[Roundtable] Skills and Training

[Kaelon]

This is a roundtable to brainstorm and share ideas.

Recently, in another thread, the age-old issue of unattractive/cumbersome training threads was raised. It got me thinking -- how do we measure character progression? Obviously, skills in Combat, Magic, and Trades evolve by acquiring Experience Points, which later translate into definitive "level up" threads (or major events/challenges) that when overcome successfully enable a player to move from a lower level of proficiency into a higher one. Often times, people rightly cite training threads as an obstacle to progression, and I can see why. Training threads are often laborious, taxing, and uncreative experiences. Trying to come up with an excuse to "learn" something doesn't, in my mind, seem to equate to earning the skills and gaining meaningful experience behind it.

When I have moderated, I tend to award experience for using a skill, regardless of whether someone is learning it from a skilled user, or simply practicing it out on their adventures. I think that wider-spread use of awarding experience points for using a skill, bringing it on par with training as an alternate/acceptable means of acquiring experience and progressing one's skills, should be a welcome policy change to how we handle skills and leveling up.

So, I'd like to open up a conversation about some general ideas that might hopefully translate into concrete proposals. These aren't new rules -- these already exist; people can acquire experience by simply using skills in Aelyria. However, Aelyria as a society is built around education and training, and so most moderators and players alike recognize that the accepted way to "learning" a skill is going to a place, a character, an institution, etc., and being "trained" or "taught" these skills. I'd like to suggest that people be allowed to spontaneously learn skills on their own by purchasing tomes, scrolls, or manuals that teach them the basics of skills without needing to necessarily be "taught" these skills. Then, as they adventure and "use" these skills, they earn experience points -- like people do today. When someone reaches the prerequisite number of experience points, they can attempt a "level up" thread -- an encounter, or challenge, that requires them to prove that they have mastered all of the abilities and techniques inherent in their current skill proficiency level, and if successful, enable them to "progress" a full proficiency level.

What are the advantages and disadvantages to this approach?

[Apakai]

I don't know, seems kind of... Platform RPG'ish.... But I don't see the harm in it really. I don't think that a person should be able to get any EXP from it, that's for sure. My take on skill education threads was to teach a person how to RP that skill, but if they would have to RP to gain any experience from it, then it wouldn't be a problem.

However, for me personally, I enjoy the struggle and the cumbersome writing. If I accomplish something, I want to know that I've worked hard for it. I don't want to know that after an intense thread of learning how to fight, that someone else knows just as much as I do just by buying one of these items.

[Palacrisis D Jones]

Perhaps I am not the best person to comment on skills and training , Pala has never had a politics lesson in his life! However as Juan suggests he has read every tome pamphlet and parchment on the subject taking in law and history along the way. Pala is one who believes that “this is a window ….now clean it!” [Wackford Squeers ~ Nicholas Nickleby] In other words he has gained a certain experience by doing! How much experience is another matter but hey I am not counting !

I am not someone who believes that one size fits all in Aelyria , there will always be a case for the formal training thread some skills fit that scenario better than others but the self taught man who has gained experience is a figure that should be allowed to pursue his path without having to attend “school”

It also depends on the individual player and their confidence in their game playing abilities. A formal training thread is the ideal way to kick off a career path for the less experienced player.

Thus in conclusion I would say that there is a case for both routes to skills training which ever road a player chooses equal respect should be shown for the skills gained and used in game playing.

[Malvoitre]

Is this much different than what we have now? A level up thread would still be required and experience awards would remain a moderator's preference. How about awarding experience over time as well? It's strange to think that PCs are only using their skills in threads and not practicing every day in their FT gaps...

That way players who come back after...say...a three year absence that saw a rule change wouldn't have to do a whole lot of back training.

...please?

[Jasmyn Jewel]

That means that there will have to be a scroll for each level then?

It seems easy for some to find jobs that pay in order to be able to buy the scrolls but then others have a hard time with it.

