Adding more skills, yes or no, pros and cons.

[fluffyduck]

Since this was argued repeatedly on discord in the update channel, I figured having this post here, where people can say their piece for once and for all with their arguments laid out like civilised people that we are instead of getting into heated conversations. At this point I personally don't care that much, I'm not a huge fan of adding more skills, but I made my peace with the fact it's most likely coming through.

[Fox²]

Moving the discussion to the forums doesn't resolve the circular nature of these repeat discussions, and starting off the first post of the topic with an inflammatory remark denigrating other players is not productive nor wanted.

Something we feel that often gets overlooked in these conversations are the few statements of what we're investigating whilst players debate and base their opinions off other player's opinions, rather than on any fact of what has been announced, so I'm going to reiterate what we're looking into and answer a few common questions before locking this thread. It can be reopened in the future when people's heads have cooled down and time has been taken to read the current proposals.

Currently, we're looking into five areas regarding skills:

1) Expanding and clarifying the roles of existing skills. Some of these have already been done as of the 4.00a1 hak update.

• Tumble's skill description was expanded to clarify its use for acrobatics.
• Persuade was expanded to encompass diplomacy.
• Each knowledge skill had its descriptions updated to better describe their domain and what each knowledge skill can cover and how it might cover them.

2) Opening up more skills as class skills to more classes. This is being done to either match discrepancies between a classes' current set of skills with their tabletop skill set, or to add skills "that make sense" for the class.

3) Looking at adding new oft-requested roleplay focused skills. These additional skills are being floated after frequent requests from our players over the years to add skills to help mechanically represent their character's abilities in various aspects where our current skill list was lacking. A round table all-staff discussion was had on these skills for our current hak update plan in 2021 where we filtered through and narrowed down the requests to three areas:

• More knowledge skills.
  
• Survival.
• Profession.

Currently these skills are still being floated within the development team for how to best implement them, if they're to be implemented. What we've determined so far is that we do not want to add every tabletop knowledge skill, as that'd create too large a skill spread with too many esoteric skills that'd see little utilization, nor do we want to combine each regional skill into one, as that'd require rebalancing and releveling every character and their skill point allotments whilst simultaneously then having to create policies to resolve how that single skill is split among multiple topics, which would be a headache for everyone.

So we're looking at only adding knowledge skills to cover the major lore sources of the server. Elven History, The Dalelands, and The Underdark. We haven't yet fully determined the extent of these beyond initial ideas. Elven History would cover ancient elven history and the complex elven topics that lay within, whilst The Dalelands and The Underdark serve as counterparts to our existing Knowledge: Cormyr skill.

Much like how our Knowledge: Cormyr skill and other knowledge skills are currently handled, not being trained in these skills doesn't prohibit your character from having surface level knowledge of these topics, nor does it prevent your character from learning limited imparted knowledge through events or roleplay.

These skills represent deep studies into intrinsic intimate lore—whether that's ancient history of the area, anthropology, culture, or other advanced topics that the average commoner or adventurer wouldn't be able to gleam without dedicated study and education.

The existence of these skills does not retcon what your character already knows or limit what they can know. It expands how we can represent what they want to learn and provides a clear route for how these can be utilized by player and DM in roleplay.

4) Adding additional skill points to classes that are suffering from skill point deficiencies.

One of our cornerstone balance paradigms here on the server is trade-offs—not every class and character has the ability to learn every skill, feat, or ability. The choices we make with our characters and through the continued choices we make throughout their development over the course of their life as a character on the server is what helps make them interesting. It is what helps make our characters unique among the crowd of other characters, and our uniqueness helps us foster roleplay and tell stories with one-another as we each bring something new to the table to play with every day.

What we don't want to do whilst maintaining our paradigm of trade-offs is forcing characters into powergamed min/max builds where a player can only pick mechanical skills required for mechanical play in dungeons, or roleplay skills to help support and hold up the design of their character. Characters need the option of making a selection from both branches, but this can be hard to balance without allowing some builds to tip entirely into one side. Currently we do recognize that some builds are lacking in skillpoints, especially after knockdown and taunt were fixed on dungeon mobs which now require melee characters to spend points in or gear into discipline and concentration, and so we're looking at where we can relieve some of that point deficiency pain to allow characters to spread out their skills between choice selections of mechanical and roleplay skills.

5) Codifying skill rolls.

High magic servers come with high magic problems, and item inflation can make spent skill points and feats feel devalued when a character can increase a skill by +50 points through magic and items whilst the highest a PC who spends all of their skill points and feats into a skill can only ever break even—assuming that PC does not also max out their skills through items.

This discrepancy in skill totals between trained characters versus geared characters, versus a character maxed in both, is quite large, and this range makes it hard for DMs to balance skill rolls and hard to make PCs who have focused on increasing their skill feel valued in quests. Despite our best training, this is something the entire DM team struggles with as even when we get it right for a quest, it is at best always going to be inconsistent with the next quest or the next DM, so there discussions being held by the admins currently on how to codify skills. We're still early days in these discussions, so the only thing there is to announce currently on this topic is that our intention with codifying skill rolls is to provide a transparent policy for both players and DMs in how skill rolls are made; how DCs are set; and how skills are evaluated by giving definitions to skill points gained from items, feats, ability modifiers, and spent skill points.

[DubiousScroll]

I have no horse in this race except that I would love a Survival skill.