Because of my poor ability with colors, I've never installed anything on my computer to work up a graphic. As such, I'll have to try my best to describe what I thinking. I am also going to assume that if you are reading this blog you are somewhat familiar with MMO Gaming. If not, feel free to ask questions about any terms in the comments.
The Skill Trees
Imagine you are creating a character for the game. First you pick out your race, then you are given some points you can spend to adjust you attributes (strength, dexterity, intelligence, etc). After this process you reach a point where you are given the ability to choose 4 skills. At this point the screen takes you to a place where you can choose from 5 different skill trees.
The first tree: Attacking Skills
The second tree: Defensive Skills
The third tree: Support Skills
The fourth tree: Non-combative Skills
The fifth tree: Attribute Skills
The trees themselves expand upward, occaisionally branching out into new skill lines. Sometimes the skill lines will end, when you have mastered that particular line, but the tree itself never comes to a point. Instead it always grows upwards or spreads out.
From here, following this metaphor, you can choose which skills to take; however you can't go straight to the fruit of the tree (the master skills). You first have to start with the trunk (basic skills), then build up from there and choose the branches (intermediate skills) until you get to the leaves (advanced skills). After that, the fruit is available.
Basicly, the skills in each tree will require a certain condition before you can choose them. This includes the most basic of skills. Let's say you want to take the tumbling skill from the defensive tree. Well, if you decided to leave you character with a low dexterity to improve another stat you might not be able to get tumbling. Want to pick up some basic first aid? Drat, maybe you should have put some points into intelligence instead of focusing on strength.
Every skill will have a requirement. It might be just a certain base attribute point, it might be that you need to have another skill first, it might be both. Does this mean that you will forever be limited from picking up that first aid skill because you started with a low intelligence? Not at all.
Attribute raising skills
Since most MMOs will have gear to improve you attributes above the base; but since gear can be removed easily and replaced those will not count for skill requisites. However, in the Attribute tree there will be skill lines that you can get to improve your attributes. Studying 101 for intelligence, Aerobics for Endurance, Video Gaming (heh) for Dexterity, Meditation for wisdom; whatever you want to call them. What these do is to improve you BASE attribute.
So now you can increase your base attributes and start picking up all the skills, right? Wrong!
Experience Points (XP)
In order to progress along a skill tree, you need to use your skills. This is like practicing. This means you need to use your attack skills to earn attacking XP, defensive skills for defensive XP, etc. Initially, I was thinking that only 4 different types of XP; but I now believe you might need more specific XP for certain branches. Setting up a conversion system is possible.
Let's say you have been using you rifle while in combat, earning you lots of Rifle XP. You want to pick up either the Combat Tactics skills which requires Attacking XP or you want to get Advanced Field Medic skill which requires Healing XP. You can take the Rifle XP that you have accumulated and convert that into it's base type which is Attacking XP. However, you can't convert that into Healing XP. So you can either choose to convert the right amount of XP to pick up the Combat Tactics skill or you need to start working on your Healing XP to get that Advanced Field Medic skill.
So how does this work with the attribute increasing skills? Do I need to make my character sit down a read books for hours on end in order to increase his intelligence? Oh, goodness no!
Attribute Training
I can't think of anything worse than making players press a single button a thousand times to make their characters do enough jumping jacks to gain the Aerobics skill. That is just sick and wrong. It would be better to just instantly give those skills out, but I am against that as well.
Instead the Attribute tree will need a different system. For this one, I favor a time based system.
As an example, you want your character to gain the Beginner Aerobic skill, the bottom most skill in order to increase your Endurance (a.k.a. Constitution). You go to your skill screen and click on the box. You are then notified that it will take 1 real hour for your character to learn that skill. So you accept that condition and start the countdown. While this is counting down, you are now free to take your character and play around some more. You don't have to just wait for the countdown, feel free to enjoy the game. The only thing is you can only train in one skill at a time.
Let's say you want your character to learn the Billy Blanks Tae Bo skill, a much more advanced skill. That skill might take a full 24 hours for character to learn. Of course, this includes time spent while you are logged off, so that isn't as bad as it might seem.
It might even be possible for the other skills to be "studied" like that as well. Going back to the Advanced Field Medic example. Let's say you choose to use this skill for your character's study time. As a more advanced skill it might take a few real days for your character learn it. However you can speed this up by also gaining healing XP at the same time.
Ok! Now you are all set to have your character improve his/her attributes and are well on the way to learning all the skills in the game! Wait a minute. Not so fast.
Each character will be given a pool of Skill points; the same amount for every character. Each time you learn a skill you will lose a skill point. This includes using a skill point for each of the Attribute raising skills. If you want to learn all the skills in the Attacking tree, you might as well kiss every other tree goodbye as you will likely have no skill points left. This means that you will need to think a bit on how you want your character to develop.
Well, this is my new and (hopefully) improved skill system. Let me know what you think of it!
2 comments:
Interesting concept.
I was thinking about other skill systems when I read it. I believe that in Eve Online you buy memory chips to stick in your brain, not sure exactly how it works, but you're skilling while logged out. And in Sims Online you got more skill points the longer you'd been playing your account. Which would probably NOT work in a fighting game because the vets would be invincible given enough time. In Sims however you could max out a skill in about a day and didn't even really have to be ATK for all of it.
The ex used to play a lot of White Wolf games, which is a little like what you described, a big catalog of various skills and a few entry level ones as prerequisites.
Naturally, power gamers will quickly find the fastest route to maxing out the skills with the most loopholes and I think designers are hesitant to give us the kind of variety found in SWG just because there are thousands of brilliant power players and Chinese gold farmers who will locate the weak spots; even the simplified skills in WoW aren't immune from that. In SWG you could easily automate things like healing and dancing, I once teamed up with someone grinding dancer to level my doctor, the dancer ran a flourish loop while I had a heal loop to keep her from getting exhausted. Which might have been exploiting but it was also like hanging out and chatting much like Sims grinding.
I've always liked the notion of peer review skills for multiplayers. If you want to be, say, a Pirate, you get placed in a guild of other Pirates, and to advance you'd have to get other Pirates to vote for you or duel your way to a rank or team up with other lowbie Pirates to do menial quests for Pirate points.
It's as open to exploitation as anything, I suppose, but unless you were a mega rich gold farmer that could buy the whole server you'd have to actually interact in order to get maxed out.
Sort of like WoW pvp titles, which you can technically get without talking to anyone at all, and you can accelerate them by teaming up for pre-mades.
I'm just happy that I the post was mostly legible. I was just heading to bed when some key parts of it clicked in my head. I was going to try to remember and write it down in the morning, but that never works.
So I dragged myself up and typed it out straight into the blog.
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