[Z'kron]

I was assumption that allowed the use of tomes etc for information and training was the way things already were? If not, I suppose it's a change that's rather overdue. But yes, I rather agree with the move away from static training and level ups to a more dynamic version when a player so chooses- you'd have trouble finding anyone who disagreed with you, Juan.

[The Huntsman]

I think if we were to allow more widespread use of tomes, scrolls, etc. for increasing one's ability in a skill, we may want to put some limits on it to be certain. I mean, there is only so much one is going to learn from a book. A basic level (Level 1) in a skill should be able to be gained from such things as reading a book, manual and so on; though I thought that is already an option. As the individual then moves on with their lives and builds upon their basic knowledge through various challenges and uses of that skill, they of course gain experience. (I have to say as I type this and think out loud, aren't we already doing this? Am I missing something?)

Anyway, I think that further leveling up should require increasingly difficult experiences for the level-up thread that require the individual to push their limits and begin thinking for themselves; adapting the skill to suit their character, style and direction. (Maybe I am already doing this with my PCs which could be why it seems so familiar).

I guess a big advantage to a more fluid skill development would be that the player may feel that the skill is more a part of their character than just another thing to add to a CIR. They begin to own it more perhaps?

A disadvantage to the tome, manual, spontaneous learning sort of thing though is that it can be cheesed easier than having to be taught by an NPC. Also, to do it well, posting to such a skill thread can be rather difficult as I have seen attempts where a person reads a manual, does what it says, and then assumes to have learned the skill without having an outlet for answered questions or another's interpretation to build upon. It would be like one of us reading a how to book on building a deck. Sure, we could follow the instructions, get the materials and learn a little of what to do and not to do by trial and error, but the skill level we have in it would not be as great as that of someone who followed the instructions but also had someone to answer questions and guide them along the way.

Thus, are we saying that someone who reads a book to learn the skill is equal to someone who takes a class and learns from another while also reading the instructions?

Perhaps learning a skill from a book, manual, scroll, whatever, could equal a single experience point which then allows one to use the skill and build up earlier than one who is taught and trained. They could then practice and develop that skill with or without training yet still have the option to go through official training for the extra two points. Either way, they would have the ability to use and develop the skill without being required to go through the initial training thread. (Hopefully that made sense)

[Iseult Fluersdotter]

I think, also, there comes a point when you need to ask 'When does a mentor stop being necessary for a person to progress?'

For instance, Iseult is at the third tier for glassblowing. She spent all three of those levels learning from other people. With enough experience to buckle down fourth level, I'm looking at it like 'why would she go sit down with a mentor at this point? why wouldn't she just gradually grow and advance on her own merits?' Needless to say, I fully intended to have a moderator push a commission my way that helped Iseult develop the skills she would need to acquire that fourth level.

It just makes more sense to grow and advance on her own now than her seeking out another person. She's growing. She's her own artist/craftswoman. Why shouldn't she be developing her own methods rather than watching someone else do it?

Of course, every type of skill is different. Arcana would require going to someone else to learn...or perhaps only in part. At Master/Archmage level do you need someone to walk you through the information that's been imparted to you or at that point do you know enough about your craft to do it figure it out for yourself? Having only advanced up to Adept at this point, I haven't experienced the 4/5 levels to know if this is already the way it's done or not.

I think that Basic levels and maybe even 2nd level there requires a certain degree of guidance. Like Huntsman said, you can read a manual, but how much do you really get out of it? Take for instance, I've done a lot of research on glassblowing. I've done so much research that I can tell you the basic idea of how to make a vessel and feel somewhat confident talking to someone who knows what they're doing. I bet if you stuck me in front of a furnace and put a blowpipe in my hands, I'd make a royal mess of it. Granted, glassblowing is different from politics, but is it really?

So reading only gets you so far. You have to do, you have to experiment. A bunch of words on a page aren't really going to matter very much at all in the long run.

[Bruce]

Learning from a scroll, book or manual is perfectly fine with me. The main point of putting PCs through all the RPing and threads is to make sure that they have the experience of actually thinking of how to use the skills and how to RP using them. This is required even for people with RL knowledge and application of these skills.

