On the Design of Skills, Read me First! Options

[Anansi]

Note: The terms I'm going to be using here are "skill" and "ability." "Skillset" is a redundant term that we don't need; "skill" means what "skillset" is ordinarily taken to mean, and "ability" means the individual powers within a skill.

General Guidelines
A typical skill should have around thirty abilities. And that's it. That's the only hard and fast rule, size. And even with that constraint, some skills are bigger than others - it's possible to "cheat" by making abilities that do more than one thing, sometimes even two completely unrelated things. In Lusternia, the Ninini ability gives either a damage bonus or a damage reduction, for example.

Besides that, there are a few things to note:

1. Skills need cohesion. A skill is not just a group of unrelated abilities; it must work cohesively with itself. Just picking abilities that you think are cool doesn't make a skill; even if the individual abilities are good, the skill isn't unless it works as a cohesive whole.
2. Nearly all skills in IRE games follow a common theme. Every ability in Imperian's Knifeplay is about using the sitara knives, for example. This is pretty obvious. Sometimes a strong theme is used to hide the fact that certain abilities have nothing to do with each other (What do waterbreathing, poison resistance, a bonus to strength and sprinting have in common? That's right, they're all in Lusternia's Totems base skill.)
3. Good skills are also mechanically cohesive. This is especially important for a skill intended to work as someone's main offense. Look at Knighthood and its specialisations in Lusternia, for example; nearly all skills either cause wounding, or they use wounding to deal afflictions.
4. Skills need a focus. When you write down your idea for a skill, think about how that skill is going to be used. A skill that is half defenses and half offensive abilities is almost always either going to be bad at both things, good at both things and thus too good (The "all-powerful hybrid" problem), or good at only one thing, thus rendering half the skill useless.
5. Skills break down into four rough categories: Offensive skills feature insta-kills, damage, and afflictions; most primary guild skills in other games are offensive. A good example is, again, Knighthood in its various incarnations. Support skills feature "utility" abilities and effects, and things like terrain control that don't directly win fights. A good example is Subterfuge in Imperian, or Stealth in Lusternia. Defensive skills feature defenses, often with effects that let the user survive longer in order to get a kill. Athletics and Acrobatics, in Lusternia, are good examples. Hindering skills don't provide ways of finishing off someone, but are mostly afflictions. Evileye, from Achaea, is a good example.
6. Some hybridisation is definitely possible and even desirable. Prominently, almost all skills feature some support abilities (Lusternia's take on Knighthood is such a good example of an offensive skill primarily because it has nearly no support in it). For example, Elementalism specialisations in Lusternia mix a great deal of support into what is a primarily offensive skill, and Illusions in Lusternia mix a small amount of offense, defense and support in what is primarily a hindering skill. Skills don't have to be focused like a laser beam, but they do need to serve a clearly defined purpose. Usually, support abilities are shoved at the bottom end of a skill - look at Tarot, which starts with powerful support abilities (Hermit) before pulling out its hindering and offensive abilities.
7. Offensive skills need viable win conditions. That means they need ways of killing people. Attacks that do a lot of damage is not a way of killing people; combat is not fun if you can simply beat someone to death by causing more damage than they can keep up with, and it's downright frustrating if your opponent can beat you with his bashing ability. Afflictions, by themselves, are also not viable ways of killing people. Afflictions and effects that let the skill user build up damage over time until they can overwhelm someone's curing are viable ways of killing. Insta-kills, along with abilities that allow them to be pulled off, are viable ways of killing. Stacking bleeding, along with appropriate afflictions and ways of making those stick, is a viable way of killing. An offensive skill should have a couple of different ways to kill people, and sometimes adding a win condition to a mostly hindering or even support skill is a good idea.
8. Skills need mechanical themes. What this means is that they need things like the wounds-to-afflictions progression of Knighthood, the demesnes of Lusternia's Druidry, or the stances of Imperian's knifeplay. This really helps cohesion, and makes using the skill different from using other skills. Ideally, a skill should give its user something extra to consider (The target's wounding, his demesne effects, his current knifeplay stance...) in his strategy without making combat overly complicated.
9. All of this applies mostly to combat-oriented class skills. Trade and common skills are very different.

