Re: [Forge-main] Happy Holidays

[Jerry Stratton]

At 11:57 AM +0000 on 1/11/03, Ricardo Gladwell wrote: 
>Jerry, it looks good. You don't need the 'All Skills' category, so what
>you have in effect is 4-tiered skill hierarchy. I have to admit, I don't
>like the abritrary division of 'mental' and 'physical' skills. Many of
>the physical skills also use mental abilities, such as music, and go
>against the arbitrary 'pick any attribute and any skill' mechanic we
>use. However, I like the final three tiers (e.g. Science -> Mathematics
>-> Algebra).

Yeah, so drop down to three tiers. Actually, I thought you were going to want 
to drop down to two tiers :*)

It might even be right to make the number *and location* of the tiers to be 
genre-dependent. Some genres wouldn't want to get as specific as algebra; 
others wouldn't want something as general as Mathematics.

>I'm still not sure how simple such a categorisation would be. What I'm
>looking for is a fairly simple list of reasonably generic skills for out
>system (see my initial email on this matter).Jerry's list is still too
>open ended, although it makes a fine categorisation system for the
>Sciences skills and so forth.

I think we need to also see how the actual rolls will be made, and how the 
"training" costs will work. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation.

I think it's also important to determine where the focus of skills will be. 
Will it be on abilities or on skills? Will innate ability be the determinant of 
success, or will learned skills be more important?

Depending on how freeform you want it to be, you might remove all 
categorization completely, and just have three levels that are dynamically 
hierarchical. So that as a player I could choose that my character has

Science->Mathematics->Musical Composition

This would make my character's skill very different from someone with:

Music->Keyboard->Musical Composition

or

Humanities->Writing->Musical Composition

Will there be synergy between levels? Will multiple skills be able to play a 
part in the same roll? Perhaps if you want this style of categorization, it may 
be best to simply recognize that and start working on the rest of the game.

Jerry
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