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Just to put my idea out up front, I think it's at least worth considering the removal of skill levels associated with spells and instead basing their power on player level. Now I'm going to go into some of the reasoning behind this

Components being sold in shops have become considerably more scarce lately and components in the 'wild' have become increasingly more common. It's a great idea on paper and in small quantities it can be really fun but taken as a whole I feel that there's a risk of this becoming another element of tedium as players are forced to spend RL hours traipsing across the world map to harvest this and that.

At the moment all players have to accept a bit of skill and experience grinding if they want the code to reflect their character's expertise at their profession. It's practically a necessary evil in any MUD, RP-enforced or otherwise, and seems to be generally accepted. Furthermore, the idea of grinding generally implies fighting mobs but I think it's appropriate to extend the concept to include any repetitive task with little means for creativity or roleplay; in other words, time sinks.

Any character, regardless of class, has to try and balance their stats, the experience they gain from mobs, their equipment (including maintenance), and their skill levels, and all of this takes a little bit of time, though in some/many cases time spent acquiring experience and skill gains can be mitigated by travelling in groups and RPing along the way.

Naturally spellcasters have to worry about all of the above, just like anyone, but entirely their own concern is the matter of components. When it was an issue of buying components from shops it was simple to go and spend your hard-earned cash. It was still troubling to spend most of your character's money on components, but it didn't involve a single-minded long-term investment of time; that is to say, components were only one reason players wanted to acquire wealth, so it was something they'd probably spend at least some time doing anyways. Now it seems as though the situation is reversed; most components can't be found for any price but can be aquired via the expenditure of RL time.

However, I think it's safe to say that RP is what most of us are after when we log onto FK and any time spent doing repetitive tasks is time that could be spent on something more fun (like adventuring into that mysterious ruin). Grinding up skills is bad enough I guess, though it can safely be ignored; the skill level you get from mob trainers is more than sufficient for me, at least, speaking as a person who would prefer to spend most of their time RPing (which, for the record, includes dungeon crawling). Unfortunately spell components are a grind that simply cannot be ignored because without them you're completely unable to use the skills that rely on them, which means that if I want to RP my character as a wizard or a priest of any sort there's no longer an option to ignore grinding; I absolutely have to do it or my skills won't just be weaker, they won't be available at all.

Speaking personally I'd enjoy being able to RP without any grind at all, but that might not be feasible given the expectations of having to invest some drudgery to advance your character. If, as seems to be the case, it is decided that components must necessarily be rare and hard to acquire, I think the best course is to re-evaluate the amount of grinding required for spellcasting classes. Even if we accept that grinding is practically a requisite for a game like a MUD it doesn't mean that it has to all be the same or that it has to involve a lot of dead mobs and I think that for spellcasters components could become a replacement to skill training, rather than something else heaped on top of it. If we escalate the difficulty of finding components even more, encourage people to trade for them and to go to great lengths to collect them, I think we can create enough work for players to justify completely removing the need to also have them grind up their spell skills, and relatively speaking (compared to spell-spamming) it'd be a lot more fun, too, and create considerably more oppourtinities for interaction between PCs.

At the moment it feels like spellcasters are getting hit twice when it comes to training because components are rare and valuable but at the same time they have to be used to practice spells. You could say that gathering components feels like the grind you have to do to get at the normal grind that everyone has to do. What this would accomplish then is to peel back one of those grindy layers. Warriors and rogues and such would still have their bit of tedium in skill-training if they wanted to be competitive with one another and wizards and clerics would have to scour the world for spells and components. Both would take an investment of time and effort so even despite their differences I think that on a very basic level they are equatable.

Anyways, thank-you kindly for reading the whole of this. I know I've kind of over-used the word grind in this post but using the word grind gives good experience so I used it a lot to help level up my diction skill

(PS: To perhaps make it sound a little less like a rant let me make it clear that I'm pretty much just brainstorming here on different ways to make spellcasting classes more fun to play and less of a chore. I don't really expect people who were opposed to this idea the last time it came up to suddenly be swayed by my logical arguments but at least I hope it can serve as a jumping point for other ideas people might come up with for how they'd like to see things changed (for the better, hopefully!), regardless of how crazy they might initially sound )

