What about splitting the skills through multiple levels? Say you put in about 9 dexterity and 10 strength, that would unlock a choice of multiple skills, like dual wielding and piercing strikes and some other skills, you would pick one of them and invest skill points in the other unused skill if you want to, so the player would slowly unlock all the skills without needing to read up on all 5 pages.
Well, yeah. But the point of skills was to get away from having to use attributes. I mean, I suppose I could make the skills more enjoyable to read, with flavor text and similar spice... Hmm. 540 skills, One sentence description, Probably averaging 2.5 sentences of flavor text. (at best) That's... somewhere between 28,350 and 37,800 words. Still take at least a month to write.
I was hoping he had some new stuff since then and maybe some elaboration on some of the terms, such as 'Butt Stroke'. 
Buttstroke: The actual, technical, term for smashing someone in the face with the stock of a rifle. The military is professionally trained in butt strokes, in fact that's what a right handed smash with a pugil stick is designed to simulate. (Assuming you're right handed)
I don't think they like the name any more than you do.
On the subject of new stuff. There was a brief time when I did have 27% of the skills worked with the technical details of what they did (though I wasn't entirely happy with them), then a critical existence failure on the part of a computer knocked that back down to 0. In fact the only reason I still had a full copy of the original was because of these forums.
Defn.The buttstroke or butt-stroking, i.e., striking someone with the buttstock of a rifle
But yeah, I'd go through the tabs at least once, myself.
Unless you'd want too, like I would.
Note to self: These are people on dwarf fortress forums. Sanity of players is not a necessary design consideration.
Well, I like the idea. I like lots of ideas, you may have noticed.
But the skill-tree intrigues me. Most (video) games that do stuff like that wind up... with only a few skills, invest X points in this one in order to unlock this one, but OH! until you invest equal points into the second, the first one is better, so you'd better do some grinding, sucka! Or worse, all of them suck except the SINGLE capstone skill, which is of course an endgame skill. I have yet to see a game do skill trees (where multiple points can be invested in one skill) where actually investing in the skills in the middle is worthwhile, or where there's lots of choice between skills.
I mean, D&D has feats, which are a lot like YOUR tree, but you can only take each once, unless specifically specified; and you only get 1 per 3 levels, more or less (usually slightly more, like 1-3 over 20 levels, or 10 extra in rare or unoptimized cases). Your tree AS IT IS (not trimmed down) looks actually similar to the feat trees, but with slightly more; not including splat books.
Personally, I'd be fine reading a list of an average 500 skills per tab over 6 tabs. If I could invest >1 skill point in each, too, I'd be in heaven. If some required multiple skill perquisites (dual wielding + dodge skills, for example), I'd be in heaven's version of heaven. If there were around 60 capstone skills, and a endgame character might get ~2 of them, or 1 and halfway to 3 more, I'd be in that version of heaven's heaven.
I highly doubt anyone with a shred of sanity shares my view on this.
I... hadn't considered multiple point investments. Tthat could help in some areas. Right now the trees look sort of like inverted pyramids, which makes things easy from a hierarchy standpoint.
Multiple requirements for a single skill are difficult, both because its a mess visually (see below) and because it would require a LOT more planning. Also interesting is that it would all but require that cross-links only occur within the same basic tree, otherwise things would get stupidly messy.
With a standard wikidot syntax, the skill tree looks vaguely like this as it stands.
* Base tier
* Second Tier
* Third tier
* Second Tier
Which isn't horrible. However, since wikidot has no flowchart tool into which I can embed links, a tree diagram with crosslinks would look like this
_Base Tier
| \_Second Tier
| \_Third Tier dependent on the above and below
\___/Second Tier
As you can see, that looks decent until I start trying to shimmy in a second pre-req.
It might be better if I just added synergies into the skills later, where I could just add tags into skills that would increase their effectiveness based on skills in completely different areas. (Trauma Control getting bonuses from Knowledge: Biology) Of course, that then creates whole new complex web of things to think up.
EDIT: Since Tabview eats itself when you put it in a table, this is probably the layout I'm going with. Each major area (Confrontational, Social, Utility, Augs) has between 3 and 5 major sub-trees as seen here.
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Topic: Roller's Block (RTD Brainstorming Thread) (HAPPY LATE BIRTHDAY) (Derm is 5k) (Read 739829 times)