How are you going to balance combat and non combat abilities? I noticed you have climbing as an available skill, does climbing improve your chances to succeed or improve your rate of success? What are the penalties for failing a climb-check?
I like the idea of a fast-climber being able to skirmish enemies in an effective manner, but for that to work a lot of care has to be put into how every skill interacts with each other. Otherwise you end up with a lot of junk skills that it takes the player a LOT of playing to evaluate their usefulness.
I suspect you're opposed to players having bad character development choices (though in any skill-tree system they will emerge in unexpected ways)- what sort of thoughts do you have to making such a large variety of skills useful?
Great stuff so far.
Balancing will come about as I implement both the specifics of combat, and the specifics of everything else. Non-combat abilities will gain you exp from trades, deals, "achievements" (like mastering a language), diplomacy, discoveries, and other things (for instance, you might gain experience for each floor of an ancient ruin explored). These will be balanced against combat in terms of how easily the player can level up as that class, though naturally each class' specialty will make it much more suited to leveling in a particular way.
Currently, each step you climb has a chance of failure; the climbing skill reduces that. The longer you climb for without a break also increases your chance of failure each time, but only very slightly. If you fail, you fall! I may add a little meter which gives you the chance of success with each subsequent step, AND - in the future - I'd like to expand that you having different kinds of terrain having different success/fail chances, as well as different moves (so maybe climbing up is easier/harder than down?) and making it a more informed choice..
Agreed re: useless skills; that's actually a slight concern about the armor tree. I might end up replacing it with something else more interesting. It's proving difficult to come up with *interesting* skills for it. Anyway, I am content to ruthlessly prune any useless skills in the future.
I suppose - though it is hard to know how to quantify and implement this - that I would like a lot of the skills to not function on their own, but to potentially function in tandem with a large number of potential other skills. For example, a Navigation skill boosts ship-to-ship combat (i.e. in person, not via guns) and a Leadership skill boosts hand-to-hand combat (and a Leadership Trait boosts sword damage), so if you took those and then equipped the crew of your ship with swords, they'd be especially effective!
Lastly, thanks a lot
. It's great to know people think so.
