Hranie: Skúsenosti hráčovej postavy

Článok o herných mechanikách nadobúdania skúseností u postáv hráčov, prostredníctvom ich osobného rolového hrania, osobných volieb, ich dosiahnutých výsledkov, a bonusov týkajúcich sa skúseností udelených za presvedčivé a nápadité rolové hranie.

 

 

 

Vylepšovanie a osvojovanie si zručností

Nikoho život nie je statický, a statická nie je ani osobná a skúsenostná úroveň vedomostí a zručností. To je neúprosná súčasť Melzy, celého kontinentu Aporue, i celého známeho sveta. Ako jedinečný jednotlivce, aj vaša postava tomuto podlieha. Ešte aj keď máte radi stabilitu a povedomosť, určité veci sa budú meniť a posúvať inam v priebehu času, a vaša postava sa bude meniť zarovno s nimi… v dobrom i zlom.

On this particular page, we'll talk a little about developing and improving one's skillsets. There is a long, long list of various skills known within the strata of society that professional thieves inhabit. The skills of an individual tend to form groupings of similar skills at times, and these might ultimately influence what sort of things an individual thief specialises in (at least most of the time).

„No one fell to earth from the heavens all-knowledgeable…“, hovorí sa v starom aporuejskom prísloví. With it in mind, let's have a closer look at what tasks, actions, events, situations and procedures can influence the development of certain skills.

Pár základov

- toto RPG nemá triedy postáv. Hráčova postava si môže vybať určité formy špecializácie, no tieto nie sú rigidnými obmedzeniami. Majú iba za úlohu viesť zameranie hráčovej postavy určitým smerom a zúžiť dané zameranie, aby s ním hráč dokázal ľahšie narábať.

- furthermore, character levels in the classic sense do not exist at all. This is because all improvement of skills is an entirely fluid process, The same goes for the potential deterioration of particular skills if they're not used for a long time. On the upside, no player character can entirely lose a skill.

- vzhľadom na prístup bez tried, môže hráčova postava teoreticky robiť čokoľvek, since there are no arbitrary rules about this or that character build being restricted from using this or that item or doing this or that thing. The chosen specialisations keep focusing the character more strongly in particular directions, but they don't entirely override the player's basic competence.

- the aforementioned lack of character levels means improving skills in the RP doesn't really rely on calculated levels of any kind. Instead, it's based on the amount of experiences and the quality/nature of experiences obtained by a particular character during whatever assignments he/she took part in.

There are no character levels. The amount of experience you can invest in a particular skill is always just a certain dose. You increase skill values individually, and you can spend experience into more than just one skill, but this is dependent on how much experience you have, so you still have to choose wisely based on what you might currently need.

Improving a skill is largelly down to performing a skill regularly and being successful at your actions

Improving a skill is largelly down to performing a skill regularly and being successful at your actions. However, there's a difference between experience gained through training or performing an action over and over, and experience gained "in the field", in a "live" situation (a real heist, real stealthy sneaking, lockpicking in a lived-in location, a real fight/duel with someone instead of a trainer, etc.). The latter, experience gained "in the field", has a higher value than experience gained only through training or repetition.

Concerning specialisation, though you don't have character classes, you do have professions, or specialisations, if you will. There's plenty to choose from, but at any given time, your character can only have three specialisations. These specialisations don't limit the skills you can use and increase, but they do emphasize certain types of skills (depending on the contents of the specialisation), so those are given a certain degree of preference when it comes to investing in them. One specialisation always covers several skills, from several skill types (though not necessarily all types).

Crucially, as the specialisations are character development guidelines, not rigid classes, you can actually change your character's specialisation over time. You (gradually) abandon a certain specialisation, then you can choose a different one. Or two, if you've abandoned two, or even three, if all three. However, if you have no prior experience in a new specialisation, whatsoever, you'll be starting from square one or relatively low within that new character specialisation. If you have some prior experience with a specialisation, you'll have more experience built up in the skills of that specialisation, from earlier.

Obviously, the aforementioned sentences mean that you can return to a specialisation you focused on earlier and re-adopt it again as your character guideline. The key things are that: 1.) adopting and abandoning a specialisation and learning with it / gathering experience always takes a certain amount of time (i.e. it's not completely instant) 2.) the maximum of specialisations is three at a time (so, if e.g. you want a fourth one, you'll have to abandon one from your current trio, then adopt that as the new third one).