Knowing them is one thing, doing things with the knowledge is one thing, writing about them is yet another thing!

[Jasmyn Jewel]

That's why the character must then do threads to gain XP points in order to be able to level up again.

And in order to open these scrolls, or w/e you want to call them, will there have to be a change in the set up? Like everyone has access to the write ups now. Will they then be sealed until you pay for them? In that case unless that type of thing is personally watched then it will have to be that each character has a bank account that keeps track of the money for you, to make sure you have enough.

Also what's to say that someone that has already paid for the information wanted to teach another character? That character either wouldn't have to pay for the information like everyone else or they'd have to pay the one who's training him or her. Maybe the trainer could make money on what he's learned thus far then?

Good point about the having to rely on someone else in order to direct your character. They may not send them in the way that you want them to go unless of course you have talked to your mod about that before you start the thread.

Self modding was always hard for me though.

And a mentor can be a npc of yours or of another player or even a mod using an npc.

I may be totally off base with my thinking.

[Lyssoryl]

My only issue with training threads is that they often require months of real time effort for a thread that isn't necessarily fascinating. Yes, you can make a training thread interesting, but one of the primary skills of being a good story teller lies in picking a good subject for your story, and beginning basketweaving (or whatever) probably is not rich territory.

I am somewhat at a disadvantage in this conversation because I'm not really clear on what the requirements of a "level up" thread are. If I accumulate enough points for a higher level during an adventure, is that a level up thread? Or do I still need to pump out 30 or 40 posts with some sort of trainer, be it scroll or teacher?

[Duvel]

Personally I'd rather not see scrolls and such appear. Primarily because what Juan proposes is largely possible already. Leveling up too can be pretty 'fluid' if you really want. After all, nothing stops you from using a level up adventure and use it to simply show in it what you have learned during your days of travel and hardship since the last time you gained a level. People just never seem to use it this way.

Btw, XP was from the start meant to be something you received for just using the skill. It was supposed to show experienced you were (for example Pala as a politician) opposed to levels which signified skill (freshy graduated politics guy with heaps of knowledge). When it was implemented I always thought of XP as an alternative way of showing skill more then just a requirement for the next level.

[Tarot]

My personal recipe for a level-up thread:

• Make it into some kind of adventure. This is almost always possible, unless it's a very theoretical lore. In that case, it is usually easier to research.
• Within the adventure, don't try to teach every single little thing. For example, in an Arcana level up (especially a later one) I wouldn't go through each and every spell - that's really useless drudgery. If the PC can figure out a few spells/techniques and completes the adventure, they can assume they've practiced the other spells or techniques on their own.
• Don't require insane technical detail. If the PC wants to put it into the skill (typically because they want to reach a high level with it) then great, but otherwise don't overdo it. Rationale over realism.
• Let the PC figure things out with minimum mod intervention. No need to over-research things if the PC knows the trade better than you do!

I've found these guidelines are really helpful with these threads and remove the boredom that is often associated with them. It seems to me that scrolls would mostly just change a thread from 'instructor said X' to 'scroll read X' - the only advantage is that it's easier to google/copy/paste into a scroll.

[Kaelon]

A lot of great comments here. Let me go through them and see if I understand and react accordingly.

Originally Posted by Apakai

I don't know, seems kind of... Platform RPG'ish.... But I don't see the harm in it really. I don't think that a person should be able to get any EXP from it, that's for sure. My take on skill education threads was to teach a person how to RP that skill, but if they would have to RP to gain any experience from it, then it wouldn't be a problem.

However, for me personally, I enjoy the struggle and the cumbersome writing. If I accomplish something, I want to know that I've worked hard for it. I don't want to know that after an intense thread of learning how to fight, that someone else knows just as much as I do just by buying one of these items.

