16 Dec, 2008, Scandum wrote in the 21st comment:
Votes: 0
Asylumius said:
I've always played MUDs where skills worked like this, and it's always grueling trying to drown 1,389,123 fishes to master the drown spell so you can get the next one or fight twice as many Orcs do your parry wont suck.

Thoughts on improving such systems?

I solved this by allowing a skill increase every 5 to 25 minutes combined with a 10% chance of increase on use. What I don't like about this is that everyone ends up with the same skill percentages which is far different from classic d&d. What might work best is the ability to practice something to 50%, then allow training up a skill to 85% through use, and allow training it up from there with practices to 95% for skills the player thinks important.
16 Dec, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 22nd comment:
Votes: 0
IMO, if going for a skill-experience based MUD, levels should not affect combat ability; rather, the skills themselves should affect combat ability (as, after all, you are improving combat-related skills). This is basically the approach that Morrowind/Oblivion take and it works quite well.
16 Dec, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 23rd comment:
Votes: 0
Tyche, uh, what exactly are all those links?
16 Dec, 2008, Davion wrote in the 24th comment:
Votes: 0
DavidHaley said:
Tyche, uh, what exactly are all those links?


He's poking fun at some of the adSense links. And I'll say this now, simply just enjoy them. I'll review the usefulness of them for a month. So expect some form of official announcement around January 15th, concerning them, and our plans :). Until then, hold tight.
16 Dec, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 25th comment:
Votes: 0
Hmm, all I see are the google ads, no adsense links… then again, I have noscript disabling Doubleclick, is that where adsense is coming from?
16 Dec, 2008, Davion wrote in the 26th comment:
Votes: 0
Seeing as I derailed the topic slightly, I figure I should add something worth-while! A MUD I played a lot of and now somewhat run called ADP:NW uses a multi-exp system. You spend your EXP on everything. HP, Mana, Movement, % on skills/spells, spells/skills themselves, restrings, the whole shabang! They got rid of trains and practices entirely. They have 8 different types of exp. WorldXP, CombatXP, TheftXP, CraftingXP, OtherXP, Physical Magic XP, Mana Magic XP, Ritual Magic Exp.

The WorldXP is gained from doing anything (practicing your skills/spells, crafting, rituals, etc) and then depending on what you're doing, you get a secondary xp gain. To gain a specific spell/skill you have to spend experience on it, and gain it from a guild master. The more skills/spells you gain, the more exp it costs to buy the next one. To gain every skill/spell in the game, it'd cost you around 63 million experience. It's wild. And there's 297 spells and 199 skills. It uses a tiered guild system for advancement. To advance you need to master the prerequisite guilds. Eg. To become a mercenary, you need to master combat and thievery. To become an assassin, you need to master rogue and mercenary. It is entirely possible to get to a third tier without killing a single creature (obviously not a combat guild.) The downside to this system is an -insane- amount of grinding is required to get beyond the 2nd tier guilds. I believe plans to implement quests that award specific experiences were in the works, but never finished. It's a pretty sweet system for advancement. Makes for a very robust game, that is, if you put in alternatives to the grind.
16 Dec, 2008, quixadhal wrote in the 27th comment:
Votes: 0
DavidHaley said:
Vatiken said:
I suppose the biggest problem with skill experience is deciding on how much experience to reward, and how often. Combat experience I suppose should be far greater then say fishing experience to the risk involved.

Why is that? Do you become a better fighter after an hour of practice than a better fisherman after an hour of practice?


Actually, when tweaking my own game's skill system, I decided to make the skill gain rate follow a bell curve. When you first learn a skill, you suck at it. At that point, you really don't know what you're doing, so you learn from success almost exclusively. As you crawl your way up the curve, you become somewhat competant and continue to improve on success, but also start being able to see why failures failed, so you learn from those as well. Once you pass the halfway point, you're going to succeed more often than not, so you learn less from the repetition of doing it right again, and more from the occasional failure. By the time you near the cap of 95%, you are only learning on the rare failure that happens.

That serves two purposes… it lets people get a sense of progress through the middle ground, where having it work or not seems pretty arbitrary (and it is… 50% dice rolls are about as arbitrary as they come!). It also encourages people to spend a practice session or two at the start. You *can* improve by casting 'magic missile' over and over again, but it might be worth a prac or two to get it up onto the curve where it can train itself at a reasonable pace. The min-maxers will, of course, try to cast the spell at chickens all day. :)
17 Dec, 2008, Vatiken wrote in the 28th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
Seeing as I derailed the topic slightly, I figure I should add something worth-while! A MUD I played a lot of and now somewhat run called ADP:NW uses a multi-exp system. You spend your EXP on everything. HP, Mana, Movement, % on skills/spells, spells/skills themselves, restrings, the whole shabang! They got rid of trains and practices entirely. They have 8 different types of exp. WorldXP, CombatXP, TheftXP, CraftingXP, OtherXP, Physical Magic XP, Mana Magic XP, Ritual Magic Exp.


I do like this idea, and I've thought of it in the past. As Kavir pointed out it does make no sense for someone who fishes to thus become better at spell casting for example. So the idea of seperate XP pools, it definetly a different way to go.

Pondering the idea, especially the "spending you exp on everything" comment, has actually given me an epiphany. In my MUD, characters have levels but aside from a numerical marker of rank, they really serve no purpose. You achieve a level, you gain some HP, VP, and 3 SkillPoints and 1 Feat. Then you do it over again. Perhaps an EXP store would be better suited?!? Say 100 xp bought you your constitution worth of HP? maybe 250 xp bought you a skill point? 500 xp got you a feat point?

Has anyone seen a MUD with a similar system that worked well? Or atleast conjured up a similar idea before but detered due to foreseen downfalls?
17 Dec, 2008, Davion wrote in the 29th comment:
Votes: 0
Vatiken said:
Pondering the idea, especially the "spending you exp on everything" comment, has actually given me an epiphany. In my MUD, characters have levels but aside from a numerical marker of rank, they really serve no purpose. You achieve a level, you gain some HP, VP, and 3 SkillPoints and 1 Feat. Then you do it over again. Perhaps an EXP store would be better suited?!? Say 100 xp bought you your constitution worth of HP? maybe 250 xp bought you a skill point? 500 xp got you a feat point?


That sounds good. How it works on ADP, is every time you buy something it gets more and more expensive. It kinda bottle necks the amount of HP you can buy so you don't have people running around with 20k hp ;). Starts out at 100 WordXP for 10 hp, then gradually goes up. Right now, for my character who has 5k hp, it costs 14 000 WorldXP to buy 10hps!
17 Dec, 2008, KaVir wrote in the 30th comment:
Votes: 0
Vatiken said:
Perhaps an EXP store would be better suited?!? Say 100 xp bought you your constitution worth of HP? maybe 250 xp bought you a skill point? 500 xp got you a feat point?


That's more or less how GodWars muds do it - you spend exp to train stats, skills, spells, hp, mana, etc. The only drawback is that characters don't tend to be as well rounded as they would in a more traditional level-based advancement system, which can make it difficult to gauge their relative power.
20.0/30