Enig wrote:Just to put my idea out up front, I think it's at least worth considering the removal of skill levels associated with spells and instead basing their power on player level. Now I'm going to go into some of the reasoning behind this

Before I go into the rest of this post I would like to know what you mean by 'skill levels'. Do you mean the 'inept-grandmaster' skill levels, or the 1, 6, 11, 16, 21... levels? I have opinions on both sides of that. If you meant the inept version..well I think Higher level wizards would be more experienced with magic in general and therefore would probably be better in general with their spells. I'll use Gesine as an example here. She is a level 50 wizard. She'd probably be better at the majority of her spells than most wizards, however..there are some spells that she knows that she has hardly...if ever used. She knows Shadow walk, but for personal reasons has never used the spell. I wouldn't expect her to be better at that spell, or more powerful with it just because she is a level fifty wizard over someone who is a level 30 wizard (or whenever you get that spell). On the other hand, it sort of peeves me when Gesine has near 4000 hours, that another wizard with less than a couple of hundred hours has spent most of those hours grinding a spell, and could outcast Gesine with that spell when she considers it one of her main spells. So I think that has good and bad points..

No, if you meant the wizard level version..now that I think about it. I really do not think you could have meant that because it just doesn't make sense that a wizard just out of the Font could learn polar ray. I'll comments on your points about components later, but just for that basic statement above...I think overall I'd rather things stayed the same.

I hear you Aveline, and that's something I have given it thought already.

Is not only that but also Martial Classes get a "double penalty" when attacking, first they must succeed in their second / third / fourth attack roll otherwise they don't get those additional attacks, and even if they get them those attacks they are subject to cumulativies penalties to hit like it is according the rules. The problem I see that even as boring as it might be
training those skills/spells gives you something to do.

In my personal misguided opinion I would tie those combat skills and spells directly to the character level adding skill points to be used in skills but that might mean a large substantial change that would need a lot of time, but what we could do is giving glory at use at last, and a use somewhat related to it, it would be training skills/spells, by investing a single point of glory you would increase your already trained skill/spell of choice (Something that you could do with time, so hardly unbalancing), the more inept at that skill/spell the larger the increase,
it would give an interesting no-balancing breaking use and it would save time.

I'd also like to chime in and I believe this is something we should consider. In D&D core rules, which we abide by more and more strictly lately, there is absolutely no reflection of the inept-grandmaster skill level progression, it's pure MUD code. Once you learn a spell in D&D, your caster level and your spellcasting stat are all that generally affect it, alongside any metamagic feats you may know. So we have to ask, who loses and who benefits from maintaining the current system? The current system rewards grinding, it rewards endless cycling of areas to kill the same mobs thousands of times in a row, mindless grinding in the fastest and most repetitive way possible, all the quicker without friends to come with you along on the party because all they do is kill the mob faster and limit the number of 'hits' you get in. Grinding encourages people going places that they should not go IC'ly like other temple's training areas because they contain better mobs to grind against (high level yet not-dangerous mobs with lots of HP). Grinding encourages exactly the kind of character FK doesn't like.

Who loses out? The people who like to roleplay. The people who like to not spend hours and hours and hours doing that sort of thing and instead do other things. I'm not talking about people who just sitin the Market Square and chat, those are people of the exact opposite level, but for me for instance, Solaghar is a level 50 fighter. He looks very cool, and has a lot of RP that makes him an interesting, tough character to be feared and respected in Menzo. His skills aren't bad by any means, I have done every adventuring quest, explored everywhere I could with him. But there's literally no part of me that says, "OK, now I want to spend another few hundred hours killing the same mobs over and over until I get a little white tick to say grandmaster so I can kill other mobs even more efficiently. Because that's all that it really is, your ability to kill other mobs even more and more efficiently. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of other characters like Gwain, Raona, Jaenoic, Larethiel, Daunyelle, others who are active, interesting, engaging characters who are constantly doing things also don't have the greatest complete set of GM or master spells or skills because honestly, the time they spend on FK is doing better things. The people who have all GMed spells and skills are the ones to watch out for, the ones trying to pump up their character to be perfect.

