Skill Books?

[Absoluum]

Have the person making said skill book pay in inspiration proportional to the requirements to learn said skill, have proficiency required to essentially re-learn said skill, and some rare materials in construction of the skill book, or something along those lines.

Person reading the book needs to pay in a certain amount of inspiration, possibly some form of relevant silver sink(admission to education facility in Prov, given that you have a skill book), and various rare inspirationals relevant to the skill being learned from the book.

If the educational facility is implemented, a time delay from consuming book to actually learning the skill could be added(1-7days proportional to difficulty of the skill).

This could allow a fairly new pilgrim to learn a skill such as cotton planting before he/she has access to said skill via traditional means. Obviously pursuing the skill via traditional means has benefits in terms of production efficiency skills learned along the way, the bonus of +plenty through stocks & cultivares etc.

Skill books should only be available for civilian skills to avoid abuse of things like thieving and the like. Basic combat skills like fencing shouldn't be a problem though.


Skill books, along with the required inspirationals, could also be added to the store packs as an additional incentive to provide funding to the development of the game.


There are many variables available to balance this addition to the game.

Thoughts?

[JohnCarver]

We long tampered with this idea and like the idea of people keeping a library of skills so to speak incase their main died. In the end we failed to balance it enough to implement but its still something we think would be fun.

[Dallane]

We long tampered with this idea and like the idea of people keeping a library of skills so to speak incase their main died. In the end we failed to balance it enough to implement but its still something we think would be fun.

Could be interesting to treat it like praying in a church. Make someone equip a book and sit down to read. Different furnitures will give a better study session. Increase in learned and bb drained. You could also add a library for this and be exactly like a church. Gain skills depending on the type of book you have. Have the books max out at the creators skill lvl so you a book made with a skill of 200 will have zero or extremely slow returns to someone at 201.

[Scilly_guy]

Thought this was something like what JC and Co had in mind when they mentioned a scribing system, made a post about it a while ago. It just feels like it would be too easy to abuse for creating alts, like JC mentions, its hard to get the balance right.

What about if instead of writing a book on a subject you wrote a diary. This would require regular work to keep it up to date, lets say you have to add a page every week (paper, ink, inspiration cost). It would have 1/4 as many uses as the number of weeks you have contributed to it, with penalties/bonus for missed weeks/consecutive weeks. And it would act as an inspirational that gives proficiencies in proportion to yours. Of course your diary is probably pretty boring to a normal person, but to your heir, after your death, it is much more valuable, so for your heir it acts as a much better inspirational. Not sure if that would be that feasible, having an inspirational that acts differently for different people.

[Argentis]

Added here: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=13730

[Absoluum]

Thought this was something like what JC and Co had in mind when they mentioned a scribing system, made a post about it a while ago. It just feels like it would be too easy to abuse for creating alts, like JC mentions, its hard to get the balance right.

What about if instead of writing a book on a subject you wrote a diary. This would require regular work to keep it up to date, lets say you have to add a page every week (paper, ink, inspiration cost). It would have 1/4 as many uses as the number of weeks you have contributed to it, with penalties/bonus for missed weeks/consecutive weeks. And it would act as an inspirational that gives proficiencies in proportion to yours. Of course your diary is probably pretty boring to a normal person, but to your heir, after your death, it is much more valuable, so for your heir it acts as a much better inspirational. Not sure if that would be that feasible, having an inspirational that acts differently for different people.

Having a varying reading time, IE, not instant skill acquisition could to some extent, restrict the abuse on alts.

Edit: Thanks Argentis

[trungdle]

Could require alchemy to finish a magical book that improve your knowledge.
For example: a book about agriculture require the combination of some inspiration that is equal or larger than the skill requirement (think of them as "dry samples" that is attached to the book) the inspiration lost counter can work the same as studying.
Also the ammount of time needed to read that book is equal to 1/5th the time needed to regenerate the ammount of inspiration lost.

[ShadowTani]

I like this idea. I can imagine unlocking this mechanism through a "Teaching" skill after learning both Aristotelian Logic and Scribing. And this is how I could see it being properly balanced as a game mechanic:

This [Teaching] skill unlocks the ability to select "teach skill" (or something) when right clicking a paper, where you have to select one proficiency and the amount of inspiration you want to apply to that page. This will make the player sit down to write the page for a certain amount of time depending on the inspiration selected. Inspiration and BB will be slowly drained during that time - and the inspiration drained is added to the page counter (i.e. a current/max counter like the stockbins got).

Writing the page should be possible to cancel and continue as needed as this will be somewhat time consuming process for the higher proficiency requirements. It should also cost ink obviously, maybe 1 ink per 2k inspiration?

Either way, to create the skill book you would need one completed skill paper for each proficiency the skill require points in. For example creating a skill book for Monster Hunting would require 4 skill papers to make (1x paper with 1800 inspiration in Cloak & Dagger, 1x paper with 4000 inspiration in Flora & Fauna, 1x paper with 7500 inspiration in Hunting & Hideworking, 1x paper with 1300 inspiration in Law & Lore) and this process shouldn't be much different than what you're doing now when you're binding a regular book.

I think this process will be sufficiently grindy to prevent people from abusing it. Alternatively throw in an additional more advanced paper-making skill as well to make skill books even more costly and grindy to make.

And when it comes to the student I believe if someone meet the proficiency requirements of the skill then it should be instant to learn the skill book (though still cost inspiration equal to the proficiency requirements), otherwise it should require a certain amount of study time equal to the amount of proficiencies that player is lacking. This study time drains BB similarly to when someone write the book.

Then throw in an University Pack into the item shop that contains a Desk furniture or something that reduces the time it takes to write or study a skill book. Then this whole feature would be perfect I think.