I'm moving some of my ideas over from MMORPG.com to see if they get more feed back here Skills, the bread and butter of any RPG, most games rely on a class/level system that gives you skill points to apply to your training. I don't like class and level due to the fact of the artificial limits it applies to your character. I like the SWG system thats coming out. But i have a few other ideas. Imagine a game where you start out as a basic for your race. Say human. All the skills cost the same amount, X. You can spend your entire game training as a base human and you will be competitive. You can mix and match whatever skills you want as they all cost X points. Now lets say you've taken a specific race. This race due to its heritage will have a few skills that are easier to learn, say costing 2/3 X and a few that are harder, say 1 1/3 X. You can go through the game and you could be a little better in one skill and a little worse than the human. Ok so you don't want to be just a normal base person. Thats fine to, what you do now is you go join a profession. A profession is similar to classes in other games except they are completely optional. What are the advantages, well when you join a profession, certain skills related to that class become much cheaper.. 1/2 X and also you gain special advantages with whichever Faction you join your profession through. Disadvantages being that while some skills were cheaper, your other skills all go up in price say 2 X. Doesn't this make every profession identical...well no again. Each profession can belong to any of the main factions (for ease right now i'm going to say church, magic, rogue, and army) depending on which faction you join, you'll get a slight mix of abilities to aid you. For example a fighter who trains fighting under the church (they need guards too) could have access to slight heals and prayers. (I know this would make them a paladin) while under the mage group they would learn some basic understanding of magic (you have to being around a bunch of brains all day). Joining the Rogue faction would teach you some dirty tricks and even maybe let you stealth a bit. Where as if you were a fighter in the army you would be a lean mean fighting machine...focused entirely on fighting gaining access to fighter skills not available to fighters who take other groups. A class that trains under a different group gets some skills from that group at the base cost of X. What do you think? I know it sounds like a lesson in algebra and i'm sorry. For those of you who are algebraically challenged i'll throw in some numbers to make it easy (just example) base cost 6 Racial adept cost 4 Racial challenged cost 8 Profession skill 3 Profession/racial adept 2, profession/racial challenged 4 Profession non-skill 12 profession/racial adept 8, profession/racial challenged 16. Profession add skill 6 Also I hate putting a small amount of points into a skill by accident and then those points are wasted. I think if you put any points into a skill you should get some use out of it. (think cantrip spells from D&D, weakest spell in the game, but creative players can put them to great use) Notice that you do not lose the ability to use other skills if you choose a profession, it just becomes more and more difficult to train in them. [edited by - robert4818 on May 30, 2003 9:06:17 PM]

I''ve been working on a skill-point-cost system just today actually. I think its a really good idea. Of course there''ll be a lot of balancing and mechanical tweaking to do, as with any system.

When I get a chance I''ll post my Skill system, and maybe we''ll each be able to gain an alternate perspective on our projects.

I''d really appreciate this. Keep in mind this is just a concept. Thats why there are not really any hard numbers in here. Just an example.