I say get rid of spell and skill 'levels' completely, if you learn a spell or a skill, you learned it, just like in real D&D. After that it's just how you use it that matters. The current system rewards people who spend their time doing nothing but the same repetitive mindless tasks, and I am under the impression we're trying to move away from that, just like with things like trades as well. There are actually people who calculate how many mobs they need to kill to advance levels in their attack or weapon skills, or how many thousands of suits of armor they need to craft to get to GM. If they enjoy it there are still reasons to do it, gold, favor, whatever. But for normal people it will mean that we can still adventure, quest, explore and party to visit new places or even re-explore old ones with new friends, without having to go through an intolerably long slog that only people who care about power-leveling generally care about.

Well put Solaghar.

I would really like seeing something like that, bring in skill points and turn combat-like skills (kick, disarm, gouge, whatever) in combat maneuvers that are affected by your hit-roll rather than a skill check.

Naturally spellcasters have to worry about all of the above, just like anyone, but entirely their own concern is the matter of components. When it was an issue of buying components from shops it was simple to go and spend your hard-earned cash. It was still troubling to spend most of your character's money on components, but it didn't involve a single-minded long-term investment of time; that is to say, components were only one reason players wanted to acquire wealth, so it was something they'd probably spend at least some time doing anyways. Now it seems as though the situation is reversed; most components can't be found for any price but can be aquired via the expenditure of RL time.

Honestly, starting up a player component shop was something I'd definitely considered, but it would be nice to have more NPC component shops, too...

With regards to the current debate, Elke hasn't grandmastered a single spell, whereas other wizards who have the will and intent to grind have a long list of gm'd spells. Personally this doesn't bother me - I'm quite happy that Elke is high-level, many-hours character -and yet- remains an apprentice - but it does seem odd that a character who has spammed a spell over and over at a dummy is 'more skilled' than someone who's had extensive lessons in magic with a skilled teacher. So I do think that losing the skill progression on spells might be a good idea.

On the other hand, I do like the idea of becoming more skilled with practice, but I think that with components being so hard to get hold of the 'distance' as it were between skill levels is far too far?

An idea that's just popped into my head is that of a quest of some kind being required back at the School of Wonder to open up each level cap. Make it much, much easier to gain the skill increases, but then you have to perform an actual quest (which only opens up at a certain level) to be able to push the cap on those skills. (Something which would actually stimulate rp - perhaps logging a PC to PC lesson? This is just thinking and typing, you understand). So that the tenth level wizard cannot get higher levels of skill in a spell no matter how much they grind, but at say, 11th, 16th, 21st level etc etc the opportunity to get a higher overall spell-skill. Finally at 50th level getting the ability to quest for the knowledge to be able to grand-master.

Obviously the above might be difficult in scenarios where the PC might have a hard time finding someone appropriate for a PC-to-PC lesson. It also has the problem of characters who are grinding level as well as spell skill...

Perhaps it might be possible to link a spell level cap to your level in Knowledge: Arcana. (To represent that no amount of grinding will make up for actual study in textbooks and magical theory). Make it possible to get Knowledge: Arcana increases from quests which directly relate to the skill-cap. Quests which require reading books, investigating, finding out more about the Weave...

If those quests require groups, rp, thinking and learning etc they could turn the grind into play. Perhaps something to be linked to the Great Library/Research Library idea that's been put about?

I believe that it is dramatic to suggest that we remove all skill levels. I believe that skill levels are important because they establish individuality, a hierarchy of competency (a good swordsman or a talented invoker), and they reward people through constant, eventual progression and improvement (by whatever method). I believe that instead of removing skill levels, we should focus on more new and innovative ways to improve at skills. In short, that we try for the best of both worlds.

A young fellow fresh off the turnip cart should not be as competent with a sword as your grizzled veteran of hundreds of adventures. To suggest that we should remove this just to respond to a few people who abuse this system is putting a bandaid on a sucking chest wound. You see people spend hours of time improving skills and finding their blue mithril greaves, umber hulk chitin arm guards, and whatever else because people like being the best. It is a fantasy game and people will always try enjoy the fantasy to the fullest extent possible, but people do that different ways and some will try to manipulate the system. With no skill levels, for example, those people would only try to rush to level 50 as fast as possible.

My character trains and practices at arms almost every time I log on (be it for ten minutes or an hour) because I believe that is credible, appropriate role-play for a knight. You may not enjoy that, but it is satisfying for me. Some people fancy training, some do every quest and wear a rainbow of gear only for its value (as opposed to its appearance), some people enjoy sitting in MS and looking pretty, but whatever they choose ...it's their choice and I believe it should remain so without slimming the options or the variety.

