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[Silverionmox]

Didn't we have somebody preaching a skill for a task, a product, and a material, so carving a stone chair would be 'furniture making' skill x 'Stonework' skill x 'Chair' skill?

If I'm not mistaken, Armok I or one of Bay 12's other games had such a system. So it's pretty much an idea that's regularly rediscovered. It would also allow people to customize their skills, synergy, groupings, ...

[Starver]

Didn't we have somebody preaching a skill for a task, a product, and a material, so carving a stone chair would be 'furniture making' skill x 'Stonework' skill x 'Chair' skill?

It probably wasn't me, but under the tree+combo system I've rambled on about[1], that'd be a "chair" (<= being a more expert sub-branch of "furniture") x "stoneworking" type of assignment.  Include the quality of the workspace as a value too, though, I should think.

And an interesting thoguht occurs, about advocating a multiplier between two or more prerequisites.  Either nothing is truly treated as zero (even sub-Dabbling is just '1', where Legendary+5 is many orders of magnitude higher, internally), or a zero-product item (god[2] at furniture, but not yet any skill in rock, frexample) is still a recognisable item, just the most basic bit of tat there is.  Or perhaps each skill is preincremented in the experience calculuation (i.e. q = ++x*++y*++z), so even when coming to a task with 0 skill in something, the product is governed by the post-task experience rating of 1 in that area.

Secondarily, if multiplying, should one then take the Nth root to normalise a quality figure of an item with one prerequisite skill ( e.g. q=val(Legendary) ) to be echoed in the quality figure of an item that requires more than one that you may each have at that level ( i.e. q2=sqrt(val(Legendary)*val(Legendary)) or q3=cubert(val(Legendary)*val(Legendary)*val(Legendary)) ).

Either that, or work at logarithm levels and average them, or RMS it, or whatever you like doing to bias the unworthy combinations of abilities lower and the worthy ones higher.

[1] Not as a suggestion, merely as an extrapolation of a suggestion.

[2] Typo.  Left in, though. 

[Granite26]

For three Skills, A, B, and C

Task (depending on A,B,C) = X₀A + X₁B +X₂C + X₃AB + X₄AC + X₅BC + X₆ABC + X₇A²B.... ad nauseum, where an undeclared X_y is defined as 0 (goes away).

If you really wanted to go crazy, just declare a series of X_M,N,O where M,N,O are the powers of the skills.  Perfectly moddable, needlessly complex... AKA FUN

[Pilsu]

You really should address a comprehensive span of possible outcomes if you're going to suggest something like this. If a master of slate drawers makes an obsidian desk, what is his effective skill level? Does ballista operating grant skill for catapults for some incomprehensible reason? If a master of pine chairs makes a willow chair, what's his effective skill? What about when he makes a microcline chair? How are modded materials treated?

[jaked122]

masonry could have some subskills, brickmaking would be different than bricklaying, and sculpting a statue would go towards a skill with more complex tasks, eg stonecarving or some other name.

[Granite26]

You really should address a comprehensive span of possible outcomes if you're going to suggest something like this. If a master of slate drawers makes an obsidian desk, what is his effective skill level? Does ballista operating grant skill for catapults for some incomprehensible reason? If a master of pine chairs makes a willow chair, what's his effective skill? What about when he makes a microcline chair? How are modded materials treated?

As far as I'm concerned, if you want complex, every task should have a letter for every skill.  How much does your letter opening skill add to your chance to block an attack with a shield?  X points, but if you've also got tightrope walking, there's a synergy bonus of Y points.

Rather than X_M,N,O It would be ^X(Y₁,Y₂...Y_Z)

[tsen]

That would probably be vast overkill as far as processing power goes, but assuming we all had 2000 terrahertz processors I agree that kind of system would be great.

[Maw]

Since the conversation seems to revolve around Masons skilling up with the big construction jobs (block making, wall construction, the BIG PICTURE megaprojects... err constructions) and also having the skills to 'construct' furniture etc, why not just do the following:

Transfer the furniture abilities to the Stonecrafter.  Since the Stonecrafter is already 'crafting' with stone (mugs, toys, instruments etc) wouldn't crafting larger items such as coffins, furniture and such just be an outgrowth of that?

