Started as a discussion on climbing into the outcrop and ogres...

Pell.

Category: The HUNT!! DR Creatures
Topic: New hunting areas!
Author: DR-BRANDEWYNNE
Posted: Dec 17, 1998 13:47:31

Larule -- no, I wasn't thinking specifically of Rangers and Thieves when I built the climbs into the Outcrop. My main purpose was to make sure that some circle 5 little kid hunting cougars didn't wander up there accidentally and get his behind shot off. :)

About requiring different skills for different professions, that strikes me as quite a bit out of character. Or unrealistic, perhaps. How would I build a portal that required a Paladin to have, say, 50 ranks of armor to pass through it? I mean, I could do it from a programming standpoint, but what would the IC rationale be? Or a portal that won't let you through unless you have so many ranks of weapon skill? I suppose I could put up a gate with a gatekeeper who assessed you the same way a guild leader does, but.... It's just a rocky hill with monsters on it. :) Having an intelligent gatekeeper constantly guarding the place implies certain things about the area, none of which apply to this one. Any such portal I put up is going to be reasonably IC and rational. But at any rate, I wasn't thinking of restricting it by profession, or even really by level, past a certain low-ish point. There are enough good places to train climbing in the game that getting enough climbing to get into the Outcrop really isn't tough, and someone who works on climbing even moderately is going to be able to get up onto the Outcrop a lot earlier than they really should. :)

But really, there's a larger issue here. We have a sort of circular problem in the game, and fixing it is going to inconvenience some people for a while, but that's just the way it has to be. The problem is that there are certain skills (and stats, but I'll just talk about skills here) which are considered "useless" by a lot of people. Skills that they learn because their guild leaders want them to, but that they don't see as being good for anything. Climbing is one of those. I'm not saying everyone thinks climbing is useless, but actually there's not all that much in the game which requires climbing, which means there are a lot of people wondering why their guild leaders think it's such a great skill. And a lot of people whose guild leaders don't require it just don't work on it. They would if it were useful, but it's not so they don't. But if we make something it's good for, suddenly we get complaints from people who haven't trained the skill because it wasn't useful, except it is useful now, but they don't have much of it... Etc., and around we go. It's the transition that's going to be annoying for some people, but we have to get through it.

So now there's a hunting area that you can't get into unless you have what is really a very small number of climbing ranks. That much climbing isn't really tough to get, and someone who gets a couple of ranks of it per level will have plenty of it by the time they're likely to be hunting ogres anyway. I know that doesn't help characters who reached higher levels with very little climbing, but I can't fix that. I can only provide the incentive for people from now on to value climbing, to see that it's worth learning in its own right, and to believe that there's a point to learning it aside from just guild-related makework.

I have plans for future areas which require some number of ranks of other skills to get into them, or to use certain features of the area, and for the same reasons I described above. When I release these areas, I know there'll be people who want to use the area, and can find the things the area contains to be valuable, but who won't be able to get in because they lack the skill. That's a given, and I accept that there's going to be some criticism. But I do think that in a mostly-skill-based game there really needs to be a true use for all the skills, something you want to do that you can do with them but can't do without them. A lot of what makes training many of the skills so boring is knowing that getting ten more ranks of Whatever isn't going to do you any real good, in terms of what your character can do. Requiring some climbing to get onto the Outcrop gives people a true reason to learn climbing, at least up to the point where they can get in, and perhaps help others by dragging bodies out, which requires a bit more. Requiring perception or stalking or scholarship or magical device skill to get into an area, or use some of the things within an area, will give people reasons to learn those skills. And, I think, will make the game more fun.

One of the main complaints that has been around since the game was first released, and a valid one I think, is that the skillset we have isn't fully utilized. We're working on that. And every time we create something which requires ten or twenty more ranks of some skill than anything else in the game ever required before it, there's going to be criticism. But it's all part of developing the skill-based system. Just being able to learn skills isn't enough; you also need things to use them on. We're working on it. :)

Brandewynne