I believe that it still balances out in the end. If you spend all of your time in MS, then you are not role-playing a dangerous killer so you are getting what you portray, yeah? If a fighter spends all day training at great blades a caster can still destroy him (and maybe a few friends) with a high-level spell that is not trained to grandmaster. At the end of the day, I do not feel that people are really as victimized by this system as they sometimes suggest. Perhaps I just do not see it, but -for what it's worth- that is my opinion on the matter. Let's stick to making more options, not fewer ones.

Agreed

Personally I don't see this as an adversarial issue and I think that we really ought to take that out of the equation entirely. I've read it before and I agree with the line of thinking that people who powergame probably don't *like* grinding, they just like the rewards they can get from grinding. If we streamline that, therefore, we'll be making things easier for them and as a consequence I think it's more likely that they'll spend just a bit more time RPing and just a bit less time trying to perfect their characters, which is a win from where I'm standing.

At the same time, and with respect, Harroghty, I think your examples are a little bit too extreme, and it's kind of limiting to say that nobody can ever become a better wizard or healer or what have you without killing a lot of dudes. There are a lot of people who spend time RPing their chosen profession, whether in the form of spars or by swapping notes with other wizards/professionals, and to say that they have no right to RP bettering themselves because they're not into murdering doesn't seem quite spot on.

That said I freely admit that my suggestion was kind of off-the-cuff but I kind of see this thread as a brainstorming session for us to throw out ideas without really considering too deeply how they could be put in and how people would receive them. If we come out at the end with something awesome so much the better and then we can organize our thoughts later and present them to the higher-up folks if we've a mind. That said, Harroghty, I'd love to hear any ideas you might have for incorporating training and RP even if you haven't figured out all the angles yet.

(Addendum: Just to make it clear nothing I was initially talking about was precipitated by powergaming in any way, and to be honest, I don't see how trying to punish people for powergaming helps anything since you can't *force* people to RP, you can only encourage it. The idea was a response to, as I've observed, the fact that spellcasters have a really hard time finding components. Since eliminating that problem seems difficult/impossible I decided to try and tackle the issue from a different angle by proposing that we take into account the added difficulty when it comes to the time they have to spend training up, if they choose to do so at all. Of course, some characters would still not want to spend the time hunting for components or spells (like mine, probably) and therefore would be at a disadvantage compared to more active characters, but I don't see a problem there. It's pretty close to the gap that already exists between untrained/trained characters, I think.)

(Addendum 2: I don't know how relevant this is but spells seem to be much harder to raise than, say, weapon skills, even without taking into account the cost of constantly replacing components. Just using Enig as an example he has a weapon skill which he's trained from inept to adept, higher than all but I think three of his spells despite the fact that he hardly ever uses that type of weapon. Heck, I think his hand-to-hand is better than most of his spells and that's only really been trained up from brief periods after getting (repeatedly) disarmed )

I'm really failing to see the reasons for this. Maybe because I have just never thought my casters had it overly hard. Gesine cannot GM any spell because she is a mage. That is a sacrifice I took with her. But even then... she does not have even one spell that she has advanced all that she could. That is fine with me. The spell levels give me something to look forward too. I don' t know about everyone else but I do a little OOC happy dance every time I see that 'you learn from your success and improve in ..blah blah'. 90% of those improvements have come through using the spells while rping with various parties. Grouping with people. There have been a few times when I've taken her out with the goal in mind to get a little practice with a certain spell. But even most of those times, I took people with me and had fun doing it. I've never really had to do too much grinding as a wizard. But I suppose I am fortunate in that Gesine knows a lot of people that she can organize quickly to take off and go on some random adventure.

To me, these spell levels are just one more thing that a character/player can look forward to in the course of that character's life. It isn't anything big but it gives me some feeling of accomplishment with the character. Gesine is already level fifty, so there is no room for her to grow there. Took me 3000+ hours to get that level 50 without going out and grinding levels. It was something she worked on over a long period of time and it was very satisfying to see it happen. Having those spells the way they are gives me endless amounts of things for her to work toward. It would be very sad for me to see that taken away. Sure she would have other things she could do, and she could still 'practice' her spells, but getting those little messages just makes me oh so happy. And I know it is the same for many others too.

