First, I do not believe that all survival skills need work. I think that the current Skinning and subsystems in place work very well. GM Royce has done a great deal of work with Hiding, Stalking, Lockpicking and Disarm and subsystems of those skills. It is his lead that I plan to follow.

We have two problems. I'll explain.

1.Some of the skills need a rewrite.

We all know that skills like foraging, swimming, and tracking need some work. This is no great secret to the GM's or the players. In these skills a rewrite will more than likely cause a change in how you perform and learn the skill. A considerable amount of discussion will go into these skills before any change is made. I have already mentioned that for a number of reasons Foraging will more than likely be the first of the skills that will be addressed.

2.The application of some skills need to be expanded.

Skills like Climbing, Perception, and Escaping can be expanded. The need here is to create applications for the World Building Team to use. If we create a mountain climbing system it will do no good for anyone if it just sits in my office. Here the systems must be set up so that they can be easily added to an area design. This can be harder than just rewriting the skill.

All survival skills are foremost in my thoughts. However, there is a reason why some of these skills have not seen a change, most of them are waiting on other systems and technical changes in order for work to start. I am working on some basic fixes to the game that will allow us to proceed with work on survival skills. There still is a great many things to do elsewhere. I do not plan on killing myself or neglecting the progress of our guild by doing nothing but working on these system changes. When the Rangers have a full Guild Team in place the work should begin to move faster, until that point I would hope to be able to balance my time dealing with all the needs that Rangers have.

There will be no timeframe given on any of these changes. When they are ready to be released you will be the first to know. Just know that as long as I am here Survival skills will be at or near the top of my list of things to do.

One last thing, if I have time on Tuesday I will post the last of these topics, after Thursday we will begin to move into the meeting Phase. I think we have covered a lot of ground in 3 weeks if there is something that you feel I have not covered let me know and I will try to address it on Tuesday.

Thanks,

Jent