New ways of learning things

[Dooflockey]

Just what the title says. I don't personally think you should learn new recipes from leveling your skills. I think the efficacy of the things you make should be tied to your skill level. But you should learn new recipes from every few pages in a book, or reading a textbook/magazine. Maybe once NPCs are implemented you could ask them to teach you things or you could teach them things (idk how deep the npc system will be, but if you can make relationships, you could have a mentor/student for certain skills whose options changed depending on your standing with them. this would also add major major incentive to keep those NPCs alive). Maybe you could find or create blueprints to alleviate some of the learning process. What do you guys think of the current "learning" system?

[Hicks233]

This is one of the things that frustrates me about the game more than most. The concept of levelling and restricting abilities based on numbers in general does.

 

I think the way that generators were implemented was the most sensible, practical and encouraging. If you are of a profession where you work with generators you'll know how to operate one. You can pick it up and carry it regardless but to use it you'll either need to have been trained to use it or to have read its user guide.

 

Compare that to carpentry or (admittedly in infancy as a feature) electronics. You can pick up a microwave, put it down and use it. You cannot however *pick up* an oven until you've dismantled x number of radios. You can build a staircase after having sawn x number of logs. The two have no correlation.

 

Blueprints, instruction manuals, training from npcs would all go a long way to feeling more natural. It does raise the potentially uncomfortable issue then however of "why even have numerical levels?"

 

Skills and knowledge can be recognised as either possessed or not. You either know how to make or do something or you don't, reading an introduction to trapping would give you a basic understanding and basic types of traps you could build, same for cookery and carpentry. You cannot however have "level 3 carpentry" it doesn't exist. You *could* have a NVQ Level 3 qualification in catering if you were to study it here in England which would have then provided you with a whole host of skills and knowledge related to cookery, or perhaps a City and Guilds Level "x" in Electrical and Gas fitting but as for a arbitrarily determined number based of repeating an unrelated action?

 

There’s only going to be so many electrical appliances available for people to take apart and I’m yet to learn how to make a noise distraction device no matter how many times I change the plug on my lamp.  Poor lamp… Also I tried petting next doors dog for five hours in hopes of being able to rear chickens to a “Level 2 standard” but it didn’t work. Surely they’re both forms of animal husbandry?! – See the problem?

 

Perhaps it's best it goes the way of the Dodo in this instance.

 

Having not dismantled sufficient CD players I'm not allowed to move an oven and there's no instruction manual I can read to tell me to strip the wire endings, attach them to a plug to use with a socket or to wire it into a fused hardpoint.

 

Not bitter at all…

 

I can't see the levelling system being removed but as for an alternate way of utilising it I'd go for something like this.

 

Schematics, recipes and construction blueprints are learnt from skill books, user manuals and from dismantling objects or taught by NPC's.

 

Building and taking apart these things gives experience.

 

The experience can be used as before to increase the level/proficiency of the related skill.

 

Increasing that skill however increases the speed with which the action is performed, an improvement to the player’s mood and satisfaction of a job well done, less sense of boredom or exertion and potentially the quality and number of components recovered from dismantling an object or the number of resources required to produce an item as well.

 

In short the higher your proficiency at crafting the more you get back and the less you waste building things. If you know how to do something though then regardless of level you can do it - you just might be more wasteful as you do so.

 

As another aside your suggestion of creating blueprints is an excellent idea. We have paper and pencils and if you were to create and store blueprints you could then have a new character learn from those records.

[EnigmaGrey]

Rambling:

 

Personally, I love level-based systems. That's it really; use-based or class and free-form systems just don't do much for me. In the end, I consider this a personal choice when the occassional argument comes up.

 

So long as the system has a clear progression and doesn't isn't cluttered with things that fit better under other headings, I'm happy. ( The caveat being this really doesn't describe what PZ does right now . . . both from scarcity of content and its changing nature.)

 

For example, a movement skill could  be a continum of  ( small || simple objects ) to ( complex || bulky ) objects that only occassionally limits access to specific objects, while dictating the chance of success of moving objects. Have related skills to the specific options play a part (e.g. moving/installing windows is obviously something that should be easier for a carpenter).

 

Likewise, actually using and moving a generator could be considered a zero-level skill, but at higher levels of electrician could increase it's area of effect / efficiency / chance of failure (oh no, you don't actually know how to install a grounding rod or disconnect your house from the grid, prevent a surge from frying your electronics, anything about inverters . . . shit), and still make use of the electrician skill.

 

It may not be realistic or it could be immersion breaking, to have knowledge/experience divied up by level, but a similar thing is already done in formal education and training. It doesn't negate the fact that people can learn outside of a structured plan, but it's not like we don't already do this in reality.

 

Short of having XP pools for every single action in the game, though, there's no real way to get around the "earn some XP, spend it in an unrelated manner," though I believe the devs have thought along these lines before. It kind of makes sense, considering the hybrid approach taken by the game right now is known to be broken.