As for the issue of components... I know I am a bit of an exception to the rule here as I have a lot of time to devote to the game that others do not. However, I have never found components to be a problem. (I am not counting evil people here who may be barred from some component getting places. I know you guys have trouble...but that is part of your price for clicking the evil button ) Sure it takes a little time to get components, and you have to know where to get them. However, Gesine probably uses up more components than any other wizard in the game atm, and you'll rarely find her low on anything. She doesn't just use one or two different components either, she changes up her spells regularly and uses all manner of components. If you looked in her spellpouch at any given moment, people might say she is hoarding things, but If you looked a day later and she hadn't restocked, you would see that she actually just uses that many components. I don't see that component issues would be any sort of a reason for what was suggested here. If you know where components are and make just a bit of an effort into staying stocked..it isn't bad. If you don't know where they are, I can't think of a single time someone has asked Gesine where to find something and she didn't tell them if she knew where to find it. Interact and ask people. If you simply don't have the time, find a character that does and pay them. Every other class has issues that make things uniquely difficult for them, I really do not find having to spend a bit of time getting components that big of a deal for wizards.

I really understand some of the reasons behind wanting this change, like the need for less grinding here and there...but.. Just in my own personal little world, I like things how they are and I like spell levels. If we can find some other alternative that would help overcome that issue then...woo! I don't think removing the spell levels is it though

Also a P.S. here... Gesine does a lot of teaching too. I would really be a tad upset to see her teach a spell to a wizard of her same level, suddenly be just as skilled with the spell as she is as soon as the lesson is over. I would hope that if this all went through that some other extra measures would be taken in this situation. I'm just not smart enough to figure out what any sort of fix for it would be.

I didn't read all of these because I'm drunk. But I did read Enig's and Drew's.

I think a great compromise would be if feats/guilds affect an entire spell circle dramatically on skill levels.

Enig wrote:At the same time, and with respect, Harroghty, I think your examples are a little bit too extreme, and it's kind of limiting to say that nobody can ever become a better wizard or healer or what have you without killing a lot of dudes. There are a lot of people who spend time RPing their chosen profession, whether in the form of spars or by swapping notes with other wizards/professionals, and to say that they have no right to RP bettering themselves because they're not into murdering doesn't seem quite spot on.

I am not saying that at all. In fact, quite the opposite. I am encouraging the development of new ways to improve skills instead of the idea of removing the current system entirely. There should be different ways to get better. I believe that spending time studying a spell on your own or with a group (particularly this latter option) should be a valid way to improve! Perhaps an old wizard hosts a few young apprentices and teaches them the nuances of a better polymorph spell.

Grinding is boring, but it's not the problem. People will always abuse whatever system you enact; I am only saying that we need to focus on trying to improve role-play and the gains by it instead of trying to only to prevent some perceived abuse of the system.

Enig is absolutely right, in real life and in FK, there's many many other options to improve your skill, even at martial arts or combat, without killing people. If skill levels are maintained then there should be an alternate path to increasing skills and spells outside of grinding. Maybe it's not as efficacious as grinding. I know teaching falls somewhat into this category, but for a lot of spells or skills it would be an example of the blind teaching the blind, and the intelligence/wisdom/charisma requirements specifically put out a lot of classes and races, fighters, orcs, etc.

In many ways controlled sparring or drilling on your own is actually a much better way to improve a skill. Coming from a fencing background, if I am trying to improve my skills, add a new attack to my repertoire, test a new defense... then training against fencers with no skill simply isn't going to do it for me. The best way is to simply get one friend and repeat the drilling over, and over, and over, until the motions are second nature and you do not need to think of them, you simply react. But in an actual bout, no one is going to do you the favor of repeating the same action hundreds of times until you get it absolutely right. There is absolutely nothing different about swordplay in FK times. And when we think about spell skill, what does it even represent? In D&D there is no such thing because it simply doesn't make sense. Consider the fireball spell. You say your words, you have your components, and you create a fireball. What does the increased skill represent? A bigger fireball? A better fireball? A hotter fireball? In D&D it's merely a function of a number of dice for dealing a semi-random amount of damage to targets in a cone. No matter how good you are at fireball you can still randomly do a very small amount of damage with the spell if you roll a bunch of 1s. Clearly random factors are much more important to the spell than anything else when it comes to dealing damage, Elminster's fireball actually is the same fireball as someon else of the same level who just learned it. What makes the high level mages more dangerous is that they are not just casting fireballs at you, they have a lot more high level spells to throw at you that you simply don't have.

