Skill Improvement

How do characters improve their skills? To preserve the notion of what a skill is, there ought to be some relationship between what you do and how your skills improve; but what?

If skills are rated using a points system (as most are), the question becomes one of deciding when to increment a skill by a point. There are basically two ways to do it:

• Random chance. Each time a skill-enhancement opportunity arises, there is a small chance of causing a skill point increment. This chance may increase over time.

• Cumulative chance. Each time a skill-enhancement opportunity arises, a random number of pebbles is thrown into a bin. When the bin is full, the skill point is incremented.

The advantage of the random approach is that you can gain a second skill point shortly after having gained a first, if your luck is in. The disadvantage is that you may never gain a skill point while your luck is out, and you will complain loudly about this. The cumulative chance approach does have some randomness, so you can’t ever be sure when you’ll gain a skill point (unless you can see the numbers); however, you can be absolutely certain that it won’t be immediately after having gained one.

Where skill nets exist, it may be possible to arrange for some skills to support others. It’s not a precondition of veterinary science that you know human anatomy; however, if you do know human anatomy, then you could expect to pick up veterinary skills a little faster. This can be managed by increasing the random chance of success or by preloading the bin with pebbles so that fewer new ones are required to fill it ¹.

It’s in deciding what qualifies as a “skill enhancement opportunity” that things start to get interesting. There are several ways to do it, none of which are entirely satisfactory.

The traditional method is improve from success. Each task requiring skill use has a difficulty rating; when a character attempts the task, his skill rating is compared against the difficulty rating to see if he succeeds. If he does, it counts as a skill enhancement opportunity; otherwise, well, he should maybe try something less difficult next time.

A variant of this is improve from failure. The theory here is that people learn from their mistakes, not from their successes, therefore characters should get a skill enhancement opportunity for coming close to success but not actually succeeding. If they do succeed, well, they’re happy anyway because they performed the task; this way, they’re rewarded for nearly succeeding too. If they try something so hard that they don’t even come close, well, maybe they should have attempted something easier. This is my own favorite method, by the way, but it’s not for everyone. It can produce inappropriate messages, too: You don’t really want to know that your character’s shield-use skill has gone up if the blow it only just failed to stop was fatal.

Many virtual worlds use improve from leveling. Although some increase in a skill may occur through use, the idea here is that experience points are a sufficiently good reflection of player activity that skill acquisition can be linked directly to character level. When you go up a level, you (may) get skill points to spend on improving yourself (also known by its fiction name, training). This approach has three advantages: Players look forward to going up levels more; it’s much easier to balance for skills that are used with wildly different frequencies (fighters swing swords more often than tailors make robes); characters don’t have to waste their time repeatedly shooting arrows at static targets, trying to learn from being bored. The disadvantage is that the skills that players decide to invest their skill points on may have no bearing on what they did to get the skill points in the first place—that is, it’s unrealistic. Some games try to limit you to only spend points on something you did in the last level (that is, you had to make a piece of clothing at least once to advance tailoring). Players will find and jump through these hoops very quickly.

Star Wars Galaxies uses a very novel approach that impressed designers because of the way it manages to kill several birds with one stone. The idea is that for craft skill points, the measure of success is whether anyone wants to buy your goods or not. Therefore, the more people use the products of your skill, the more skill points you get. This gives crafters a reason to produce the items that PCs want rather than the items NPCs will pay for. It helps stake-holding, it helps community, and it integrates crafters more fully into the economy. Players are as excited over the potential use of their skill as over the actual use of it. Presumably, there could be an improve by failure equivalent, whereby characters gained skill points by making items nobody wanted, but this has none of the advantages of the SWG original. Unfortunately, it does have one very important advantage that the improve by success version doesn’t: It makes sense. In real life, people buy a crafter’s goods because the crafter is good at making them, not the other way round.

There is a final skill advancement mechanism that isn’t used much at the moment but may become more important in the future: improvement from purchase ². If the virtual world’s business model and player base are right for it, characters could gain skills by simply paying for them. This was first done implicitly in the early 1990s by Avalon, which allocated skill improvement points to characters depending on how long their players stayed logged in (at a time when it charged by the hour). Achaea is more upfront about it: You pay real money for credits, which you can then turn into skill improvement points.

When skills can rise inexorably along a linear scale, it’s worth asking what the values mean. Is a character with a strength of 100 five times stronger than someone with a strength of 20? Unlike the case with character levels, it could well be possible to measure this directly—for example, by considering the maximum weight that the virtual world lets a character carry. If something approximating a proportional relationship is established, this raises a number of issues:

• If the principle is established for one skill, should it not apply to all skills?

• Is it realistic to have skill disparities as large as this?

• Are players agonizing at character-creation over whether to give their character a strength of 15, 16, 17, or 18 simply wasting their time thinking about what’s basically just noise?

That mention of player design brings us conveniently to our next topic.