How it works right now (I think): Skill increase increases your rolls, grants recipe points (if applicable), and allows the practice skill level to increase. Practice skill only functions as a bar to where skill can be bought. There is a reset option, as well as a planned reset, which will remove purchased skills, recipes, guild affiliation, and all abilities. Practiced skill remains unchanged, allowing people to quickly repurchase skill (provided the riln is available).
Why I think there should be a skill decrease option: Right now guild is a big choice, you can't change your mind on it (aside from the above mentioned resets). But also every skill point is a big-ish choice. Maybe a medium choice. Any skill picked up will be a potential source of future regret, and while the availability of a reset minimizes that concern for now, the post-reset period of the game will still have this issue to contend with. But there is in my opinion a better reason to allow for skill unlearning. It can allow for dramatic story changes to renew characters rather than ending them. A combat veteran who sees too much and turns pacifist or a blacksmith turned warrior on a quest for revenge aren't relegated to only being an option for a backstory, but a lived and experienced story. Transformative moments in characters lives' can be times to push forward, but they can also be times to step back and reconsider things and take a different path.
That's my argument, but it's a big ask. Here are some ideas I've had about how to do it (or not do it) and why.
- Skill decrease lowers purchased skill and nothing else: This is pretty abuse-able because characters could buy skills up to what they need to learn all their recipes and then drop them back down. While they'd be forced to only make poor quality versions, they wouldn't have to rely on anyone else. Not ideal.
- Skill decrease lowers purchased skills and recipe points: This solves the issue of raising skills to get all the recipes and then dropping them back down, but introduces a new one: how do you implement the loss of recipe points (ideas on that below)? Another flaw with this method overall is that it could lead to people alternating between two significantly different skill sets since they don't need to re-practice skills to rebuild them.
- Skill decrease lowers purchased skills, recipe points, and practice points: Here alternating between two (or more) ability sets is more difficult, because it requires rebuilding the skill over time (though for some skills, such as swimming (at least at present), that's a non-issue). However, it's still too swingy without the additional consideration of time.
Any of the above options, if instantaneous, would tend toward abuse. If the unlearning required time though, characters could grow into skills, and grow out of skills. The rate of unlearning seems important, but I don't know what scale is most appropriate (balancing realism and roleplay and mechanics). If enough time is required though, there is less concern about leaving practice points in place.
- 5 skill points per day: Going from 700 skill to 0 skill would require 560 days or a little over 1.5 years. I feel like this one might move too quickly compared to other options.
- 1 skill rank per day: Going from 700 skill to 0 skill would require 700 days, just under two years. That doesn't seem inappropriate for the extreme examples noted above, at least, not to me. And you could still unlearn a 25-point skill purchase in a month.
- up to 100 skill points at a time in 30-day increments: This takes 870 (ish) days (2.4 years) from 700 skill to 0 skill, and any unlearning from 0-100 skill requires 30 days no matter where in that range it falls. This also seems not unreasonable to me, but it also gets a little gross arithmetic-wise because you have to unlearn 600-700 skill ranks in increments of 98 skill points (14 ranks * 7 points = 98 points), 500-600 skill ranks in increments of 96 skill points (16 ranks * 6 points = 96 points), etc.
- up to 25 skill ranks at a time in 30-day increments: This also takes 840 days from 700 to 0. The arithmetic works a little more nicely, but I don't like that unlearning from 700 to 600 takes the same amount of time as unlearning from 100 to 0 (120 days).
- organic with new growth: The idea with this one is that you flag a skill as decreasing (or possibly decreasing to target, e.g. skill decrease swimming to 500) and it only goes down as you raise other skills up. While this would be more internally consistent if it relied on purchased skill, that would allow someone to set a skill to decrease and then immediately raise several fully practiced skills to quickly erase the decreasing skill. This approach would move more smoothly if it followed practice levels. Basing the decreases off of practice increases would require practice levels decreasing with purchased skill levels (for sustainability) and would also fall apart for the rare case of a max level character with all skill points spent and all practice maxed. What I really like about this option though is that instead of saying "You're all set to unlearn, come on back in a month when you can learn new skills!" it encourages people to continue to play and progress at their own pace rather than at the pace of a cool down timer.