I have always envisioned training as an opportunity to tell a story. For example, instead of having to go through a typical magic lesson, why not make the adventure all about a character's time in a School of Wizardry? It could feature a regular recurring cast of characters and other players, and essentially be a "Harry Potter in Aelyria" sort of module that players can participate in. I think the challenge this the scenario I've mentioned here is that you need to find a moderator that feels passionate about a particular training topic, and this is difficult because moderators tend to inherit, or develop, cities with diverse training opportunities that may, or may not, match certain moderation styles and skills.

That said, going back to the original suggestion, I think there has to be a way for characters who just want to "learn a skill" to do so quickly and conveniently; it shouldn't be a replacement for people who want to tell a lengthy story about how they learned the skill, but it should be just as viable an alternative path for players to take this route. So, for the players like you who do love intense threads of learning how to fight, there should be locations - and moderators - that cater to this experience. For other players, who just want to acquire a skill, and start using them in their adventures to gain experience and tell stories about other facets of their characters, I think there should be a fast-track way for them to do this. However, Malvoitre said it best that:

Originally Posted by Malvoitre

Is this much different than what we have now? A level up thread would still be required and experience awards would remain a moderator's preference.

Technically, nothing that I've proposed can't already happen -- it's how it works right now. The problem is purely one of attitude shift from both players and moderators; for some reason, people feel forced/compelled/required to do lengthy training threads, because that's what seems to be the dominant way of doing things. I think it'd be interesting, and ultimately beneficial for our community, to see two things happen:

-- Training Threads become more story/adventure driven experiences for characters; and,
-- Players have clear, quick alternatives to learning a skill, if they want to begin earning Experience Points and using that skill.

Originally Posted by Palacrisis D Jones

I am not someone who believes that one size fits all in Aelyria , there will always be a case for the formal training thread some skills fit that scenario better than others but the self taught man who has gained experience is a figure that should be allowed to pursue his path without having to attend “school”

Absolutely, Palacrisis. I think we need to keep all avenues open, and this sort of fits in the theme that Charlie and I have had for Aelyria for the past year: Aelyria has to cater to different play styles, both the budding novelist as well as the fantasy enthusiast, the brief role player and the quick quipper. Former GM Steve once said it best that a great role playing environment is one that supports both loquatious role playing and brevity in writing, enabling writers of both styles to flourish. I think the same needs to be said of how characters progress, because not everyone is a fan of training threads -- largely, I feel, because they haven't found training threads that they like (which is mostly a matter of matching up players and skills with moderators who are passionate about them), or because they are mostly interested in telling stories about their characters from other angles. Characters who aren't into magic, combat, and trade skills -- and instead, are lore-driven characters (who acquire their "abilities" through knowledge, which can simply be read rather than used) -- tend to have an easier time side-stepping the whole training matter because it doesn't impact them. However, consider the difficult road that ambitious characters have when they want to play a certain archetype -- a heroic swordsman, or a mysterious magician -- since building that type of character will invariably require training.

Originally Posted by Malvoitre

How about awarding experience over time as well? It's strange to think that PCs are only using their skills in threads and not practicing every day in their FT gaps...

That way players who come back after...say...a three year absence that saw a rule change wouldn't have to do a whole lot of back training.

Rustification is one of those things that, while controversial for some, is necessary to ensure balance in our game world by making certain that characters who vanish for a year (and aren't involved in storylines or role playing) can't simply reappear without any consequence. Rustification impacts everything -- from skills and abilities, to wealth and possessions -- and it is designed to simulate what happens during the character's absence. Is it reasonable to believe that an absent character is somehow still practicing magic/combat/trades? I think this is open to interpretation, which is why each returning character is treated differently based upon the type of explanation that players want Game Directors to consider for why their character wasn't participating in any storylines. Becoming reclusive and vanishing from the game world has to have its causes and consequences to make that disappearance, and reappearance, believable.

Originally Posted by Jasmyn Jewel

That means that there will have to be a scroll for each level then?

