Since the intelligence of races is a balancing factor, int should definately play a factor in how fast you learn skill.

It already does.

So, how I thought it would be, each time you rank up, you get a chance to improve in your skills, perhaps 1-2% or 0-2%, based on your int, where the usual gain would be 1% and races with 20+ int would recieve occasional 2 pointers.

We have a system for this, and it's around the strength we're comfortable with.

Aging would make your skills better. This can be viewed odd in a roleplay sence (sitting, doing nothing and your skills go up).

Older characters learn more quickly as is. It's intended to reflect maturity and greater life experience, and also to favor long-lived characters, who tend to be better-developed RP-wise on average.

But it can also be viewed as the gradual increase of prowess while living the bloody life of a cf adventurer.

The current system does this, except it's only helpful if you're using the skills in question. You don't get better by sitting in a dark corner somewhere.

The toughest nut to crack is figuring out a way to have PK improvements for gills, without the system being highly exploitable. First I though about having a counter that counts time in PK and gives gains based on it, but ditched this idea as way too abuseable. Then I came up with making it go up with each time you kill someone, but this would be too rewarding to low level PK spam, and also abuseable by rolling chars and having your buddies roll low level chars. So, what I decided might be best, is have a level cap at 30ish. After that with each player is DEAD, you get a chance to increase 0-2% in every skill/spell you used in the fight.

Generally speaking, there are plenty of incentives to PK as is. We're not exactly experiencing a shortage.

Also, this is a 'rich get richer' method- newer players won't benefit much from it, but players near the top of the power curve will reap more rewards, thus moving slightly more up the power curve.

The main reason I believe it would be good for cf in general, since it would remove silly speculation on which and which hidden stat affects learning rate and how, aswell as endless argument over skill practice.

I wrote 'help skill improvement' a while ago while looking at the (surprisingly simple) skill improvement function. It was comprehensive at the time. Looking it over, I think now the only thing to add would be the bonus we give to characters that have been around a long time. (This was announced publically when it went in, but never made it into the helpfile. It'll get added next time I have a chance.)

Our method of handling skill improvement is much simpler than people often claim. People make up crap all the time about how things work. Some people make up so much highly inaccurate stuff (which they post as rigorously tested fact) that I have to doubt either their sanity or their sincerity. The game needn't, shouldn't, and won't make policy based on the existence or absence of 'silly speculation'.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com