Code: Select all
Days required to unlearn
+-----------+-------------------+----------+---------+----------------+--------------+--------+
| Ranks (R) | Skill Points (SP) | 5 SP/day | 1 R/day | 100 SP/30 days | 25 R/30 days | Ideal? |
+===========+===================+==========+=========+================+==============+========+
| 25 | 25 | 5 | 25 | 30 | 30 | 30 |
+-----------+-------------------+----------+---------+----------------+--------------+--------+
| 50 | 50 | 10 | 50 | 30 | 60 | 30 |
+-----------+-------------------+----------+---------+----------------+--------------+--------+
| 100 | 100 | 20 | 100 | 30 | 120 | 30 |
+-----------+-------------------+----------+---------+----------------+--------------+--------+
| 200 | 300 | 60 | 200 | 90 | 240 | 90 |
+-----------+-------------------+----------+---------+----------------+--------------+--------+
| 300 | 600 | 120 | 300 | 210** | 360 | 150 |
+-----------+-------------------+----------+---------+----------------+--------------+--------+
| 400 | 1,000 | 200 | 400 | 330** | 480 | 240 |
+-----------+-------------------+----------+---------+----------------+--------------+--------+
| 500 | 1,500 | 300 | 500 | 480** | 600 | 360 |
+-----------+-------------------+----------+---------+----------------+--------------+--------+
| 600 | 2,100 | 420* | 600 | 660** | 720 | 480 |
+-----------+-------------------+----------+---------+----------------+--------------+--------+
| 700 | 2,800 | 560* | 700 | 870** | 840 | 630 |
+-----------+-------------------+----------+---------+----------------+--------------+--------+
* assuming partial rank decreases because 501-700 cost more than 5 skill points per rank
** because ranks 201-300 require 3 skill points per rank, an additional 30 day period to remove a small number of additional skill points becomes necessary.
Days required to unlearn
+-----------+---------+----------+---------+----------------+--------------+--------+
| From Rank | To Rank | 5 SP/day | 1 R/day | 100 SP/30 days | 25 R/30 days | Ideal? |
+===========+=========+==========+=========+================+==============+========+
| 700 | 600 | 140 | 100 | 240 | 120 | 150 |
+-----------+---------+----------+---------+----------------+--------------+--------+
| 600 | 500 | 120 | 100 | 210 | 120 | 120 |
+-----------+---------+----------+---------+----------------+--------------+--------+
| 500 | 400 | 100 | 100 | 150 | 120 | 120 |
+-----------+---------+----------+---------+----------------+--------------+--------+
| 400 | 300 | 80 | 100 | 120 | 120 | 90 |
+-----------+---------+----------+---------+----------------+--------------+--------+
| 300 | 200 | 60 | 100 | 120 | 120 | 60 |
+-----------+---------+----------+---------+----------------+--------------+--------+
| 200 | 100 | 40 | 100 | 60 | 120 | 60 |
+-----------+---------+----------+---------+----------------+--------------+--------+
| 100 | 0 | 20 | 100 | 30 | 120 | 30 |
+-----------+---------+----------+---------+----------------+--------------+--------+
Additional Considerations
Losing recipe points
- Force the player pick a recipe (or recipes) to unlearn: I don't like that this would let someone unlearn a recipe and learn another to toggle between two sets of recipes, but may not be an issue based on the time considerations (above). I do like that this would allow further development of available recipes without needing to hand out resets or similar headaches when players are on a skill point/craft recipe budget.
- Force unlearning a random recipe: This result is functionally similar to the above, but with people wasting more time playing recipe roulette.
- Have the game remember the order the recipes are learned in and just disable-but-not-remove the latest recipe: This essentially forces someone to relearn any previously unlearned/disabled recipes if they ever raise the skill again. This might lead to regret on recipe choice (especially if dramatically more recipes are released).
- Allow recipes to be unlearned independently of skills: This would require recipes to be unlearned first (requiring more time to unlearn craft skills than non-craft skills unless recipe unlearning is instantaneous) or to already be flagged for unlearning with simultaneous unlearning of recipes and skills allowed. If the latter, the system should prevent anyone from canceling unlearning a recipe without first also canceling any skill unlearning that was contingent on that recipe unlearning.
Should it be possible to cancel unlearning a skill? I think so, but what happens then? Do they not unlearn any of the skill? Do they unlearn some of the skill? I lean toward the 30-day increment models because that makes it easy to say if you cancel nothing gets unlearned in that unlearning session. If partial unlearning on cancellation is a thing, be sure it cannot be gamed to be faster to repeatedly partially unlearn skills rather than completing the unlearning sessions.
Please let me know if you see any loopholes that I've missed or other considerations that I've left out. Also please chime in if you have any idea of the ideal amount of time unlearning should take. Thanks for reading!