The Content of a Skill

So you have a strong theme, you know where the skill goes, and you know what it does. Time to come up with the actual abilities. This is the difficult part; having good ideas is easy, executing them is hard. Knowing what the skill needs helps a lot; what you'll want to do, most likely, is write down everything that comes to mind and constantly thin down your list of ideas so that you can pin down the ones that work well with the skill. When you can thin the mass of possible abilities and effects and choose the ones that support the themes of the skill, then you know you have a good enough outline. While an ability can do nearly anything, these are a few rough outlines that you can use as a guideline:

• Offensive skills: One or two insta-kills or abilities that work as win condition (Including damage or bleeding abilities), five to ten abilities that support those win conditions, the remaining in hindering abilities and afflictions that help survive enemy offense and overcome curing.
• Defensive skills: As many as five abilities that allow escaping combat entirely, ten or so permanent defenses, the remaining in abilities that work defensively but aren't constantly working (For example, abilities that cure afflictions).
• Support skills: Assorted utility abilities, at least some of which should be useful for combat at least marginally. Common effects include fast transport, reaching different elevations, putting up barriers and invisibility effects. Most support skills also feature at least some hindering, often in the form of poisons (Because that allows you to "cheat" in the variety of afflictions the skill can do) or very common hindering effects, like entanglement. A little defense and even "cheat death" type abilities are also common.
• Hindering skills: Assorted afflictions, often with a little battlefield control (Putting up barriers, moving people around around or between elevations). You can often turn a hindering skill into an offensive one simply by adding one or two insta-kills that work well with the remaining abilities.
• These are very rough guidelines, and work only for the more clear-cut skills.
• Base skills tend towards more support, specialisations tend towards more offense or defense.

Reviewing Abilities

After you're done with your first draft, ask yourself:

• Are the abilities too complicated? Are there things here that players won't be able to understand, or which behave in ways they can't consistently predict? You should prevent this, but that doesn't mean "dumbing down" combat.
• Do I know how this skill is going to be used? Do I know how it can kill people? Do I know which abilities are more attractive to players? You should know this.
• Is there anything this skill should do, but isn't capable of? Are there any common situations which would render abilities useless that this skill should be able to counter? If yes, add abilities that make this skill useful in more situations. For example, if your skill relies on the user being in some particular type of terrain, it should be able to make that kind of terrain. If it relies on a particular elevation, it should give users the means to reach that elevation and stay there safely. If it has a timed instakill, it should have ways of keeping people from leaving.
• Can this skill be countered? Is there something that shuts down its offense? If yes, you may want to consider how easy that is to accomplish. If no, then the skill may be too powerful. Some skills, particularly ones that are non-combat but can be dangerous if unchecked, may benefit from being able to counter themselves.
• Does this skill shut down something else? Is there something that becomes useless against someone with this skill? If yes, you may want to reconsider the abilities in question if they're too easy to accomplish.
• Can this skill easily get an affliction lock? If yes, then you may want to reconsider the abilities in question, or rework them to be harder to use.
• Does this skill shut down curing? Aeon, locked throat, asthma and a slew of other afflictions can make it impossible to cure. Having too many of those can not only lead to affliction locks, but it can also make fighting against a skill frustrating. On the other hand, some ways of either shutting down curing or afflicting faster than curing can keep up are necessary, so that the skill can make its important affflictions (The ones that support its win condition, or the win condition of another skill) stick.
• Is this skill frustrating to fight against? This is the most important. Even if the skill isn't overpowered, skills that force people to fight in ways that are frustrating aren't fun. A good skill should present a clear challenge, not overwhelm people with how much harder fighting against it is. Examples of things that some players find frustrating are aeon (And its hideous room-wide child, choke), effects that force people to think about esoteric things they ordinarily don't have to care about, effects that hinder curing, effects that hinder everyone in the room (Especially when combined with passive effects), illusions and domination-type abilities. That doesn't mean you can't use those things! It means you should be extra careful not to make them too powerful, to difficult to stop, or too fast.
• The balance/equilibrium system is what gives IRE combat its characteristic pacing and balance, so be careful when bypassing it. Illusions don't unbalance things in the least. Illusions when off-balance can be dodgy if not done carefully. Illusions as a passive, constant effect, without caring about balance or equilibrium, can easily become overpowering and strongly abusable.
• How do all the different afflictions in this skill work, exactly? It's important that you define your terms. We're not carrying over any old code, so all our afflictions, even if they have the same names, are in fact "new."
• Is this skill frustrating to fight with? This is also important. Commonly frustrating things are are abilities which are overly random, abilities which depend on too many different factors to be predictable, and relying on uninterruptible actions that take a long time to finish.
• You can't really know whether an ability is unbalanced until it's tested, so don't worry too much about the precise costs, speeds, damages and effects. However, be very wary of abilities that can't be balanced; some abilities are just broken, and no amount of fiddling will fix them. Particularly dangerous are, again, abilities that don't use the normal balance/equilibrium system.

Edited to Add: You should also note that our skill system is different.

[Ciarnyn]

If we're brainstorming a skill and its abilities, do you want us to have thought out all thirty abilities in order to post it, or can we throw a skill down with maybe, ten planned abilities and then brainstorm with each other?

