The "TBD" Extended Subguild

[wizturbo]

So many of my characters have found their niche well after character creation, and I was just thinking how amazing it would be to have the option to pick subguilds sometime later in your character's life instead of up front.  For standard subguilds, this would obviously be a lot more work for staff, but I was thinking perhaps the extended subguild CGP option could somehow be used for this...  Pick the TBD extended subguild, and you get no subguild skills at character creation, but may pick an extended subguild at a later date that reflects the IC growth of your character.  Since these are manually applied anyway, I'm assuming there's little difference in staff work applying the skills on Day 100 instead of Day 0?

Thoughts?

[Harmless]

Especially in the case of learning a craft, that seems kind of cool. But it's a big change from existing policy where many character attributes are set at creation and fixed.

I think practically the biggest advantage of picking your extended subguild late is knowing what niche you'll fill in your chosen playing area.

I think the current practical way of doing the above is to make a "throwaway" PC to scout the markets and players active in the area, then submit the extended subguild app once you know what you're going for.

Those are my thoughts 

[Kol]

I'm not an expert, but I'm fairly certain that from a coded perspective, this would be difficult.

The reason Staff had people wait in the Hall Of Kings when applying for a Extended subguild before they were coded in, was because once your Character points to a location, and is transported there, his stats and skills etc. are generated, assigned, and fixed.

I can't speak for staff obviously, but from what I remember when I used to mess around with this sort of thing, to apply skills, upgrade them, or change anything requires finding the particular file for the character, and adding them one at a time, in the correct place. Imagine changing the values in a INI file, except at any one time, you have to trawl through a INI file with around 2000 separate sections, each with around 20-50 lines of code each.

Also, there are certain staff that are required to do such a thing, with other obligations and responsibilities. It would have to be coded in to make it effective, otherwise it would just burden staff with more work.

The CGP system was announced a few years ago, and it's only just starting to get to the point where it can be automated, it might be another few months or years before it goes into the actual character generation process. This is probably due to the amount of time, effort, brainpower, bandwidth and willingness required to implement such code.

A while ago, Nyr posted a breakdown of what goes into the staff side of most processes, I'd imagine the processes for coding anything into the game is similar, but on a much longer timescale.


Not forgetting that Zalanthas is a harsh place. It's easier to find someone willing to kill you than teach you, and if you do find someone willing to teach you a new skill, you have to convince them to do so, probably with a lot of effort, bribery, coercion and work. And while you're trying to learn that skill, you have to scrape a living, and probably a second living for your new teacher. Even then, there's no guarantee you'll have any aptitude for the particular skill you want to learn (Remember, not everyone can sing, but everyone tries)

The reason your PC starts with a set of skills is because (usually) these are the skills you've spent your entire life training. from a young age, until you've been sent off on your own. As soon as you are on your own, it's assumed you're too busy trying to survive from day to day to learn new skills, you spend enough time trying to improve the ones you do have.

Besides, I (and many other players I'm sure) Not only consider a main guild but their subguild as well when creating a concept. Usually, my Subguild is the focal point of a PC, it's what they LIKE to do, what they WANT to do when they're not using the skills taught to them to scrape a living.


Aside from that, I like the idea, although I can only see it being applicable to a marginal few PC's.

[IntuitiveApathy]

The reason your PC starts with a set of skills is because (usually) these are the skills you've spent your entire life training. from a young age, until you've been sent off on your own. As soon as you are on your own, it's assumed you're too busy trying to survive from day to day to learn new skills, you spend enough time trying to improve the ones you do have.

I've always viewed character guilds/skillsets as more indicative of a character's potential and talent, rather than the particular set of things a character's been doing up to that point.  I view branching similarly - the additional skills are just inherent to what your character has ended up being good at.  This makes more sense to me, especially in terms of magickers/psis, so that the whole unmanifested concept works.  Language and other general global skills are the exception though, since those can be picked up organically by anyone.  I believe it's been policy for a long time to not grant additional skills to characters beyond guild/sub no matter how much they try - whether they are able to train, practice or are taught or not.  At least, I was shot down, the one time I tried.

Back to the original topic though - I like the idea, but I think there might be some question as to (a) how many and which skills one could choose, and (b) whether some skills have different weights than others which would affect (a), and/or (c) would there be tradeoffs in different skillcaps if you chose different combinations to balance it out?

[nauta]

The reason your PC starts with a set of skills is because (usually) these are the skills you've spent your entire life training. from a young age, until you've been sent off on your own. As soon as you are on your own, it's assumed you're too busy trying to survive from day to day to learn new skills, you spend enough time trying to improve the ones you do have.

I've always viewed character guilds/skillsets as more indicative of a character's potential and talent, rather than the particular set of things a character's been doing up to that point. 

Me too, especially since I, as a player, usually know -nothing- about the skill in question (e.g. floristry, sneaking, everything involved with merchanting, brewing) and have to find out IC anyway.  Hence, I view them as potentialities rather than actualities.

