From: Eric Jablow (jablow@pilot.njin.net)
Date: Tue 29 May 1990 - 09:56:33 EEST
(I'm not sure if this was meant to be a posting or just an e-mail message,
so I managed to treat it as neither for a while. But what the heck, why not
a posting?)
Should all skills be equally easy to learn? In RQ2, they weren't, of course. Thrown Rock was easier to learn than Halberd Attack. Now, the training times and costs were quite arbitrary in RQ2; what would be a good system for RQ3? I can imagine each skill having a learning index attached to it; the Longbow Attack index might be 2, meaning that you would need to train for 2 times your current skill percentage in hours to get a training roll. Thrown Rock might get a multiple of .75, while Speak Tradetalk might get a multiple of 1. Do you agree?
One ambiguous point in the rules for both RQ2 and RQ3 is the following: Gubik the Unruly has 10 points of 1-use Divine Magic Spells. He then tries to become a Rune Priest of Ex-lax, god of digestion, and he succeeds. What happens to his Divine Spells? Do they suddenly become reusable? Or, do they remain one-use, with his future spells being reusable as usual. The first interpretation causes his power to go up by a hell of a lot, while the second would be hard to handle--I can imagine the player trying to keep track of his reusable points of Devour and his one-use points of it, and everything getting confused. Note that TrollPak still refers to Chief Priests and High Priests having 15 points of reusable Rune Magic; if his spells all become reusable, then the difference between Priest and Chief Priest becomes quite small.
A friend of mine, Stephen Tihor, runs a homebrew campaign where skill increases are granted by "training days": in other words, the Evaluate Beer skill is a 5 point skill, and to increase your ability in it from level 3 to level 4 takes 4*5 days. However, for success during play, characters are granted "bonus days of training", which may be applied to skills between expeditions, given proper equipment. A character may need a teacher or a grimoire to learn a skill at all, but given that, he may use up his bonus days. Sometimes, bonus days are given for a particular skill. Thus, if Goofy spends 10 bonus days earned on his last adventure and goes drinking for 10 days, he will be able to increase his skill as above.
This leads to the following idea. Whenever a character uses a skill in an adventure successfully, he gets an experience check. After that, each success counts as the equivalent of 0-3 hours of Research, depending on circumstances. I'd give 0 if it were trivial, and 1-3 depending on how difficult the situation was. When a character accumulates bonus research hours equal to his skill percentage, he may roll for a skill increase as if he had researched the skill.
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