You don't get any bonus for knowing a related skill. If I'm a
woodworker, and I know how to make bookshelves, I probably have a good
start on knowing how to make a chest of drawers. Yet in the flat
skill system, "make bookshelves" is completely separate from "make
chest of drawers." (substitute "make shield" and "make plate armor"
if you like.)
That's because knowing how to select the proper wood, make dovetail
joints, etc., are all part of a parent skill, "cabinetry". If I know
cabinetry well, then I'll be able to apply all of the subskills
better. My first bed I make might not be too great, but the more of
them I make the better I'll get. And my first bed will still be
better than the one made by the warrior across the way, who has no
skill in cabinetry.
Just what is an "assassination" skill? It probably takes into account
stealth, knowledge of poison, skill with weapons, and others. How can
you be a good assassin without being stealthy?
We can fit this into the current system by making assassination a
subskill of stealth, its primary parent skill, and noting in the
documentation that increased combat skill will make it more effective
(shocking, really, because that's just the way it works now :-).
I think that levels for subskills should come back, and should make
things more effective. I'd suggest limiting the level of a subskill
to be at most that of the primary parent skill (e.g. if I have stealth
3, I can't have assassination at > 3).
Then, when we want to see how effective you are as an assassin, we
give full credit for assassination skill, partial credit for stealth
skill, and partial credit for other parent skills.
(start proposal II)
Of course, this really means that I want two levels of skills, parents
and subskills, with arbitrary dependencies "up," i.e. parents don't
depend on subskills, but subskills can depend on many parents.
A much simplified example (I hate ascii graphics):
stealth combat woodworking archery
| ______/ / \________ |
| / / \ |
assassination make cabinet make bow
We can then define the dependencies of each subskill (e.g.
assassination is 75% stealth and 25% combat), etc., and can limit the
level of the subskill depending on the level of the parent skill.
I can see this being mostly table-driven for an efficient
implementation.
We don't have to tell the players the proper prerequisites for a
subskill; that can be part of the training process. For example,
Feasel the Wicked sets out to become an assassin.
We could even have a "study assassination" automatically study the
parent skills as necessary, and then study the subskill. That might
be removing too much control from players hands, though.
order: study assassination
output:
You must achieve higher levels of stealth and combat before you can
study assassination. Feasel will study combat and stealth before
studying assassination.
(Feasel studies to stealth 1 and combat 1, and then studies to
assassination 1).
We could even have a "study assassination" automatically study the
parent skills as necessary, and then study the subskill. That might
be removing too much control from players hands, though.
sc
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