I've been playing a lot of Stone Soup, and one thing struck me about it's experience system: In order to train skills, you needed to have actually DONE something. (in it's case, kill monsters).
Now, in DF, we've got (IMHO) 3 types of players:
1: Skill train by swimming, sneaking, wrestling skeletal rabbits before heading out. These trainers spend hours NOT playing the game in order to create a survivable PC.
2: Use Non-Standard races: Alternately, players tend to create powerful PC classes to adventure with.
3: Finally, players who do neither of these things, tend to have trouble getting started, and die a lot. (I fall into this category).
The possibility for #1 breaks a few major bits of conventional GAME wisdom. In a game, you shouldn't be able to take low risk actions to develop great skills. (This also touches on fort mode military training). If you CAN train up a character to legendary throwing, swimming, sneaking, and wrestling with no risk, why force the player to go through it every time? It's a significant time investment of no-fun and no-difficulty grind.
The question is, how to resolve this? Current (bad) possibilities are:
- Starting Characters with max skills in those areas
- Reducing advantages of easily trainable skills (swimming and sneaking don't add stats)
- Implimenting XP system (Must accomplish something to train skills)
- Forcing skills to be trained in dangerous situations (sneaking in a friendly town)
- Forcing skill training to be effective (no choking undead)
Unfortunately, these are all rather gamey solutions to the problem. (Real life really does reward you for spending 6 hours a day at the gym before going rock climbing)
Any thoughts on other solutions? I know that there's a future goal to give different power levels things to do, that'll help.
TL/DR : Training adventure mode characters either shouldn't be so tedious or shouldn't be so effective
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Topic: Adventure Mode Skill Development: A Gamey Incentive to DO Something (Read 655 times)