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--- skills_in_general [2019/08/31 17:30] – [Valuable, Equal, Sensible, and Standard] dungeonmaster
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-[[start|Dice Mob Home]] > [[dice_mob_rules|Dice Mob Rules]]
-====== Skills in General ======
-===== What is a Dice Mob skill? =====
-In real life, a skill is something that not everyone can do but many people can learn to do given enough practice. Sometimes a person has come innate ability or talent that makes this easier to become proficient or exceptional in, but sometimes a person with no initial innate ability also learns how to do it with enough practice.
-A skill in Dice Mob is more or less the same thing in theory, but because of the premium placed on learning skills, a skill has to be something more than that. And because we aren't limiting ourselves to humans or even just creatures found in the real world, depending on the genre, skills can also be something more akin to attributes, powers, or magical abilities than they are simply skills.
-In real life, when we talk about a skill, sometimes we talk about a skill and sometimes we're talking about a set of skills. Are gymnasts skilled in gymnastics? Maybe. But just because a gymnast is skilled in the high bar doesn't mean they are skilled on the pommel horse or the floor exercises. They have to practice each of them individually. Flexibility, strength, and balance are all needed to be successful, but being good at one does not automatically make one good at the other. But we group them together anyway because there does seem to be a natural grouping that we can make.
-By necessity, Dice Mob will employ all of these principles as much as makes sense and with the guiding principles of keeping the game easy-to-learn, versatile, and fun to play for far longer than just a week.
-==== Valuable, Equal, Sensible, and Standard ====
-In Dice Mob, a skill is a nebulous concept that describes one thing a character can do or a group of smaller related things that can be reasonably grouped together to describe what a character can do. In creating skills, we consider four principles.
-First, a particular skill should be something a player is willing to expend a valuable resource on, namely skill points, when compared with other "skills". If a skill is never worth having, no matter the genre, it's probably worthless to spend time defining it. We call this making a skill valuable.
-Second, skills should be more or less equal when compared with each other. There shouldn't be one skill that every character picks just because it's so much better than other skills that it's a no-brainer. The point of dividing character classes up into the more basic components of skills is supposed to make characters more unique and by extension more fun to play as an individual rather than a role. We call this making a skill equal.
-Third, skills should make sense. A flying skill shouldn't also give the character the ability to throw fireballs. Knot-tying shouldn't also give the ability to eat a hundred hot dogs in two minutes. We may be tempted to put two skills together to make them valuable enough together when they're not valuable enough separately, but we won't do it. Where we can, we'll fine something overarching concept that can group enough skills together to make them valuable and equal, but sometimes we'll just have to live with a skill being what it is.
-Fourth, skills should be more or less easy to determine how, how often, and how much they affect the game without having to look them up every time a player wants their character to perform that skill. Now we could do this by only having a few skills to choose from, but we want characters to have many, many skills to choose from so there are many thousands of different class combinations a character could theoretically be. Instead of limiting the number of skills to make it easy to remember, we'll make skills determinable by coming up with common ways almost all skills interact with the rules. In other words, skills will be as standard as possible. We'll probably have skills that can't be standard, especially when doing so break ones or more of the other rules, but where we can make them standard we will.
-In other words, skills should be valuable, equal, sensible, and standard.
-In making skills valuable, equal, sensible, and standard, we might be required to make a skill less standard to make it more sensible and equal. Or to make it less valuable, to make it more standard, sensible, and equal. Skills like regeneration have required some nerfing to make them more equal, but we've tried to do so in the most sensible way possible. Skills like the mariner trade have included a lot of small skills together to make it valuable enough that a player might choose that skill for their character, but we've also tried to do this in a way that is both standard and sensible.
-In making skills valuable, equal, sensible, and standard, we're going to talk about how to do in the following sections:
-  * [[standards_for_skills|Standards for Skills]]
-    * [[skill_points_and_degrees|Skill Points and Degrees]]
-    * [[proficiency|Proficiency]]
-    * [[compounding_skill_effects|Compounding Skill Effects]]
-    * [[standard_effects_degrees_levels|Standard Effects of Degrees and Levels]]
-      * [[standard_effects_degrees_levels#distance|Distance]]
-      * [[standard_effects_degrees_levels#size|Size]]
-      * [[standard_effects_degrees_levels#duration|Duration]]
-  * [[skills_vs_items|Skills vs Items]]
-  * [[standards_for_items|Standards for Items]]
-    * [[skill_degrees_in_items|Skill Degrees in Items]]