Though the player character is not forced to adopt a specialisation - theoretically, they can play without one, if they like - it helps to have at least one, to provide a bit of focus for the character. Regardless of whether a player character has 0, 1, 2 or 3 specialisations, they can always invest into stats and skills that aren't covered at all by any of their specialisations. If you have three particular specialisations, but decide to invest in a skill outside of them, it's perfectly possible. You just won't get as much of a "boost" to the skill improvement as you would if the skill was under one of your specialisations.

(Sidenote: Of course, not all stats can be improved, some are dependent entirely on the environment, but a handful can be occassionally improved over time. Most of the improvement lies within the skills, though, and in the abilities that some skills have as a subsystem of sorts.)

The character skills you don't utilise for a long time (months, years of in-game/in-story time) lead to your character slowly losing experience invested in them (especially if they're meant to be skills you can easily forget) and the performance of your character in a particular long-dormant skill will lower accordingly. It won't cartoonishly disappear or anything, but if you haven't used a skill in a very long time, your character might need to re-increase it a bit, or maybe re-learn some things (at least those beyond the basics). Certain skills are slightly more or slightly less prone to being affected by this partial loss of experience.

For example, you were pretty good at lockpicking, you've grown to really feel what your hands are doing with the tools while picking a lock, etc., but you were no lockpicking master. Something got in the way and for various reasons, you hadn't lockpicked for two or three years. Then your character needs to lockpick and realises they're a bit rustier at it. They still know how to do it, in terms of knowledge, in terms of hand movements, etc., but it's become less "second-nature" to them than before. Over time, they'll have to relearn that "deeper feel" they had for the skill in earlier years. Obviously, if a particular skill isn't that easy to forget, especially when a character has long-term ingrained experience with it, it's very unlikely the existing experience would vanish completely. The character learns to ride a bike, or a horse, and after not doing so for a long time, they might be a little uncertain at first while trying it again, but they won't be completely clueless about how to do that particular thing. (As they say in the real world, it's hard to forget how to cycle, especially if you have a few months or years of experience with it, even if you hadn't cycled for years.)

Thing is, you can't just state you're doing something. You have to actually do it.

Want to "GIT GUD" e.g. at polearm or staff fighting ? Go visit a reliable trainer and spend some time there. Just for a bit of practice via sparring. Or practice your gambling skills with someone adequately experienced (doesn't even need to be a trainer), etc. Alternatively, maybe your character just needs a rest, socializing and reassurance with friends, so you'll spend your downtime having a beer, picking apart the latest gossip, intel, or just venting personal worries and such.

This makes it more interesting for player characters to manage their downtime. You can't be in two places at the same time, so you have to figure out your current priorities. The game is actually fairly narrativist in approach, so there is no "lesser" use of a character's downtime. If they prefer to focus on something, they can. Even just having a thoughtful or informative conversation with someone can be beneficial to the player character. The various skills are there to serve the various characters' adventures (individual or teamwork-based), rather than the skills being self-serving, for their own sake.

To balance things out, it's not all that hard to increase your experience values in a skill. Generally, I try to limit any frustrations that might pop up, since the primary goal is to have things be fluid, engaging and fun. The skills and gear and such are only important insofar as your characters can use them to achieve things. It's not a 'murder-hobo' type of game, but one where characters haveto achieve things more through exploration, cunning and finesse. The characters and their personal adventures are basically at the heart of the gameplay, with the skills and gear only tools.

The point is that the players are encouraged not to treat downtime as a boring routine. They're encouraged to change up things, depending on what they'd like to do. If a character decides they're going for a walk in the city, or even the countryside (alone or with someone), they can do that. There's no schedules to plan, or anything of the sort. The player just decides and they do what they decide to do.

Do note that I explicitly wrote in the above posts that this only deteriorates a bit if you don't use it for a veeery looong time. Many months, more than a year, two years of in-universe time. If you don't use a skill for a few days or a week, nothing happens, no decrease.

Are any of the skills listed in my earlier post a bit on the iffy side ? Do any feel redundant ? Or cover too little or too much ?

As I've mentioned earlier, I prefer a "less is more" design approach. partly because it's also more pleasant and readable to players that way. I don't need 30 billion skill ideas, I think a few general archetypes are sufficient. However, am I forgetting or overlooking something ? Not sure.

