Skills

[Justin]

How will skills work in Ahln?

First of all, there are no classes in Ahln. You are welcome to learn any kinds of skills you would like and put together the character that you want. However, some skills may be dependent on others or may only be available to people of certain alignments.

Skills will be available to learn in several ways, but the most common will be from an NPC. Do not think they will just hand out their hard-earned knowledge, though. They may ask you for gold or to perform certain tasks for them before they will be willing to teach you. Not all NPCs who can teach skills will be easily accessible, either.

Other skills may only be learned by performing a quest or finding ancient documents. This means that just learning skills is an adventure in itself. It also increases the variety of skills known by different people. Many skills will be publicly known, but there will also be some that are secret, particularly the more powerful ones.

Once a skill has been learned, a character's proficiency in that skill will slowly increase with use. How difficult it is to 'master' a skill will depend on the skill itself.

Though you are not limited to pre-made skillsets, skills will naturally fall into related categories. Improving any skill in a category will also improve your effectiveness with other skills in that category. I think this makes sense, because if, for example, you were already good at using daggers, you will be better at a new move with a dagger than someone who only learns that one move.

As mentioned above, skills will depend on each other. You cannot go and learn a powerful spell if you do not know lower spells first. But not all skills will only depend on a singe category. You may be required to know two skills in different categories to learn a third (which would logically depend on the first two.) For example, you may need to know how to jump and swing a sword before combining the two in some sort of leaping slash.

More details as things get worked out!

[Saffire]

That sounds excellent. I've always loved this sort of skill system. I definately have a lot of ideas in mind for you (Especially stealthy type skills). I'll start jotting down my ideas and submit the when they're ready.