No. Like Malvoitre mentioned above, this doesn't really change anything. A Scroll, or Tome, or Manual, or Guide, or something of that sort, would only get someone from Level 0 to Level 1 -- basically, "learn the basics of a skill", so that they can start using it. Characters can already do this, but tend to do this through cumbersome self-taught lessons which tend to be viewed dimly by moderators. I propose an attitude shift where we allow characters to acquire the basics of the magic, combat, or trade skill, and then role play how their character uses this skill and acquires experience. Moving from one level to another would still be necessary through role playing in a "level up" thread, which I described as:

Originally Posted by Kaelon

an encounter, or challenge, that requires them to prove that they have mastered all of the abilities and techniques inherent in their current skill proficiency level, and if successful, enable them to "progress" a full proficiency level.

We'd want to emphasize that in order for a character to "level up", they would need to have a spectacular encounter or challenge in their level up thread, and just as a moderator can award experience, the moderator could also deem a "level up" having occurred. The player would need to demonstrate that his/her character is capable of mastering the techniques and abilities that s/he learned and used during the previous level of proficiency. All skill write-ups, be they magic, arcana, or trades, describe different abilities or techniques available at each of the five proficiency steps, so those are the sorts of tools that moderators would use to measure a character's progression. This is, in theory, supposed to be happening now, but all too often, we moderators rely upon a formal academic environment or training situation to simulate this progression. I think both styles should be equally encouraged.

Originally Posted by Z'kron

I was assumption that allowed the use of tomes etc for information and training was the way things already were? If not, I suppose it's a change that's rather overdue. But yes, I rather agree with the move away from static training and level ups to a more dynamic version when a player so chooses- you'd have trouble finding anyone who disagreed with you, Juan.

You are correct that this is generally how it can be done now, but as I mentioned to Malvoitre above, there is a general perception that -- for whatever reason -- this cannot be done. I'm suggesting that we think progressively about this, and maybe even write this into the Skills Primer and Moderator Manual, to make it easier for characters to tell these sorts of stories.

Originally Posted by The Huntsman

I think if we were to allow more widespread use of tomes, scrolls, etc. for increasing one's ability in a skill, we may want to put some limits on it to be certain. I mean, there is only so much one is going to learn from a book. A basic level (Level 1) in a skill should be able to be gained from such things as reading a book, manual and so on; though I thought that is already an option. As the individual then moves on with their lives and builds upon their basic knowledge through various challenges and uses of that skill, they of course gain experience. (I have to say as I type this and think out loud, aren't we already doing this? Am I missing something?)

No, you're totally right, Huntsman. I was, however, reacting to some feedback we've been getting from players that acquiring basic skills is too challenging - and reviewing what seems to be done, it appears that there isn't easy access to getting a basic skill quickly and conveniently; essentially "leveling up to Level 1", in my opinion, needs to be streamlined and made simple -- so that players who want to acquire a skill and move on can do so, and those who want to go into greater detail have that option in different scenarios.

For example, let's say that everyone could become an Initiate in Sorcery simply by reading a tome and touching an artifact, or meeting a magician, that unbound them. Some players would prefer their characters immediately go out into the wilds to use their magical abilities, while other players might want their character to undergo stories of their time in Magic School. Both of these experiences should result in Experience Points, enabling characters to move closer to a Level Up thread. Once a character gets the prerequisite number of Experience Points, they can attempt a Level Up.

Originally Posted by The Huntsman

I guess a big advantage to a more fluid skill development would be that the player may feel that the skill is more a part of their character than just another thing to add to a CIR. They begin to own it more perhaps?

I completely agree with you. This is very well said. However...

Originally Posted by The Huntsman

Thus, are we saying that someone who reads a book to learn the skill is equal to someone who takes a class and learns from another while also reading the instructions?

What I am suggesting is -- that for the purposes of acquiring Basic Level 1 proficiency in a skill -- players who take their characters through a quest, through training, to read tomes or encounter scrolls or artifacts, etc., should all be seen as having started out in the profession more or less equally, from a proficiency standpoi