Unskilling

Have a new general feature to suggest, or think one should be tweaked? Share your ideas here.
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Navi
Posts: 350
Joined: Sat Apr 18, 2020 7:07 am

Unskilling

Post by Navi »

Unlearning skills has been something of a topic recently. It is difficult to construct an idea that doesn’t make it so that a character is able to switch from one set of skills to another at will. Skill-ranks are also how you gain recipe points. It makes little sense to me for someone to be able to reduce a skill to 0 and still know how to make those things, even if it is crude.
My suggestion is to keep track of how long a skill has been inactive for. That is, has not been used to gain experience. After a set amount of time, a week, two weeks, months, could be dependent on the skill in question and any stats the character possesses, that skill’s practice level begins to decrease. After a certain point, I’ll say 25 points, not ranks, the practice stops to drop, and the skill level begins to decrease. Once the skill is at the same level of the practice, the practice begins to decrease again. If at any point the skill is used to gain experience, then the whole process starts over, so long as the practice level is not below 25 points of the skill, if it is, then the skill begins to drop instead. Though the character would still need to refrain from using it for that set period of time again. The rate at which it lowers could be dependent on the skill level. Higher level ranks cost more skill-points, so naturally this benefits those with higher skills more, but the rate at which you gain skill-points back shouldn’t be any faster than someone who has 100 invested. If it takes them two weeks to recover 25 skill-points, then it’ll also take two weeks for someone who is neglecting a skill rank 400 to regain 25 skill-points.
I’m not a huge fan of someone being able to become a master in something, then just stop doing that thing for a year, and suddenly not know anything about the application of it, so I propose to set some benchmarks in skill, that once past, means you can no longer unlearn that skill below that point. The first bench mark I would set is 50. The second would be 200, and the third would be 400. After that I would suggest setting them at every 100 after that. Though this is really up to someone else, I’m not particularly good at fine tuning ideas.
An example of this would be our friend Michael. Michael is level 5, and has raised his woodcutting skill to 100 for 100 points, and woodworking to 200 for 300 points. He also increased his construction by 100. He’s realized that he’s probably not going to stick with woodcutting for long, since it is so much more efficient to pay someone else to do it, and it’ll free up his skillpoints. So Michael decides to cut down a tree or two, so that he can woodwork still while he waits for those skill-points to refund. In the meantime, he’s still collecting riln, levels, and skill-points. The first week goes by and Michael notices that his practice in woodcutting is beginning to drop. It’s now at 95. 4 days later, it’s at 75. After that, the skill level begins to drop, and after another 5 days, it reaches 75. Michael still has no interest in woodcutting so he continues to neglect it. The practice begins to drop again, and the process repeats until he’s reached 50 at which point it stops. Michael knows that he’s still better off putting the rest of the 50 points into woodcutting, but he’s still fairly low level, and the extra skill-points will help him reach 400 woodworking sooner, or perhaps 400 construction, he has not decided yet.
Some additional considerations could be to make the first benchmark equal to the recipe points spent in that skill category. They could even just be set to every 100 skill, though if I have 400 skill, I would still like to recover the 400 points down to skill 300, even if it does take a long time. Characters would still have to train as they would normally once the skill is lowered. This is a pretty big topic, so I’m interested in reading what other player’s and GM’s think.
wander without wanting, thrust into lands unknown. the shadows shift and change, and the worlds with them.
I'm not a soldier but I'm fighting
Can you hear me through the silence?
I won't give up 'cause there will be a day
We'll meet again
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