Looking at attacks, I might be completely off here but I am fairly certain we already moved to the D&D system rather than the skill system and that apart from learning your attack to open it up to you, it's merely a function of your class, level and stats. Your first attack is at your attack bonus, your second a -5 bonus, third a -10 bonus, fourth a -15 bonus, fifth a -20 bonus. I don't even know where skill is supposed to come in with this, how it fits into the D&D mechanics. Does having a low skill mean your bonus is even lower, and a high skill mean your bonus is higher? They're not exactly mutually complementary systems, one is designed for balance in D&D, and one is designed for MUDs.

I like the D&D system. I like tailoring my character to have mutually complementary skills, feats, spells that you can make do interesting things when you study how they work and think of new ways to work them together. It's like a puzzle. The MUD code rewards getting as many of your skills and spells and whatever as high as you can possibly get them, it rewards grinding, it rewards not RPing and instead endlessly cycling areas. Some people like to see that flash of white that says they got a skill increase, but why do they like it? Is it an accomplishment? Let's find some other way to accomplish things that dovetail more neatly with roleplaying, with character development, with turning your character into a unique and interesting person who is a member of a community, faith, guild, whatever rather than just becoming the next person with a complete set of spells and skills raised as high as you can possibly get them who then gets bored and starts a new character to do the exact same thing all over again.

I think a few ways to work around the skill levels could be to throw in quests that improve your skill level with certain skills. For example, attending a class conducted by a NPC, after which your skill level in a certain skill increases by 1. The complexity of the quests can be tailored according to the skill being learnt. Of course, every one can only take each quest once, but there is no stopping multiple quests increasing the same skills.

Another would be for IMMs to reward good roleplay with increases to skill levels. Of course, the skill being increased would have to be relevant to the roleplay.

Of course, I am of the thought that we should get rid of skill levels for most of the existing skills (since they aren't representative of D&D) and implement skills as per the pen-and-paper rules. But then, since skills have been a part of the MUD, and it probably will be more work trying to get rid of them (or adjust them to tabletop rules), I guess it may be more efficient use of the coding/builder teams time to work on other ways to improve skills.

Just my two cents worth.

I'm not sure I know what you guys mean by *grinding*. (Grinding in EQ and WoW is killing mobs, waiting for them to repop, then killing them again for character level experience, so I'll assume that's what we mean.) I literally have never seen someone spend more than a few minutes killing a series of the same mobs just to level their characters raise their skills on this game. Though I've only been here 10 months, I would assume that's a long enough time to witness such a thing if it was indeed happening enough to be a real problem. Any time I've tried to level my characters, I run them through a large area, leave, heal, and look for the next area. (Admittedly, I have 'ground' Howling Peaks and TFAI at low level because I -still- don't know of any commonly difficult levelling areas). I am (admittedly) one of the biggest powergamers on the game (trying to rehab) and I have never GM'd an active (non-passive) skill. (Except aid once and I was cheating) I've never GMed a weapon skill. I've never had a level 50 character. I'm seriously one of the biggest (again, trying to reform) twinks in the game and if I haven't done this (much) then I find it hard to believe that it's being done enough to be a real issue.

And thinking on the issue of skill-grinding, isn't there a saying, "Practice makes perfect" ? Okay, your roleplay is that you're a well experienced 50 year old blacksmith who's been hammering out breastplates for the last few decades, but when you RP you don't make breastplates (because that's boring grinding) but instead stand around MS and chat it up with the local (always) off-duty knights, venture around <insert adventure area> and romance this character or that, and you're somehow irritated that the kid with 100 hours who actually sat there and (since you're IC 100% of the time) RP'd making 10000000 breastplates is better than you? The thing of it is, life -is- a grind. I'm a waitress at Ihop. IRL I RP a waitress. Every night I spend 10 hours grinding my waitress skill. A mechanic grinds his mechanic skill for half of his day. Seriously- a 3rd of a working person's life (at least) is spent at their job, grinding their skills. If you spent a 3rd of your FK time grinding yours, you'd notice a difference. You'd be better at your skills. Maybe not as good as the 100-hour 90%-of-the-time grinding character, but face it, ICly he just works harder than you do.

