I am all for occult teachings in other fields, like your enhanter/blacksmith, or special buffs for fighters from meditation, channelling chi or whatever...

But no, Wizards should be WIZARDS if you want destructive/summoning/transmuting/teleportation type abillities which are not just a mystical extention of normal technologies, then you need to be a wizard first and fore most. Those of you who read my \"Illarion Fallacy\" post will know that I think

\"Perhaps you must become very powerful in other things before getting to touch magic.. \"

Is a terrible Idea. Stop trying to hold back cool features for established players!!!

Far too many people who \"become powerful\" are powergamers who should be the last people to be included in Magic.

As I said, A wizard can learn to fight, but a established fighter cannot learn magic. Magic has to be the central lifes work of any magic using charachter of this sort.

And as for Gandalf, remember that he wasn\'t human, was older than most of creation, and had had quite a long time to practice....

OK, lets all hold hands and acknowlege something that we have all known for years: D&D STYLE MAGIC IS GAY!!!!!

Spellbooks with disappearing ink is dumb... not \"remembering\" a certain spell once it is cast is dumb..

The whole point of MAGIC in any mythology is that it is a force which turns the commonplace necessities of resource management and causality on their heads.

There should be no MANA further, There should be no limit to casting..

What there should be is a price to be paid for weilding magic... Some long term toll it takes on the caster, aspecially when done in a way which compromises his guiding philosophy.

Heres how it works: Lets say Magic skills run 0-300 and spells (a combination of spell difficulty * intensity) run 1-250. The rule is : You can cast any spell at a value
A good wizard might be a guy who never seems to do much but conjure neat looking but useless effects to amust children or sit beggin for change in the town square while spectral violin music plays from no visible agency

A neutral Wizard might spend weeks at a time silently poring over ancient texts, not a metphysical flicker to be seen...

An evil Wizard might be a guy who always gets his way... Not by roasting you with a giant fireball, but by crooking his eyebrow at you in just such a way as to say \"I could quite easily roast you with a fireball, or any of a thousand worse things if you weren\'t nearly beneath my notice, now do as I say, worm!\"

Fighters are a dime a dozen, and should be, they are flexible, robust, they can afford to screw up badly, dust themselves off and try again, people like, respect, or fear them based on what they DO... But wizards are all about what they ARE... the abillity to summon enough occult force to light a friggin candle should make whole villages weak in the knees at the sight of it...

Having a wizard go adventuring with you should be oddly frustrating.. You know that he could easily teleport you right to your destination, level the enemy, and have you back by lunch, but instead, he spends most of his time reading or sitting by the campfire brewing tea while you do all the work... you call for his aid and he smiles knowingly, you ask his advice and he sighs distantly... But then, out of the blue, he applies just the right ammount of meaphysical influence at just the right place at just the right time, and rearranges all the courses of fate around him, making the impossible possible. Then he quietly goes back to the fire and starts water for tea....

Originally posted by zanzibar
Not all businessmen are lawful. :p

Actually, all merchants rely on a fairly law-abiding and civil society to make the prospect of the merchantile trade possible. Even modern day illicit Arms dealers can only operate so long as currencies are reliable, few shipments are hijacked, inventory can be wharehoused without being subject to too much pilferage, the banking and credit system is stable, etc...

Alternatives to guilds found in western history:

Order    (as in monks, knights, or freemasons)

Rule      (many orders or individuals who follow a common set of principles)

Cartel   (small group of powerful \"patron\" individuals in alliance to monopolise an industry or commodity)

Faction  (one of such patrons, his extended household, retainers, and network of clients, their households, retainers, etc.)

League (Like a cartel, only the oligarchs intend to dictate many aspects of governence as in councils of medieval burgers or the roman senate)

Mystery Cult  (why should all these temples have open doors, offerring services or insight to all who ask?)

Bourse/Exchange (A few key producers and consumers agree to only trade amongst themselves, become more powerful as upstart competitors can not gain a foothold with the best customers or suppliers)

Buying books, questing for books, being-of-high-enough level-and-only-in-the-right-guild-so-that-those-who-played-ps-first-will-always-retain-in-game-advantage-rather-than-making-game-open-to-all-of-us.... BAH!

Your just going to change \"Kill mobs - Get loot -level up\" paradigm into \"Kill mobs- getloot - read books - level up\".

Look, I know that many of you have powerful charachters because you have \"invested\" thousands of hours powerkilling in the arena... That is the wrong way... Stop having a fit everytime you think someone might get a loint of skill in something without having to \"earn\" it by killing stuff.

In a fully developed game, having the whole population devoted to kill and loot activities would be stupid anyway. Having to kill 20k rats to get a decent skill in mining is simply retarded.

Have books persistent in specific locations, one use per charachter, gives (with quiz) one points in one skill in one range. Make ranges like 5 points, so that you can use (skill)book one to get a point as long as your skill is 0-4, (skill)book two: 5-9, etc.

Yes, without ever drawing your sword you should be able to get 1/5 of your advancement from reading as long as you seek out all the books in the game.

And yes, you should be able to pass on info about the location of books. If it is out of game, it is a spoiler, and the traditional rules apply. If it is an in game hint, that is roleplay of training/helping out younger people, and should be encouraged.

5min of fighting = 30min of watching = 1hr reading?

If you enable reading as a method of learning a skill, I think it should be variable according to ones abillity to learn from books (a language skill)

The fact is that in real life, experriance isnt all that. This fact has been acknowleged by drill seargents for a century who consistantl claim that the worst student of marksmanship is the farm boy who has been firing a rifle since he could walk and has ingrained a slough of bad habits. A completely inexperianced soldier is more likely to become a master of the rifle because he is open to the perfected teaching of a professional.

