Often times I find myself wondering just what affect a certain ability of my character has and if you think about it - it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

A character trained by his guildmaster should have an in depth understanding of exactly what their abilities do.

The helpfiles generally describe an ability but they don't give you any insight into exactly what it does. For instance, take the impale skill. Helpfile says it does heavy damage, bleeding and strength loss, but, exactly how much? I don't know. It seems to make sense that someone trained in that skill would know. I kind of look at this like police and tazers. In order to carry a tazer you have to get tazed yourself to understand just what it does. It's part of the training.

As it is right now, you have to either rely on past experience as a player, be on the receiving end of it from an enemy, rely on some sort of OOC method such as asking someone on the boards or looking at logs or you can get an ally and go to the arena, which starts to cross an OOC line because how do you say IC that impale is -6 Str/-6Dex? Also, another point is that I'm pretty sure impale does -dex but the helpfile doesn't mention it.

I propose that something be implemented where you can go to your guildmaster and ask him to show you an ability. You'd have to have the ability practiced for him to do this. Your guildmaster would then perform that ability on you - as if you had performed it on someone else. So if strength is a factor in severity, then it would be performed at your level of strength. It wouldn't start combat or anything but you'd be left to deal with the affects of the ability for the normal period of time.

So you could ask your guildmaster to show you impale - he actually impales you, as if you had impaled someone else, but that would be the end of it. No combat. This can be done multiple times to see if things vary. There would be risk in this because you are essentially beating up your own character in your guild and at risk to get PK'd.

I think this would be a great tool for new players or for players trying out a new class. For myself, I've never played a shaman. Now that neo-shaman's are in its even more daunting because of so many new abilities and not all of them are readily apparent as to what they do. This offers an in character way to help discover your characters powers without having to rely on OOC sources, experience or insider knowledge.

What do ya think?

I get the coding hurdles, but it sounds like an awesome idea. My last char (a thief) always wondered what gouging did when it hit the various parts of the body and for how long. Gut? Would be nice to know how much -str and for how long they bled. I only found out how much -str kidney caused because someone told me.

Point is, makes sense that playing a thief would allow you to learn more specifics about your skills then playing something else and fighting one. How else are you going to find out?

Lastly, I had invitations to the arena so others could find out what their skills did. A bit awkward, but no other options.

I may be wrong, but don't the power of centurions change depending on who's fighting them? Could the same code be adapted to a practice mob in your guild that's the same class/level as you, has 99999 hp, and deals grazes and will use skills on you that you tell it to?

This would be a nightmare and a half from a code perspective and certainly falls into the bucket of things that aren't worth the level of effort required. That aside, I don't see much value in it anyway. If you really think you'd use this then that's well and good I guess, but I have a hard time believing most people are going to intentionally inflict harm upon themselves in a relatively unsafe place when as you said, there are more effective ways to learn what abilities do (that don't involve making yourself much easier to PK).

As an aside, while we're certainly not interested in an enormous level of detail in helpfiles (e.g., 100-200 damage w/ a ~Z% chance of -Y str/dex for X hours), if there are abilities for which the helpfiles really seem inadequate please let us know and we'll consider making them more clear.

But I disagree with some of the other stuff. For starters your guild is where you train. It isn't inconceivable that while learning to do something it would be done to you in the process.

I myself would certainly use it. An example is that sometimes in fights I try to pay attention to ticks if the fight gets drawn out. If I know something lasts 5 hours ill try to take that into consideration into my strategy when re-engaging. This is alot of times something I only know from having it done to me on past characters. In the spirit of keeping things IC this doesn't fit.

Furthermore, take torak's comments from Vhalorns char thread from the other board. He talks about using questioning thoughts and then dispelling someone so they can't sanc up again. I've been hit with questioning thoughts before but I wasnt aware that it could totally prevent someone from communing sanc. Heck maybe it can't. I don't know!! I wouldn't even know what it's doing to my opponent if I were the shaman casting it. I certainly can't ask them either. It's not very good RP unless they just outright tell me. So how do I find out? Hope someone drops a nugget on the forums? Happen to be on the receiving end on another character and remember it for future use?

Do you see what I'm getting at? This all adds to the high barrier to entry this game has where the older experienced players have such a huge leg up on these issues over the less experienced and there really isn't some sort of in game training mechanism to address this short of going ooc.