Re: Okympia: New Subskills

From: nicholso@pioneer.arc.nasa.gov (Melvin H. Nicholson YBH)

Date: Wed, 08 Jul 1992 21:19:20 +0000

In article <1992Jul8.194041.14502@cbfsb.cb.att.com> skrenta@cbnewsg.att.com (Rich Skrenta) writes:
>Dave Horowitz <DSH109@psuvm.psu.edu> writes:
>> For instance, I was at forestry 4 when the new subskills started.
>> This shot me all the way back down to a subskill of 1 in
>> harvest lumber, and breed oxen.
>
>I keep swinging back and forth on this issue, but having a level
>rating on both the parent and subskill seems awkward.  What if
>only the parent were rated with a study level?  Spells would
>retain their levels, and exceptions could be made for certain
>subskills if necessary.
>
Perhaps the exceptioning may be even more awkward.  How about this:

No subkill may be studied to a higher level than the mainskil.
Subskill study is cheaper than mainskill study.
Effective skill would be (constant*subskill)+mainskill

This is really simple, and in it you can make it so that the constant
is higher for widely dispirate skill groups (so studdying the group as
a whole is less usefull), and lower when skill at one thing in the group
tends to imply an all-around skill (so studdying the group lends
usefulness at all the subskills)as

A small addition is all that is need if you want to prevent mainskill
from being highly raised with no specialized studdy (like the spells,
where you don't want a powerful magician to nessesarily have all the
spells available at reasonable level) is to make effetive skill =

(k1*subskill)+min(k2*subskill, mainskill)

This way, if you want exerience in the subskill to be important, set
k2 low.  If general skill is good enough to imply skill at the subskill,
then set k2 high.  This also has the nice effect that if k2 is small
(but not zero), then people with a higher mainskill can pick up
subskills faster (by the ratio k2/(k2+k1) for you math buffs) without
having to make subskill learning dependent on mainskill ability.

Mel

References

Okympia: New Subskills
Dave Horowitz <DSH109@psuvm.psu.edu>
Wed, 08 Jul 1992 13:08:43 +0000
Re: Okympia: New Subskills
skrenta@cbnewsg.att.com (Rich Skrenta)
Wed, 08 Jul 1992 19:40:41 +0000