This opens up the Mason to skill gains from construction of walls etc as originally suggested as you aren't cross training them into furniture makers.  Of course, this leaves the Mason with a restricted skillset.  As an outgrowth correction for this:

Mason constructed buildings increase in quality (we already have, just for pure value).  However, output of higher quality buildings receive a quality modifier bonus i.e. the Stonecrafter trying to turn out high quality stone furniture in a poor quality workshop receives a penalty (negative bonus) to his quality output (less chance of producing higher quality items).  Working in a Masterquality Workshop, however, gives a high bonus to quality.

Rationale: working with poor quality tools in a terrible workplace makes it difficult to produce quality work.  A well designed workbench, good, sharp tools etc makes it a hell of a lot easier to produce quality.

[Granite26]

wouldn't be any slower than any other skill method, even if you explicitly called out every skill.  Not that you would, just have a linear list of the skills you were using.

[Pilsu]

I really don't see how a workshop would improve the quality of your work to any significant degree. Tools sure but having a pretty table really wouldn't do much. Should tools wear out and break? Do they need to be sharpened?

If Masonry was combined with Stonecrafting, it'd do nothing to explain why a good "Stoneworker" trained by grinding chairs is suddenly good at making rings. Besides, Woodcrafters craft the small wood knickknacks, having a stone equivalent has it's place. I would relegate statues to it though, if for no reason other than game balance

[Techhead]

An interesting idea came to me that throws a wrench in the works.
If a stoneworker trained by carving statues and scupltures for his entire life, but was then commissioned to make a door, what would happen? I imagine he would output a beautiful work of art that looks like a door, but doesn't swing on it's hinges properly. The door would look lovely in any room, and no one could ever open it once installed. A piece of furniture that is useless for anything other than admiration. In the meantime, the noble who commissioned it was overjoyed to see it in his bedroom, until he realized he was locked inside. No one ever heard his screams through the thick walls of his suite.

[Starver]

I had a think about it overnight.  Think of a tree something like:

Skills

• Materials
  • Stone
    • Sedimentary
      • ...maybe subdivide for sandstones, gritstones, etc...
      • ...limestones, chalk, etc...
      • ...shale, or whatever (arguable as to where various items lie, of course)
      • Blocks of
    • Volcanic
      • ...granitic stuff... ...obsidianesque...  ...blah blah blah... all their own sections
    • Metamorphic
      • ...accordingly...
  • Wood
    • Hardwood
    • Softwood
    • Other (i.e. tower cap?)
    • Planks of
  • Metal
    • Ductile (below which copper, wrought iron, etc)
    • Brittle (pig iron, etc)
    • ... and whatever, because working different types needs its own knowledge
    • Bars of
  • Bone
    • Skulls?
    • Femurs?
  • Plant
    • TBD (intended for ropes and similar)
• Mechanical
  • Basic
    • Subset to gears, axels, insofar as constructing these from (B)uild (M)echanisms items goes
  • Fiddly
    • Stuff for creation of Crossbow mechanisms and the like
  • Heavy Engineering
    • Mechanisms
      • Manufacture
      • Installation (i.e. levers)
      • Connection
    • Mill construction (wind and water being subsets?)
    • Pump construction
• Construction and Demolition
  • Subset to (walls, floors <=further subset),
  • Bridges
  • Pillars and supports
  • whatever
• Architecture (i.e. design of)
  • Bridges
  • Supports
  • etc
• Furniture
  • Surface
    • Subsets to chairs, tables, etc
  • Container
    • Subsets to chests, cabinets, etc
  • ...whatever else...
• Crafts
  • Subset to size and/or function, so earrings are different to statues, swords are different from ropes, clothing is subtly different from bags, and possibly subset the instrument-making into wind, string, etc
• Food Handling: with subsets for the agricultural end (growing, milking), bulk processing (milling, extraction) and preparation (cooking), but I haven't worked out whether milling for dyes should be in here, so maybe a change of title to "Plant Handling", except that this excludes milking, so maybe an Animal Husbandry tree should take that over...

Skill levels are set at branch-tip level.  Effective skill level of a  branching point is the sum of all skill levels directly underneath it, divided by the number of possible branches.  A work order that requires a chair skill would primarily look for experience in making chairs, but would fall back upon the effective skill for making "surface items" at 50% if this exceeds actual chairmaking.  Or if 25% of the Effective "furniture" superset skill is greater than either.  This is a further penalty for going outside the speciality (I didn't think you'd have much truck with the straightforward inherited effective level, but I didn't want to deny a Legendary cabinet maker a chance of making a half-decent chair).