Concerning the skill trees, one of the reasons I decided to adopt them for some of the skills structure was when I thought long and hard about structuring the combat skills and the artisan skills.

My structural train of thought when it comes to the skillset hierachy goes as follows:
Type of skill (skillset) -> Skill (individual entries) -> Abilities (subsets of a particular Skill, advanced through skill trees)

In the case of the Artisan skills, I felt it was obvious that skill trees allow characters to develop certain crafting skills in a more custom manner. This would avoid me needing to add 70+ different crafting skills for every thing imaginable, making the Artisan skills absurdly bloated compared to the rest. You instead have a few broad categories of crafting skills, and all the individual crafting knowledge and abilities for a player character are under one of those categories. You learn the basics of a craft, then you can branch out in the direction you want to. Learning new stuff is more difficult if it's new to the character and they have less of a basis in that particular kind of crafting. And if they already have some basic experience in the area, it's a bit less difficult to learn. If a character knows basic woodworking and has learnt how to carve themselves a spoon, or assemble a small wooden lantern, then they'll be able to grasp how to craft a simple, weaker wooden crossbow much easier, than if they had never held a carving knife, chisel, drill or saw before, in their entire life.

The combat skills, namely Melee combat skills and Ranged combat skills, were the other two skill areas where I realised early on that skill trees might be the best structural solution, at a micro level. In the Movement skills, I only have about six or seven skills in total, so I wanted each of the two combat skill overviews to be similarly simple. Meaning, for both melee and ranged, you'd get only a few general skills that make sense for each type of combat, and under each individual skill for either Melee or Ranged, you'd get a skill tree on developing particular combat abilities. A particular skill would still govern a particular combat ability, but you can choose which combat ability it is.

For example, you're investing in the Thrusting skill in Melee, and you can choose to focus on Spear/Polearm thrusts, Knife-fighting thrusts, or on Swordfighting thrusts, as more specific abilities. Within these, you can then learn the basics of e.g. sword thrusting, then more and more detailed abilities on thrusting with a one-handed sword, hand-and-a-half, or a two-hander, then with a specific type of one-handed sword, etc., or a specific style of thrust from a particular swordfighting tradition. (When it comes to fighting traditions, I wanted to draw upon the known and documented European martial arts traditions, because it feels natural and fits the strongly historicist tone of my setting. Doing fictional equivalents of stuff like the Liechtenauer tradition or Meyer tradition or Fiore tradition in swordfighting, or the French poleaxe fighting tradition, or Polish-Lithuanian sabre-fighting tradition makes perfect sense. However, I didn't want to ape what games like 7th Sea had already done years ago, where a country's fighting tradition was basically a whole separate skill. So, relegating this level of detail down to a skill tree level felt reasonable. If a player character in my game wants to learn a very particular fighting tradition, after learning the absolute defeault basics, they can, but they don't have to if they find it superfluous.) Similarly, in Ranged combat, you might decide to focus on your bow draw skill, and you can develop this towards a certain (cultural) style of bow draw, depending on what fits the character's current needs or preferences.

When it comes to Social and diplomatic skills, I realised that skills like language learning, or a character's cultural knowledge, could also be branched gradually, by way of simple skill trees. So that's one other area where they are definitely present. It is entirely possible I will add skill trees to some of the other skill types as well, beyond their current availability in Artisan skills, Melee combat skills, Ranged combat skills, and some of the Social skills. I only want to do it where it makes the most sense and where it would be the most flexible for players, for the sake of variety and enjoyability.

One design guideline I've always tried with my project thus far, for years, was "Add depth, but avoid adding complicated-to-understand features and structures". I consider it better to try and keep gameplay relatively simple and interconnected, though without losing more interesting details. Details that make it feel less generic (and more unique to its own fictional setting).

Proces vylepšovania zručností

Použíme nasledujúcu modelovú situáciu: Niekto začne s postavou amatérskeho zlodeja, ktorý sa „len tak vezie spolu s vami“ a musí pozorne sledovať rady už skúsenejšej postavy. Neskôr, daný zlodej alebo zlodejka nazbiera dostatok skúseností pre vylepšenie svojej celkovej zručnosti v niektorej konkrétnej oblasti. Často metódou pokus-omyl, v snahe zlepšiť sa v daných zručnostiach.

