SKILLS:!!!!
We went through this discussion for over 500 posts in the Horizon's boards (before they were shut down. heh!)
My thoughts were....

1. Skills should only be improved through use, and more quickly through training. So, to get better at whittling, you have to whittle, or talk to a master whittler.
AC did this wrong by giving you skill points that you could put anywhere. EQ did this right.

2. It would be nice if skills were invisible. There would be some way of measuring your abilities, but you wouldn't look at a list and see that your skills are 32,50,34,12 in some category.
However, text descriptions "Poor, Good, Excellent" suck. They are just placeholders for the numbers. Bar charts are better, except they are done on percentages which means there is an upper skill limit (which is a bad thing.)
The best solution would be some sort of highly specialized chart that shows your skills as they compare to your other skills. So you can see if your better at standing, or walking. However, that could be a very confusing chart, and it doesn't show how you relate to others, or the world around you.

3. There should be NO skill advancement message. No "DING" as it were. If there is a verbal or audio reward for progressing in a skill then progression becomes all about obtaining that reward instead of increaing your players abilities. It should be taken for granted that to increase skills you have to do the task that uses those skills, and if you do that task your skill will increase. There should be no need for artificial encouragement.

4. The last thing I want to say is that skill advancement should not be seperated from gameplay. In the discussions on the Horizons boards, a comment statement was that they wanted to know when their skills increased so they could stop working on the skill and have some time left over to play the game.

There should be much effort put into making skill improvement and 'playing the game' are inseperable. So that the most effective way of skill improvement is 'playing the game' and so that repetitive, tedious, and single-minded 'practicing' doesn't do you much good.

Most skill related issues fall back to the issue of communicating those skills to the player. If you have a list of numbers associated with words, such as:
Climbing: 10
Walking: 15
Sneezing: 25
One Handed SwordFighting while Standing on your head: 72


Then people are just going to look at those lists and work to make their desired numbers bigger.

However, if there is no list of numbers, people MAY just start playing in the world however it feels natural. The problem is, they MAY feel lots and without direction or purpose.

The two main parts of role-playing games are character interaction, and character development. Skills are the major element of character development. That makes this topic one of the most important in the entire design of any RPG system.

Personally, I'd like something completely new. Make it complex. The computer can handle it. In PnP we had to manipulate the numbers ourselves, so they were presented in a simple manor. Now that the computer is doing the calculation, make the calculations much more complex, so that we really don't want to try to do it all manually.

Part 2
How should skills improvement/maintanence work? If I cast a fireball at a large rat, what should happen? I suggest the following:

  1. You channel mana, whatever that is, so your 'channeling' skill, or 'mana usage' skill goes up.
  2. You create fire from nothing. Here, your 'fire affinity' goes up as well as 'conjuration.'
  3. You form this fire into a ball shape. This is where your actual skill along the 'fireball' line of magic goes up.
  4. Now, you hurl, (or cause to be hurled), this fireball at your target. If it hits the monster, (or would hit) the monster, your 'magical accuracy' skill goes up.
  5. When the fireball gets to the monster, and the check is done against the monsters magical resitance skill, if you succeed, your 'magical potency' skill goes up.

And that is that.
Skills are based on usage, and success, but there are varying degrees of success. I do think that advancement comes not from soley from repetition, but from experimentation. You can get better at doing the same thing, but to really advance, you have to try something new. (So, from your choices, you get better if the monster was a match for you....but whether that is so is done with the same level of specificity as were the skills I mentioned.)

Obviously that is too many skills to be listed on your character sheet. With that degree of granularity, it's probably too much for humans to understand and keep track of, so there's really no reason to show the skill numbers to the players. happy.gif Just use them for calculations, and give the players some other method (testing perhap. It's on another thread) to track their progress.

(Oh yeah, if the monster dies, it's possible that your 'finishing' skill might go up...But since fireball is just generic magic, and you didn't cast the 'finishing' form of fireball, then most likely not. A 'finish' move must be a called shot.) (And that also is another thread.)

I could/should have added another one. 'Concentration'. You have to pass your concentration skill before you can even do the channelling mana skill. In that case it would be based on environmental concerns, how much and how close is the combat going on...and what kind of monster you are staring down.

MANY MANY MANY different and varied skills is the best way to manage this. The list of 'skills' should be constantly changing up until release. Everytime you see a new situation, you need a new skill, and then retro-fit it back into the old formulas.