[LEO]

Naw, we are supposed to have just about 60 abilities is every skillset, the names, what they do, the coding, and who the skills will go to.

[Ciarnyn]

Well then you're in luck! I've been coding like mad. Mad!

[Anansi]

If we're brainstorming a skill and its abilities, do you want us to have thought out all thirty abilities in order to post it, or can we throw a skill down with maybe, ten planned abilities and then brainstorm with each other?

Some people hate design by commitee. I am not one of those people. By all means, post unformed ideas. What I wrote is for people who really want to go all the way and do a full skill by themselves, but if you want to just throw an idea at us, then great. But you'll have more chances of seeing your idea come into the game if you observe what was said; that doesn't mean you have to design 30 abilities, but it does mean that you have to design your ten or so with those two things in mind:

1. They should be representative of the skill as a whole; from looking at those ten abilities, it should be possible to extrapolate what the skill is like as a whole.
2. They should be designed to share space with 20 other abilities.

But really, knock yourself out. I want you all budding skill designers to understand what the rules are, so that you can go out and break the rules.

[Manny]

Quick question, as this appears to be THE thread to ask it on, but would "Piloting" be a skill or an ability, like in Survival?

[LEO]

I'd say skill, since you could then do swift turns, double back...great, now I'm gonna have to make a skillset.

[Ciarnyn]

Here's another question... I'd rather look dumb in a small way by asking a silly question than look dumb in a big way by making a whole skill that's just not good.

I don't have a large amount of experience with the skills (I am a casual MUD player, I'm looking for this one to really grab my attention). What I want to know is, how specific should these skills be? Say I want to suggest a skill called Piloting. Should there be separate skills for, say, piloting a cargo ship, piloting a star fighter, and piloting a huge warship? Or should those things all come under the umbrella of one skill? (Sorry if this should be completely obvious... like I said, I've got the will and the imagination, just not the experience.)

[Ciarnyn]

Ha ha, as I was typing that, someone asks about piloting, and I didn't see it. Sweet.

[LEO]

I'd say one skill, have the other specifics in other skills.

[Unarmed_Forces]

I think these forums will really pick up fast.

My suggestion would be to have skills relevant to items, and have them less relevant to others. (Yeah, I'm no programmer, don't laugh at me. )

For instance, a person who can drive a car could drive a truck as well, but only to an extent. Therefore, I would assume that someone who can fly a starfighter would be able to fly a massive cargo lugger, but only to a certain extent.

So, we have abilities that are common to both, and then the skills go off in different directions.

Before we design skills, what are the 'classes' or archetypes that would use them? Or are we going for a 'you choose' sort of idea?

Some vauge ideas:

Gun care - cleaning, upgrading, skill, etc.
Discipline - for combat bonouses?
Trading skills?

[Kunin]

Any and all ideas are welcome, whole skills, a few random abilities... even just a cool name for an ability. If you have an idea we want to hear it!

As for anything relating to space we already have a lot of things planned out, but that doesn't mean we don't want to hear what YOU think. Unkeml is the space master right now, so expect to see him comment on anything like piloting.

Remeber, Tears of Polaris is for the players, so let us know what you want!

[Gaetele]

Design by committee is a good idea, in theory, but it's ultimately the forces that be (in this case, Administrators) who have the final say in everything.

For example, the Monk archetype in Lusternia is a new archetype that was formed largely in part by various committees in each organization who pushed for their own specialization that would separate them. One of the admins has recently brought up that, although the committee gave a nice broad concept for the skillset to follow from, the administration were the ultimate deciders in the matter. Now, with the advent of a new affliction system (Ruptures, in Ninjakari), the other Monk skillsets are now to be rewritten in order to meld that into their organization.

Just be sure to remember that, although your idea may be great, it may not be exactly the flavor of what the administrators are looking for, so if it is denied or tweaked, do not be surprised.

[Kunin]

I think these forums will really pick up fast.

My suggestion would be to have skills relevant to items, and have them less relevant to others. (Yeah, I'm no programmer, don't laugh at me. )

For instance, a person who can drive a car could drive a truck as well, but only to an extent. Therefore, I would assume that someone who can fly a starfighter would be able to fly a massive cargo lugger, but only to a certain extent.

So, we have abilities that are common to both, and then the skills go off in different directions.

Before we design skills, what are the 'classes' or archetypes that would use them? Or are we going for a 'you choose' sort of idea?

Some vauge ideas:

Gun care - cleaning, upgrading, skill, etc.
Discipline - for combat bonouses?
Trading skills?

The skill system, to include archetypes and subtypes, will be released this week.

[Anansi]

Here's another question... I'd rather look dumb in a small way by asking a silly question than look dumb in a big way by making a whole skill that's just not good.

