Tales of Zalanthas, like its predecessor ArmageddonMUD, will use a level-less skill-based system for all characters. There are no 'experience points' as in MMORPGs or level-based systems; you gain skill by using the skill and either succeeding or failing in using it. Veterans of the old game will feel right at home with the general way this system works; our hope is that new players will find the system straight-forward and easy to understand through use and through transparent helpfiles.
That said, the system will be based on a d20 instead of a d100. We chose this approach because twenty-sided dice are familiar to many tabletop players while still allowing for a fast, legible skill system. Most checks are simple “roll under” tests. If your Hunt skill is 12, rolling a 12 or lower succeeds; rolling above it fails. Circumstances, equipment, difficulty, injuries, and environmental conditions may modify the target number, but the core idea remains straightforward: increasing your skill raises the number you must roll under, making success more likely.
Skill Values and Ranks
Skill values on a character will have a value such as 4.0 or 13.7. The decimal place will be used to track skill advancement, but will have no other bearing on outcome. If your skill is a 4.0, then you have to roll a 4 or less on a d20. If your skill is 13.7, then you have to roll a 13 or less on a d20.
Skills have a rank associated with them: Novice -> Apprentice -> Journeyman -> Advanced -> Master. In the old game, rank was mostly a way to display information to the player, and didn't have a direct meaning. In Tales of Zalanthas, sometimes rank will have a more meaningful purpose. For example, bonus damage to Archery is +3 per rank above novice. That means a bonus of +3 at apprentice, +6 at journeyman, +9 at advanced, and +12 at master (Yes, Archery will be better in ToZ).
A skill's rank is a percentage of what the maximum possible value is among all classes and subclasses. So if Kick has a maximum value of 18 for a Warrior, and no one else can get higher, then Master starts when the skill hits 16. Advanced starts at 12, Journeyman starts at 8, Apprentice starts at 6, and Novice is everything below 6. If we changed it so the maximum anyone could get in Kick is 9, then Master would start at 8, Advanced would start at 6, Journeyman would start at 4, Apprentice would start at 3.
Skill Gain
Skill gain will be some decimal value depending on the skill and the method in which you gained. The delay between how often you can gain a skill will be a factor of real-life hours. The default values unless we specify otherwise are:
success_gain = 0.1,
success_delay = 4.0,
failure_gain = 0.2,
failure_delay = 4.0,
teach_gain = 0.4,
teach_delay = 6.0,This means that on success, you will gain 0.1 in a skill and have a 4 real-life hour delay. On failure, you will gain 0.2 in a skill and have a 4 real-life hour delay. On teach, you will have a 0.4 gain in the skill while dealing with a 6 real-life hour delay. Your character's wisdom will modify the delay length - the exact amount is still TBD. The values may change in the future for balancing purposes, but likely not by much.
Whenever you gain a skill, the game will let you know with messages like this:
You miss Halaster.
You have gained some experience in the 'Offense' skill.
You have gained some experience in the 'Slashing Weapons' skill.Branching a skill will show you similar messages:
You have gained some experience in the 'Dual Wield' skill.
You have branched the skill 'Dual Wield' into 'Parry'.
You slash Halaster, barely grazing their hand.Skill List
Similar to the old game, you can type skills to see your skill list.
The red asterisks next to a skill means you have gained in a skill recently and the gain timer is active (on cooldown). The period in front of Throw means it is a skill that branched from Archery.
Custom Skill List
In ArmageddonMUD, players could request a special setup for a character. One of the asks we saw frequently was to swap skills, or in some way customize their skill tree. Due to the nature of how the skill system was setup in the old game, this was difficult and would often times revert a skill's value or the skill might drop off someone's character sheet entirely.
In Tales of Zalanthas, we have added the ability to have a custom skill tree on a character from the beginning. In fact, technically speaking, everyone has a custom skill tree.
When a character is first created, the game looks at their class, subclass, and race and uses the 'templates' for each of those, combining them into a full skill-tree. So if a player chooses 'warrior' as the class, 'linguist' as the subclass, and 'elf' as the race, then they will get a merged tree of all three templates. In the case of overlap, the character always gets the higher values.
This combined skill-tree is then stored on each character as a Python dictionary that can be fully modified by staff. In the old game, if a character branched a skill, it would lookup what should come next from the database. But with this new method, it refers to the already created full skill-tree. The full skill-tree is stored on the character, including which skills are yet to be branched. From the staff side it looks like this:
Skill Curr St Max GoOn
Archery 4.0 4.0 15.0 14.0
. Throw 0.0 4.0 15.0 14.0
. Fletchery 0.0 4.0 15.0 14.0 The character has the Throw and Fletchery skills already on their tree, the values are just 0, so from the character's perspective they don't know how to use those skills yet. Once the skill branches by reaching the GoOn value, the Starting value (St) of the new skill is copied to the Current (Curr) value.
What this allows us to do is customize a character's skill-tree in any way we want. We can set future branched skills on them to any values, set the GoOn value to determine when they branch, and with spells the minimum or maximum power level they can reach. While we have no method in place yet for players to request this, and we're still working out how we might do that, the ability is there to customize a skill-tree.
This also allows us to have ways for characters to learn new skills in the game. Maybe they can go pay a master cook NPC somewhere a bunch of money to teach them the 'cooking' skill, and it would just get added to their custom skill-tree.
Classes and subclasses are still a work-in-progress, and likely won't be fully decided on until closer to launch. So look for those in a future Devblog!