As far as the Construction and Demolition options are concerned, better experience with a wall will allow quicker building or removal of a wall (in leiu of quality concerns).  If it's a stone block wall, then experience of the stone subtype, stone blocks and walls is used (or backtrack up the tree, for each, accordingly) and experience is gained in all/some of these according to developer's preference (from a fixed amount of each, to randomly distributed to random subskill within the requirements).  But demolition/removal gives less available gain of experience than the building, obviously, even on a net gain per time needed basis, and maybe it could be skewed towards material understanding, so that removing a lot of stone walls (of many varied types) gives a some experience of each stone type, and less (but still some, on balance) towards how it was put together.  But I've included "block" material experience sub-trees within each material type there as a skew so that if working with pre-prepared materials (blocks of stone, planks of  wood, bars of metal) then the experience gets shared thinner on the basic material than if working with the raw material that programmatically needs more time to use than blocks, and/or less quality where applicable.


As far as the program is concerned, going down this path is definitely a major rewrite from the current system (apart from anything else, time needs to be spent deciding the skill tree structures and the elements of tree structure looked for for any particular task) but shouldn't be much more data intensive than the current system, with each character having a number of branch-end skill values no more than a small multiple of the stored array of abilities, at most, and certainly insignificant compared with the 4+D definition of the terrain as I understand it.  Even the background calculations are fairly minor (given a simple lookup-table for prerequisites) and only need to be done on task initiation (for checking the ability) and end (to credit with expertise).  The latter could even be precalculated at the time of the former and feature in some way towards the mood of the Dwarf (one who likes challenges could like the learning from a task she's got some mismatched ability for, and conversley be less enthusiastic about a "been there, done that; ooh look, another masterpiece... so what" situation).


It also occurs to me that hauling jobs could tap into the skills table,  Knowledge of stone (in general, if not the specific type) could help in moving a unit of it, in addition to the strength.   Experience with megabeasts under the Animal Handling skillset  would definitely be invaluable when moving a pet dragon from a cage to a chain.  Certainly make things happen quicker/avoid quitting the job and dropping/letting-free the target of the haul before completion, but succesful completion would give a little (proportionally very small) insight that could assist them taking up a carving career (craftwise or butchery, respectively ) .  Other "skill-less" jobs could tap into a skill-tree, somewhere, also.  Recovering wounded adding (by trial and error) to something like first aid ("yeah, it hurt when I dragged him by the beard, but at least his foot didn't come off, like the other one's did").

This is a huge thing to implement.  I don't expect it to happen like the above, but as far as the theory goes it's a possible idea to expand on (or deflate to something more likable, perhaps),

[Sunken]

As for wall building and its exploit, that could be adressed by making exp gains for "simple" tasks drop off above some skill level. I.e. building rough stone walls will quickly bring Masonry up to Competent (or whatever) but it goes real slow after that. In general, the more critical and expensive the work, the higher the cutoff.

Now that doesn't solve the "stone rings/stone chairs" problem. Perhaps a possible enhancement would be to divide Stonecrafting into only 2 subskills - "large" and "fine" and have each task draw proportionally on one or the other depending on the object.

[nymersic]

As for wall building and its exploit, that could be adressed by making exp gains for "simple" tasks drop off above some skill level. I.e. building rough stone walls will quickly bring Masonry up to Competent (or whatever) but it goes real slow after that. In general, the more critical and expensive the work, the higher the cutoff.

Now that doesn't solve the "stone rings/stone chairs" problem. Perhaps a possible enhancement would be to divide Stonecrafting into only 2 subskills - "large" and "fine" and have each task draw proportionally on one or the other depending on the object.

I won't even touch the rest of the fairly off-topic, albeit interesting, responses (yet).
There is no wall-building exploit.  It's the opposite.  Masons should just receive experience laying walls and floors.  Kinda the same way a miner receives experience with every square taken down, a mason would receive that [or at least some exp] for every square of it put up.  Nobody is disagreeing right?  I like building things, so this would make me happy.

[Sunken]

I was referring to how others view what you're suggesting as an exploit: it would allow you to train masons without any net materials cost. My suggestion was intended to address that objection.