This came to mind as I was trying to find good monsters to train my weapons on. It could make combat training more fun, and should be pretty realistic too imo.
I was thinking of some training dummies or poles that players could keep hitting, helping them skill their weapons just like fighting real monsters. Such training poles could be normal objects that you fight without destroying, and of course without them fighting back. They would make sense to place in yards near weapon trainers, perhaps in designated combat training areas. As a separate idea, there could also be movable pole structures, that can be used in training your armor skill. They swing around and hit you but without doing any real damage, training you for the armor you are wearing.
The only downside that comes to mind is this making training too easy (although in my opinion training is hard enough for most skills once you get too far). Dummies could have special skilling rules to prevent that perhaps. Like you can keep training on them for 5 minutes, then need to take a 2 minute brake before you have another 5 minutes and so on. Or, the skills you get from them can be slower than skilling on monsters, so you would need fight a training pole for much longer to advance.
But yeah, I don't see why not
I think it's nice for players that find monsters who either fight back too much, or don't fight back but die too easily for them to train on. Any form of combat has places you train in, and the field where you put that training to use (fighting monsters in our case). They would also make PS more complex and realistic... I'm thinking of them as functional combat training yards. I actually seen this in another mmo a while ago (it was a japanese themed rpg... forgot its name but it was pretty popular). Hope this can be considered for 0.5.5