Celý proces sa dá zúžiť na nasledujúce tri kroky:

1.) Cvičenie – precvičovanie zručnosti za cieľom získania skúseností, či už prostredníctvom tréningu alebo dokončením „záťahu“ alebo príbuznej činnosti. Háčikom je tu fakt, že cvičenie postavy sa pre získanie skúseností počíta menej, pretože ponúka vašej hráčovej postave len precvičovanie si zručností v bezpečnom prostredí, nejde o situáciu „toto je naživo, naozaj“.

2.) Skúsenosti - ktoré získate už spomínaným precvičovaním, či už tréningovo alebo (najlepšie) „naživo“. Tým naživo myslíme, keď vaša postava vykonáva úlohu/misiu/prácičku nejakého druhu, či už ide o úlohu-bokovku alebo o riadny príklad záťahur/lúpeže/načúvania/atakďalej. Skúsenosti v určitej oblasti/zručnosti získavate len pomocou praktikovania určitej oblasti/zručnosti efektívnym spôsobom. Napríklad, preskočenie prekážok počas behu skoku dohora na chytenie sa rímsy pomaly zvyšujú vaše potenciálne skúsenosti pre zručnosť Skákania, ale len skákať na mieste vám mieru skúseností nezvýši.

3.) Vylepšenie - ako hráč konkrétne investuje množstvá/sumy skúseností, ktoré získal v niektorých oblastiach. Vylepšenie sa udeľuje na základe toho, čo ste precvičovali, ako dobre ste to precvičovali, a koľko skúseností ste daným precvičovaním získali. You only tend to gain the most new experience in a few particular areas. Nové skúsenosti, ktoré ste získali v menších množstvách “uložené” na neskôr, až kým ich nebudete môcť investovať vo svojich vlastných oblastiach.

Kvalita získaných skúseností

Affects a lot. It can be measured by how a player performed on an assignment. For instance, how many guards he avoided successfully, how many times he sneaked past without being heard or seen, how well he used a device/weapon, etc.

Investovanie získaných skúseností

While you should usually go for the biggest amounts of XP gained, you can also choose the smaller, more marginal gains if you like, and invest in those. So, you have to make it a bit of a picky process and choose what you want to focus on at the moment in terms of „upgrades“. It gives your character a bit more control over things and a bit more challenge too, rather than just going for a boring „eh, just continuously upgrade everything I can“ option.

Zaúčanie sa do používania nového výstroja

Jedna z vecí, ktorú je potrebné zohľadniť, je fakt, že rôzne typy výstroja a zbraní majú vzájomne odlišné vlastnosti, či už v ich používaní, v miere ich kradmosti, alebo v miere ich rozšírenosti.

Hráči majú smolu, ak hľadajú nejakú pôsobivú zbraň alebo predmet, ak sa tak či onak ťažko zháňajú. Vaša hráčova postava si na ne bude musieť zarobiť, a ak ich aj nájdete šťastnou náohodu, budete možno potrebovať trochu popracovať na tom, aby ste sa ich naučili správne používať. Je dostatočne prirodzeným obmedzením snažiť sa obísť hráčovo priľahké zneužívanie niečoho silného.

Poznámka na záver

Musíte vždy pamätať na to, že ešte aj s výrazne vylepšenými osobnými zručnosťami, vaša hráčova postava sa nikdy nemôže stať úplne dokonalou vo všetkom, o čo sa on/ona pokúsi. Toto je spôsobené dvomi vecami:

1.) Ešte aj veľmi skúsený majster zlodej niekedy dokážu robiť chyby, niekde sa pokĺznuť, atď. Nie príliš často, ale “niekedy” rozhodne ostáva pravdepodobnosťou.

2.) Nech sa snažíte akokoľvek, nikdy si nemôžete vylepšiť úplne všetky vaše zručnosti naraz, zároveň. Ste vždy obmedzovaní vašou kariérnou cestičkou a špecializáciou, ktorú si vaša postava vybrala (buď na samom začiatku alebo postupne v priebehu hrania) a tým, aký konkrétny výkon odvediete v rámci mäkkých no citeľných mantinelov cestičku, ktorú ste pre svoju postavu vybrali.

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Copyright

(C) 2017 P. Molnár 
(C) 2017 Knight-Errant Studios