I don't mean to offend anyone- Sorry if it seems that way.

edit> AND FURTHERMORE, I want someone to show me the book that teaches you how to perform any task as well as doing the task a couple dozen times will. It's just illogical.

While putting time and effort into your character is obviously something worthwhile, and I do agree with the basic point that you shouldn't just be able to sit in Market Square and talk about what a great fighter or craftsman you are without something to back it up, but at the same time there is nothing about hitting the same command 'craft chainmail armor' literally 20,000 times to get to GM that is praiseworthy. Even your 'victory' of attaining GM is a hollow one testifying to nothing more than your ability to spend enough time on the game to repeat the same command enough times to gain that level of IC skill. I'd actually rather someone sat in the Market Square talking about what a great craftsman they were than actually crafting armor because at least they would be interacting with people when they did it and the stores wouldn't be full of 20,000 useless suits of tin full plate armor or whatever people decide to craft that day. When modern craftsmen make things in real life, they spend days, weeks, months on a single piece or suit of armor. In FK, you can hammer out a breastplate in a minute and once you're done, if you can't sell it then it's useless and you may as well bury it or melt it down for the metal and start again.

The key isn't to say, "Well some people like to get that GM craftsman thing." because everyone would probably love to have a character who was wonderful at some trade or other. No one enjoys banging out 20,000 items. No one thinks it is fun to sit there and do the same thing over and over. They are just much more goal-oriented than others. The goal should be to make crafting more realistic, more worthwhile and more interesting/engaging. And that just goes for crafting...

As for Skeas whether your success at powergaming is representative of powergamers as a whole I don't know, there are people who know the ins and outs of this game in ways I wouldn't even care to. There are people with excel spreadsheets detailing how many times they must repeat each action to progress depending on the various skills each trade/spell/skill requires. There are lots of people out there with a few specific spells GMed because for some reason they are simpler to train than others, like phantasmal killer for example. You may be proud that you've been here for 10 months and never GMed a 'non passive' skill. I have characters with thousands of hours who have adventured to all of the most dangerous places in the realms, defeated the most dangerous foes, done almost everything a character can do, and they don't even have more than perhaps one or two passive skills GMed, including mount. No spellcaster of mine has a single spell GMed because I never go out with the intention, "Today I will cast harm 1000 times" because it's just boring.

I like the adventure of the game, I like going on quests with friends, I like running around and being people's adversary and spurring RP and doing what I do. I love to explore new areas, find out every secret in it, and then sometimes go back and explore it again with other new friends. But there's no part of me that says, "Ah, well... I could go find someone to RP with or I could go cycle an area and kill mobs repetitively hoping to see that magical white tick telling me I have succeeded at a completely meaningless, arbitrary task that moves one number up one position. I am well on my goal to having all of my numbers up to the highest position" Then I can finally RP... what... being a dangerous character deserving respect? You don't need amazing skills to garner respect as a PC. Someone who has every skill Gmed and a perfectly tricked out character doesn't even need to be well-known. If they go into the Market Square and hear someone bragging about being a great warrior, do they feel the compulsion to prove that person wrong? To be better than that person? Congratulations, there is always someone stronger. But it doesn't gain you a bit of respect or admiration, and if anything merely marks you out as someone who doesn't really get the point of playing a game like FK, to interact with other people.

In FK, someone who goes to the most dangerous places and fights the most dangerous foes is actually at a *disadvantage* to increase their skills compared to someone who just cycles the same areas with same mobs that aren't the least bit dangerous, but can take a few hits and allow you to do nothing more than utilize the same spells in succession. When you go to some of the more dangerous areas in the game, you can't afford to memorize 60 slots of a single spell and ignore all of the cures you will need, all of the simple protective spells. You are doing what you can to stay alive. But in reality, these should be the people who would gained the *most* in their spells and skills. Someone who memorizes 40 harms at a time and spends a few RL days in the Howling Peaks would probably be much better at harm than Zarafae. But do they deserve to be? How many goblins can you kill before you stop learning anything new from goblins? How do you apply your goblin-harming knowledge to a different creature? A taller one? One with a longer reach, or different weapons? These are the things that should be taken into account but aren't.