Think of it this way: If you have a good abillity to comprehend written material and apply its abstractions to real life, a book can tell you in one sentance information which it took the lifetimes of many masters to learn from scratch. Simmillarily, A few minutes with a talented teacher or coach can correct months worth of the flawed bungling which you would do on your own.

I know that there is a tendancy in games like this to feel that benefits such as skill improvement should be handed out in proportion to the risk which a player takes of his charachter getting killed. This prejudice is understandable, but reflects no realistic mechanism. In real life, People who wontonly risk getting killed generally get killed as a reward.

To keep this risk reward ratio and improve role playing would it not be better to institute a system of Player to player training? To improve a skill, you team up with a senior player whose level in the skill to be trained exceeds yours by at least 10. Include your idea of a library of trivia about each skill, only have there be questions for both the trainer and the trainee... stimulating the idea that the experianced player is passing on these tid bits of information, and encouraging players to keep a notebook full of their library of game lore. Players should be limited to learning 5 points of a skill from one player/trainer.

Lore should be acquired through books, passive watching, or direct combat, and they flash on the screen in such a way that an afk or macroer wont have a record of them. Books should also give bonus skill almost instantaneously, but they should be limited to say every tenth level. A specific book should have to be found through quest or exploration for ex: \"book of small blades II\" would teach one time a level of knife/dagger skill between 11th and 20th rank.

In either case, players should still have to practice as they do now, but training with players or books would save them the time gathering dp and tria.

Originally posted by Neryam
we have to keep a steady flow of new people, otherwise in the end everybody will be able to craft some uberthings.

But yeah.. and this would REALLY encourage player economy too.

So what if everyone can craft a few uber-things? So long as no one can craft them all, you will still have an economy. Uberthings should require rare materials which only expert gatherers or hunters can supply, and occasionally need repair by an expert crafter (though not necessarily the guy who has the monopoly on new construction).

I think that letting everyone have access to high levels of competence in some field, people will be more invested in the game and community.

Some results of this fallacy in Illarion:

- Skills are freakishly hard to acquire. Skill is gained very slowly even if you power-train them. Further, players get harrassed who repeatedly engage in training activities.

- Powergamers still powergame: The motivation of the worst PGer is to \"break\" the system, so the harder the nut is to crack, the more satisfying; and who cares if a pig-killing macro runs for ten hours or ten thousand?

- Game reality is broken, as players RP charachters in ways that the game does not in fact support: My charachter concept is that of a blacksmith, but after many months of playing him, his horseshoes still usually come out looking like Mobius strips.

- Because few interesting activities are persistent in the game world (Illarion relies heavily on GM-mediated one-time \"quest\" events) the game is only satisfying when the server is relatively packed. Players who log on and find no other player online rarely stick around, making it unlikely that the next player to log on will stay. In the end, the game develops a circadian rhythm whereby it is actively played only during a few hours a day when players learn they can depend on the presence of other players. All activity drifts gradually towards a tighter and tighter time window. Potential players whose timezone/ RL schedule bars them from playing during this period are effectively excluded from play.

My suggestions to avoid these pitfalls:

Skills and charachter development:
Have all charachters start out equal from char gen. This way, one uses the char gen to establish a backstory they wish to roleplay without concern about advantage or disadvantage.

Use a tiered system of skills. Everyone can first maximise all the general skills, for example:  Acrobatics, Roguery, Close fighting, Armor & Defence, Distance fighting, Language & Scholarship, Magic, Crafting, mining & gathering. Just as in life I can hum a song, weave a crude basket, run from a burning building, chop down a tree, and punch someone in the nose with none of these abillities requiring that I sacrifice in other areas. In the second tier, a player must choose say three of the above to further specialise in, but can aquire intermediate skill in all of those three tiers\' sub-skills. Sub-skills being like Axe, sword, pole-weapon, unarmed, chain weapon, etc. under the class of close fighting. On the third tier, A player must chose one of his three focus areas to be his \"profession\". He can gain \"advanced\" skill in one sub skill of his other two areas of focus, and in all subskills of his profession area.
Final tiers will narrow the subskills of ones profession down so that amongst \"crafters\" known as \"smiths\", a weaponsmith (who can make damn fine nails and horseshoes) is distinguishable from a armorsmith (who can also make damn fine nails and horseshoes as well as posessing the mystical abillities to prune the hedges, dig a small hole, walk and chew gum, etc.). In this way, you avoid the \"charachter class\" silliness where every wizard is a 90lb weakling, and every fighting man is an illiterate dunce.

Make skills EASY to acquire. An average player should be able to max out his skill tree in say six months of regular play. Everyone will quickly become good at something, nobody good at everything. The ease limits of advancement will quickly bore the \"killin \'n Skillin\' \" players, and good RP will be empowered. You see, If I am a skilled weaponsmith, and you are a world class swordsman, then we will allways have a potential interaction to RP. Whereas, if I am a middle-rank guy who can sorta get by while you are an ancient master of everything under the sun who has been playing for years and can run circles around me in every way, you have no reason to give me the time of day.

Game enviornment:
Of course, it may seem that the fun will go out of the game if every charachter is maxed out in his first few months. This is why it is important to have a few Illarion-style GM-moderated unique events every week. Unique items/ skills/ and advantages would be the rewards. Thus, there will be a hundred charachters who are master weaponsmiths, all of whom can craft a kick-ass battle axe, but only one of whom has learned the ancient secret of constructing an \"obsidian lance of banishment\".

Mobs and quests should be inserted into the persistent world which are beyond the abillities of any one charachter to encourage teamwork, perhapse requiring a variety of complementary skill-sets.

Embrace any feature which improves guild play, dueling, trade and other RP-intensive activities