Ideas for Practicing Skills

[Niamh]

Hey guys! We're looking for some ideas from the pbase that might be used to practice skills that are traditionally difficult to raise.

We are not looking to do this for Combat skills, rather the skills under Performance and Covert.

[Evrald]

As a general rule of thumb, practicing in your home on your own IRL can make you better at instruments, though rarely the case with dancing(I would think) feedback helps when improving Dancing and while a Teacher is always better for instruments, you can still practice specific notes and cords on your own with stringed instruments like a lute or guitar. Same goes with the others, putting in time with them makes you better, so possibly a way to practice the skills up to a certain point? And then past that you can only get better by playing them with other people around same as before?

[Voxumo]

Would that not make it more difficult to raise Evrald?

[Taunya]

Implement something like the old inspire system for certain skills perhaps? If I recall correctly, you would get a certain amount of 'inspiration' as you RPed, which you could then dump into a skill to pool it.

Bump the pooling of the skill for the teacher when teaching the skill to others?

[Starstarfish]

Lockpicking is one of the more difficult ones. To support that, I'd argue that the chests/keys that the trader NPC could/was trading for cinnamon get a craft to be able to craft them. And/or that people could craft padlocks so that they could indeed practice on. IE - some way to practice lockpicking while using up materials/silver but not randomly breaking in to places with an RP reason etc, just to pool.

But locks/keys are handled through admin building/loading (for code reasons perhaps as much as balance?)

[Taunya]

Blacksmithing has safes which provide a lockable container and key. They're all the same key unless QP is spent to re-key them, but they should work as-is for practice.

[The_Last_Good_Dragon]

I'm not sure how it works right now as I've never rolled a covert-type character, but a key issue I could see in raising covert skills is that the skills themselves are by nature non-interactive — if you're "good" at sneaking, hiding, picking locks, stealing, etc. there's only certain levels of engagement with your victims.

To that extent I'd argue that these skills should be given some of the existing methods to practice on one's own, either through spamming the skills or through cheap alternatives, or a special trainer accessible by Brotherhood (or friends of the Brotherhood) to raise outside of standard RP time. Already, it should be noted, that as far as I know you can do this with perform skills. Let players get to the level of covertness that their RP-interest and FreeXP pool suggests with time investment so that they can then go forwards and spawn their madness.