Besides the basic and last point that Skeas ended her post with, the fact that grinding is a job and people who practice more at their job are better. I don't want FK to be a job. I don't want to feel like I have to do boring, repetitive, meaningless actions here anymore than I would want to do those things at work. At least work pays me however, but if adventuring on FK wasn't fun I wouldn't do it. But for people whose only intention is to max out their characters skills and spells and everything else, why play a cooperative game like FK at all? There are plenty of games out there that reward endless grinding, soloing and power-player actions, but I don't think FK should be one of them, it should be the opposite.

If you read nothing else in this post please read this, it's the crux of my argument. Even though I suggest doing away with skill levels entirely, or at least streamlining them greatly for some things like crafts and making them less repetitive, I'd be all for keeping them if there were alternative methods to gain that were open to everyone, promoted RP, and were actually more efficacious than simply killing mobs or casting the spells/performing the skills/creating the items literally thousands of times with no care for the situation. One could effectively cast fireball in an empty room several thousand times to become a GM. I don't understand what they are IC'ly learning about the spell in this time that translates into increased IC knowledge, especially considering that the difference between a very effective fireball and an ineffective fireball depends far more on random rolls of the dice and character levels than skill with the spell.

In the past I have raised a discussion about a system where people would receive skill rewards for events that contributed to the fun of FK. For example, you break a few lances at a joust and dodge a miraculous amount of times. Well, everyone saw you do it and it enhanced their enjoyment of the event so - bing, improve at dodge. There are a myriad of possible scenarios and we talked it out with some detail, but...

...it requires people being dedicated to facilitating that event and, if we're honest with ourselves, who wants to sit here and read applications for that? It would be contentious and a source of ill will as people became jealous of approved applications and/or bitter about denied ones.

So instead of arguing one way or the other and go with something that most people will agree on: let's focus on adding more ways to improve to suit more, different styles of play. What are some new ways that we help the situation? Skills already seem to improve more quickly if you are in a group (you receive more experience) and that's fine, but what else?

Here's a suggestion (possibly what Tyson was getting at). Suppose that upon joining a guild, you got a fixed number of "talent points," something like this: (just throwing out numbers)

As your character progresses, you could then choose to be "talented" at specific weapons/skills/spells/trades. For example, shortly after getting a character into the fighter's guild, I might spend weapon talents on double-edged blades, long axes, and thrusting blades; combat skill talents on bash and parry; a non-combat skill talent on spellcraft; and a trade talent on weaponsmithing. The remaining points would be saved, to be spent whenever I feel like it. Similarly, my wizard could join the enchanter's guild and then place talent points into five enchantment spells, three non-enchantment spells, two wizardly skills (say, brew and concentration), and one weapon.

Once you have spent a talent point on a skill/spell/weapon/trade, the time you need to learn it is dramatically reduced. All your other skills remain at their current progression rate (or maybe are slowed slightly). If you want to train up everything in your spell list, you still can, but it'll take time. If you would rather RP more, your character's talents will let him or her become competent at what they do without too many real-life hours of repetitive practice.

I really like this idea. (Those numbers are murder on fighters though)

I'm also for the prospect of quests relating to a skill level raising the skill level as well

Another good idea might be to make quest rewards in the form of skill increases. Say a stablemaster has you buy him 10 bags of oats- Instead of him giving you the Flaming Mithril Helm of Fortification +3 (totally out of his character to have, imo) he might teach you (no matter where you are skillwise) a little bit about mount or handle animal. The same with wizards and teaching you more about spells or a blademaster levelling your sword skill. A monk and 3rd attack. etc. Regardless of what your task is, they teach you a bit at the end.

I would much rather have many quests having an option to forego the object reward in exchange for a skill/trade/spell increase, lots of quests give me things I have no desire for or are useless to my class. Everyone at level 50 has a bag full of magic items they will never use, or can't use. I'd say that perhaps we could have a clearinghouse type area where people could trade in magical items for weapon/skill/spell/trade increases of one tick each.

This wouldn't fix the problem however, with neutral players who do every quest having a lot more quest rewards than everyone else. Any solution needs to consider the huge disparities existing currently between evils, monstrous races, lawful goods who follow their religion very strictly, and the average neutralish halfelf who doesn't stop themselves from doing everything they can, good and evil.