[Kol]

I've always preferred to view it like the way apprenticing used to work. You  or your parents pick a career for you, and apprentice you to someone with that trade. You then spend a year or two doing the shittiest tasks, cleaning the toilets, stacking hides, carrying training weapons etc. This time is so you can watch how it should be done. then another few years of doing the basics, stitching a pattern, swinging a sword at a pillar of wood, to get a good foundation of the basics, then onto slightly difficult tasks, actual sparring, maybe make a pair of gloves for the commoner over there, or learn to skin that hide. After that, you can carry on and learn more, or go and learn on your own (which is where I've always seen PC's going, leaving the apprenticeship to strike out on their own)

Sure, there's a need for natural talent, but even Mozart was taught chords and scales. Beckham spent years playing football (soccer to you yanks) before he learnt to bend it. Al Pacino had acting lessons. Teaching yourself a skill in RL isn't the easiest thing to do from scratch without help, even if you have a talent for it, in Zalanthas, I'd assume it'd be next to impossible.

[valeria]

I'm with Kol on the way that I view subguilds.  But the only thing it says in the subguilds helpfile is "to round out your main guild."

[IntuitiveApathy]

I've always preferred to view it like the way apprenticing used to work. You  or your parents pick a career for you, and apprentice you to someone with that trade. You then spend a year or two doing the shittiest tasks, cleaning the toilets, stacking hides, carrying training weapons etc. This time is so you can watch how it should be done. then another few years of doing the basics, stitching a pattern, swinging a sword at a pillar of wood, to get a good foundation of the basics, then onto slightly difficult tasks, actual sparring, maybe make a pair of gloves for the commoner over there, or learn to skin that hide. After that, you can carry on and learn more, or go and learn on your own (which is where I've always seen PC's going, leaving the apprenticeship to strike out on their own)

Sure, there's a need for natural talent, but even Mozart was taught chords and scales. Beckham spent years playing football (soccer to you yanks) before he learnt to bend it. Al Pacino had acting lessons. Teaching yourself a skill in RL isn't the easiest thing to do from scratch without help, even if you have a talent for it, in Zalanthas, I'd assume it'd be next to impossible.

I don't disagree with you as to how this works in RL.  But it doesn't jive with how the game is set up, unfortunately.  There are characters that will never practice their guild's granted skills - maybe they're doing something else with their time.  But they can never gain skill in that something else if it wasn't something that was part of their pre-selected skillset, no matter how much they IC'ly practice, learn, etc, simply due to how the game is structured.  It's an artificial construct that way, and so that influences how I view the artificial constructs (guilds) within.

The OP's suggestion actually would give the flexibility to allow RL and your view to make more sense with how skills work with the game, which I would love.  So long as it's balanced off with the rest of the game, then I'm all for it.

[JackGibbons]

I don't disagree with you as to how this works in RL.  But it doesn't jive with how the game is set up, unfortunately.  There are characters that will never practice their guild's granted skills - maybe they're doing something else with their time.  But they can never gain skill in that something else if it wasn't something that was part of their pre-selected skillset, no matter how much they IC'ly practice, learn, etc, simply due to how the game is structured.  It's an artificial construct that way, and so that influences how I view the artificial constructs (guilds) within.

The OP's suggestion actually would give the flexibility to allow RL and your view to make more sense with how skills work with the game, which I would love.  So long as it's balanced off with the rest of the game, then I'm all for it.

+1000.

My understanding of the idea behind the guilds/subguilds concept and especially their limit is that otherwise long-played PCs would be able to master every skill, and it would be a foolish set of merchant-poet-bard-archer-swordsmen all walking around. Whether you pick your subguild at the start or later doesn't let you get access to any more skills or any higher skill caps than you would otherwise have had, but it does give you the freedom to develop a little and pick a fitting SG later. At which point I guess you could make a selection somehow and those skills would open up at their usual starter values.

[Lizzie]

All of our skills are TBD. The presets represent the capacity to learn, not the ability to know. Just like in real life - some people have a knack for picking up certain skills, and some don't. Not everyone is capable of being a good painter. Not everyone is coordinated enough to be able to knit, or sew fine clothing.

The skillsets you pick at chargen determine which things you -will in the future- have a knack for doing well in. They don't determine what you're good at from the start, or even what you know about from the start. Remember some players choose to play mages who don't manifest until after days and days of playing their character. That means - their character has no knowledge that they are mages, even though the skills are right there on their skill list.

What skills we use, is up to us to decide, based on the skill set we choose during chargen. Most of my characters only make use of certain of their skills, and completely ignore the others and I play them as not recognizing that they CAN do those things.

Some of them eventually discover that they are able to piece together something, and take an interest and try to develop it. Some don't.

But that's the whole point of picking skills at chargen. To decide which skills your character *can* learn. Not which skills your character *already knows*.