you fail, you''ll get a lot of TPs because you just realized something you had completely missed out on! Similiarly, if you succeed with something that you really have no idea on how to solve (5% chance or so) then you also learn a lot.



"Kaka e gott" - Me