I don't have a large amount of experience with the skills (I am a casual MUD player, I'm looking for this one to really grab my attention). What I want to know is, how specific should these skills be? Say I want to suggest a skill called Piloting. Should there be separate skills for, say, piloting a cargo ship, piloting a star fighter, and piloting a huge warship? Or should those things all come under the umbrella of one skill? (Sorry if this should be completely obvious... like I said, I've got the will and the imagination, just not the experience.)

How specific a common (That is, a not-combat-oriented skill) should be depends mostly on believability and redundancy.

I'll take three examples. One is urban survival/wilderness survival; the other is kendo/sword-fighting; the third is battleship piloting/freighter piloting.

Urban survival really is something you learn separately from wilderness survival, so it makes in-world sense for those to be separate skills. Kendo and "western" sword-fighting are also taught differently and look different, so it is plausible for making them separate. But it's not plausible that someone capable of piloting a capital warship can't also pilot a freighter.

Urban survival entails totally different things from wilderness survival, so they are not redundant. Kendo and sword-fighting, however, boil down to essentially the same components; unless the fact that they involve the same essential thing (Cutting people with sharp swords) is masked by different mechanics
or they have some essential difference (Such as kendo using one sword and sword-fighting using two), there's a lot of redundancy there, and making the two separate skills wouldn't seem to be worth it. For the same reason, it's redundant to have different skills for piloting warships than for piloting freighters; warships carry cargo, after all, and freighters can be fitted with weapons...

A case can be made for separate fighter/capital ship skills, but at the moment we (And certainly not you, I'm afraid) don't know enough about how space and its combat will be handled to be able to make that decision, but expect more details soon.

[seeS]

Probably this will get clearer once we have an idea of the "terrain" involved. What I mean by this is Lusternia has water and elemental planes, so there are a bunch of abilities around those hostile areas.

There's no point having waterbreathing or the trout totem if you have no rivers or seas etc.

I would imagine there might be other unpleasant areas, for example hard vacuum that could either be overcome with an ability or even an innate ability for some creature. There's not just mere breathing though, you cannot hear in space. That's only a few examples throw around (or even throw out!)

I know you mentioned randomness and how its bad but, and perhaps its just me I'd like it. One downfall with combat to me is its too regimented. I always use effect X and you counter with Y and we always get this result. Now IRE certainly is way ahead of a lot of places in this regard, but perhaps there can be more done here.

[Ciarnyn]

Thank you for the detailed response... that was exactly what I was looking for! I can already tell the feedback between designer and player is going to be fantastic, and that *really* makes me want to play the game.

[Kunin]

Design by committee is a good idea, in theory, but it's ultimately the forces that be (in this case, Administrators) who have the final say in everything.

For example, the Monk archetype in Lusternia is a new archetype that was formed largely in part by various committees in each organization who pushed for their own specialization that would separate them. One of the admins has recently brought up that, although the committee gave a nice broad concept for the skillset to follow from, the administration were the ultimate deciders in the matter. Now, with the advent of a new affliction system (Ruptures, in Ninjakari), the other Monk skillsets are now to be rewritten in order to meld that into their organization.

Just be sure to remember that, although your idea may be great, it may not be exactly the flavor of what the administrators are looking for, so if it is denied or tweaked, do not be surprised.

All very good points! In the end, obviously, I have final say in the design of skills. While I will do my best to read every post and comment if I can, don't be put down if I don't. Anansi will be my main filter and make sure I see things that would fit in well or that could be adapted to meet one of our planned skills.

[Kunin]

Probably this will get clearer once we have an idea of the "terrain" involved. What I mean by this is Lusternia has water and elemental planes, so there are a bunch of abilities around those hostile areas.

There's no point having waterbreathing or the trout totem if you have no rivers or seas etc.

I would imagine there might be other unpleasant areas, for example hard vacuum that could either be overcome with an ability or even an innate ability for some creature. There's not just mere breathing though, you cannot hear in space. That's only a few examples throw around (or even throw out!)

I know you mentioned randomness and how its bad but, and perhaps its just me I'd like it. One downfall with combat to me is its too regimented. I always use effect X and you counter with Y and we always get this result. Now IRE certainly is way ahead of a lot of places in this regard, but perhaps there can be more done here.

What Anansi means by randomness is things that are SO random that you can't count on them at all. For example something that damages a random limb a random amount and can never be targeted wouldn't be so useful. Something that does a random affliction, out of a set list of 3-5, is much more useful.

[Necromancer]

One of the types of skills that I would like to see are more occupational skills. It opens up a range of possibilities. For example, someone with the Bounty Hunter occupation would get bounties on certain NPCs, or someone with the Coroner/Medical Examiner occupation would get corpses to autopsy. I think it allows a wider means of income than just killing people and doing quests.