I've often thought that the current (and widely accepted in many games) system of using experience to develop skills is kind of bogus. In real life, you gain strength and other skills because you used those skills, not because you traded in points to a trainer. If anything, strength, agility, and so on, would be entirely dependent on practice, not training. Similarly, in games where no trainer is available (nethack) it seems odd that you need to 'pick' the skill slots to advance. What are you picking? Either you got better at something or not, based on how much practice etc. you have. How can you be deciding after the fact what you learned?
An argument could be made that there is training for INT or CHA - book learning, and charm school respectively. I think you have to reword the "INT" definition a little (i.e. along the lines of academic 'achievement' rather than 'aptitude'), but it kinda works.
And we know that strength and agility training works.... but why are stuck in place without it? Shouldn't we get strong at some rate by doing physical work? I guess the basic annoyance I have is that if I dig gold by swinging a pick axe all day, or fight all night, why don't I get stronger? (I realize that swinging a pick axe produces experience, but it's a very small amount compared to swinging a battle axe.)
And why does fighting experience translate into crafting experience? I know this is inherited from D & D and similar, but it just seems fundamentally goofy that to get good at gold mining I need to kill rogues or tefusangs to get PP. It seems like crafting, alchemy and so on, should use a seperate experience currency from fighting skills. If you get good at pottery it might help with metallurgy or wood working (it's all artistry or chemistry or physics on some level), but fighting is irrelevant to craftsmanship and vice versa. Back off, man - I'm a pottery expert! Or "buy this new cooking device, it's designed by George Foreman!"
In the PlaneShift world, the best brain surgeon in the world would have to be a prize fighter - to get all the 'experience' (PPs) needed to go through a plane shift medical school, he would need to spend years in the arena. Thomas Edison and would have had to have black belts. Picasso: "I'm killing trepors - I want to power level my oil painting skill."
It also kind of makes the game violence-centric. Not that violence should be reduced per se, but it would be kind of cool if (at some more developed future point) you could take a different road and be a fur trader, black smith, etc.
Sw.
