Re: Experience as "currency" (Re: Merged proposal)

[Peter Mardahl <peterm@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU>]

In message <9506261616.AA21374@pluto>, Ken Woodruff writes:
>
>Wow--conciliation and compromise.  A Crossfire first?

I've never felt anyone was unreasonable.  Consensus can be pretty
hard to build when so many people have different visions for the game.

Having said that I'm going to object to your ideas below:

>skills/classes/levels, etc.   What if we considered experience not as an ever
>increasing number but rather as a kind of currency which you accumulate by
>adventuring and then "spend" (in a guild or similar place) to learn new skills

We've seen this proposal before.  So you've seen my arguments against it
before.  Nevertheless, I'll rehash those:

1)  This requires the addition of guilds and requires maps with guilds.
More work for implementation, more things to go wrong, and more things that
any new world-maker would *have* to put in, to have a viable mapset.

2)  It doesn't make sense to me to go kill monsters with fireballs and
use the "experience" gained from this to "purchase" skills in say, 
levitation.  Yet this is exactly what would happen.  Either practicing
fireballs automatically helped you become a better spellcaster or not.

>or refine existing ones.  This would allow players to have more flexibility in
>developing their characters and would also free the code from analyzing every

3)  Players already would have this flexibility.  If they want a player
to have a skill they practice it.  They can tailor as much as they want.
Furthermore, they wouldn't have the extra trips, bookkeeping and general
hassle of having to go find guilds.

>  -  Allow for transferrence of experience from one category to
>     another with some penalty, e.g. Physical EP could be spent for Subtlety s
>     at a cost of 3x the Subtlety cost.

I really hate this idea.  First, you'd need to build all the infrastructure
needed to "buy" skills.  THEN you have this weird thing where you can advance
in your magery by having beaten up lots of kobolds with your +2 club.

>  -  Add an actual cost (gold pieces) to certain skills in addition to the 
>     experience cost.  Again profession could have a multiplier effect here.
>     (So could charisma?)

Yuck!  Now you can sell things to advance in exp too?  *sigh*

>  -  Skills can have prerequisites, which can be levels (i.e. you must be at l
>     third level to learn this skill), or other skills (e.g. you must know how
>     make fire and levitate objects before you can throw fireballs)

Having prerequisites for skills is a decent idea, but it is a frill
which can be safely left for later.

>  -  Fundamental skills (ones which serve as prerequisites to many other skill
>     could be given a much higher price to encourage specialization.  (a simil

I thought everyone had agreed at one point that while it's nice to
encourage cooperation, we shouldn't make it too hard to play the
game alone?  Not everyone has a nice network connection.  This means
not forcing a great specialization on everyone.

>Some obvious problems:
>  -  how to keep "score".  Currently score is based on experience, if this goe

I've always felt that "score" was beside the point in this game.
For me, the fun was always solving new maps.

>     stats, magic power, spirituality and hit points instead of experience.

Can we please use the terms "grace" and "mana"?  They're short and capture
the ideas of "spirituality" and "magic power" very well, IMHO.


PeterM