Excuse my writing, I'm a little tired.

I think it'd be really cool to see even more lowbie/newbie skills than we have now. It'd just add a little bit more flash and sparkle to the low levels, and that holds new players.

But the problem with just adding more newbie skills is that in ten ranks, these skills may be useless, and you feel like you've "wasted" a couple practice sessions on them, or even reverted a train to get them.

So what if we had some skills that didn't require using practice sessions?

More items with that grant insight into certain skills would certainly be a start, and an easy way to achieve that. Make them available in newbie areas, like the Kobold Warrens, Aldevari, the Forest of Nowhere, and Galadon.

But the hard part I guess is thinking up of these lowbie skills. The place to start is by thinking "What did I always want more of as a newbie?" Food, gold, and flashy echoes.

A lot of items already have flash echoes associated with them, so that's cool.


A couple ideas.

A map of FoN (or other lowbie ranking ground) (or maybe a generic "hunting guide" that's not area specific) that helps you "hunt" better, increasing the chance that edible body parts will be dropped when you kill a mob.

Prospector's pickaxe, that when held gives you the "prospect" skill (level 5, ability decreases by level until practically useless at level 20), which lets you hunt for a few chunks of gold, gems, or valuable minerals, when underground or in monutainous terrain. These could be sold for profit of a gold coin or two at a mining outpost or something. Balanced by having to find the pickaxe, prospect skill lag, having to find someplace that'll yield minerals, and having to find a mob that'll buy them. Seems like it'd be a cool experience for newbies/lowbies. I realize that long-term players have their own sources of gold and would rather just powerrank.

Splntrd

But the problem with just adding more newbie skills is that in ten ranks, these skills may be useless, and you feel like you've "wasted" a couple practice sessions on them, or even reverted a train to get them.
Not necessarily. There's a lot of ways to handle this. Some examples:
-- Haven is inferior to Sanctuary, yet skill at the former can help with the duration of the latter. By using Haven when it becomes available, you strengthen a core supplication that you'll use the rest of your life. Some ideas presently in the pipeline will use similar dynamics.
-- Elbow and related skills are inferior to warrior specs like Jab, but because they can lead to general bonuses to unarmed combat, and you're eventually going to find yourself disarmed/etc. in your life, they retain some value.
-- Transmuters get three spells that do some healing. They also address different subsets of miscellaneous injuries, and have separate reuse timers. Even if all you need is healing, knowing all three is better than knowing one. If we made a low-level Repair Pancreas spell which was inferior to all three but otherwise followed the pattern, you could get some use out of all four.
-- Invokers have a lot of spells that throw damage, but being able to pick what type of damage, who gets hit goes a long way, and how much mana/lag to pay means that knowing several is valuable. Ditto their room-oriented 'trap' spells like Quicksand that don't stack well, but do different things and can generally be used when you're still waiting on a timer for something else.

What I'm more opposed to:
Prospector's pickaxe, that when held gives you the "prospect" skill (level 5, ability decreases by level until practically useless at level 20)
Why do I lose the ability to dig because I'm getting more experienced? I'm not opposed to a skill of this sort (see Panhandling for a related mechanic), but there should be some narrative/logical consistency.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

Keep them coming.

>Why do I lose the ability to dig because I'm getting more
>experienced? I'm not opposed to a skill of this sort (see
>Panhandling for a related mechanic), but there should
>be some narrative/logical consistency.

It went in as Panhandle. We'll have to add panhandling
as a keyword.

By the way, I kind of like Prospect as a panhandling
style variant.

Much to Amaranthe's chagrin, we have a lot of skills (Dirt Kicking instead of something like Blind, Horror instead of Horrify, Steal/Containersteal instead of Pickpocket, Spinebreaker instead of Spinebreak) which lead to awkward syntax. I've been trying to keep this in mind with newer skills so the syntax is more natural to an inexperienced user.

So Panhandle should remain the operative keyword during use, but I agree with adding Panhandling as a helpfile keyword.

Prospect has some potential as well. A lot of games have skills like this, but if poorly implemented (IMHO, usually so) it becomes a snorefest where the optimal strategy is finding someplace where no player will find you for hours and mashing the Prospect command until you have an inventory full of junk. A reuse timer doesn't make sense there (whereas it does for Panhandle, since people will get sick of you), although you could obviously attach move/fatigue costs to digging to create a de facto limitation on use.

One difficulty is determining what you get. If you're in a room and the description says "This is a mithril mine", you don't necessarily want some simplistic algorithm spitting out "OMG! You found silver!" I have some ideas (come tap me on the shoulder) along these lines which should tie into some future projects, but I don't think this will appear immediately.

That said, I like the idea of craft/mercantile skills as add-ons to existing classes, like Commerce skills are. I don't think our game lends itself well to playing purely business-oriented characters, but I think a lot of characters could have that as a secondary or even primary facet of their overall interests. It obviously aims at a different player than a skill like Pincer does, but part of our appeal has always been providing an environment for "cross-trained" players, and the downstream results of mercantile skills (custom-made items, whatever) can target the Pincer crowd.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

Re: Prospector's pickaxe thing.

How about the Pickaxe being a reward for a quest or some such, and (like the happy boots) it's usefulness just slowly wears down as it's used and as you get older.
It isn't so much you lose the ability, it's that the axe wears down and you can't replace it.

I kind of like the idea, seems like it'd give newer players who don't know where to find coins the old fashioned way a useful alternative until they learn their way around a little bit.