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Date:    2013 Aug 20 22:41
From:    draak
Subject: general skills and spells?
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So there are some spell and skill trees that don't entirely make
100% sense in the class they are in, or a case could be made they
belong to more than one class. The survival skills like forest
navigation and mountaineering come to mind as good examples. What
if there were more general trees, learnable by anyone that met the
stat prerequisites and had a high enough primary level?

These trees would generally be composed of utility abilities, with
only a few offensive ones.

The ones I were thinking of are:

Basic magics -- these mage spells have to do with very simple
manipulation of magic. Dispel magic, maintaining spells and undo
already work for spells from all classes, so it seems natural that
any spellcasters, or sufficiently intelligent person, could learn
them.

Transportation spellgroup -- I understand why this group
belongs to clerics, as recalling is based on prayer. But clerics
already have a ton of stuff, and since anyone can use recalls and
waypoints (most of them, anyway), why not make this tree accessible
to all?

I would suggest leaving hallowed ground in cleric as part of the
divine aid group, perhaps dependent on solace. While any class can
use waypoints and learn about them, only clerics can call upon the
gods to make them. Also, astral bridge should allow players to
waypoint across planes instead of its current lameness, though it
should cost a ton of mana.

Brew antidote, reduce antidote, advanced antidote -- these
skills could be added to the survival (or ranger) skills, along with
forage. The tree might look something like this:

forest navigation
 hunting
  butchering
  skinning
   tanning
 fishing
  swampfoot
 forage
  cooking
   brew antidote
    reduce antidote
    advanced antidote
 firestarting
 mountaineering
  spelunking

Firestarting should not require a tinderbox.

Not as sure about these:

Hand to hand combat -- the warrior currently blends barbarian
and knightly skill sets, which have a broad overlap in that both
archetypes field similar abilities, with some outliers of course.

The hand to hand skills could be expanded into a martial arts tree,
but it would not fit with the barbarian/knight archetype covered by
the warrior skills. Anyone that learned the hand to hand skills could
consider themselves a martial artist, even a mage or necromancer
seeking to better defend themselves.

There might be some problems with combo skills, so changing this skill
tree must be done with much thought on how to properly handle it.

Illusion -- most mage spells work by transferring energy or
matter from a distant place and bringing it to the mage. These spells
don't have nearly as clear a mechanism of how they work. They seem to
be direct manipulation of light itself. Detect invisibility and
displacement are useful to any character.

I'm not sure how skill or castlevel would work with these. Maybe they
wouldn't apply, or all caster castlevel would work for spells and all
skill level would work for all skills, I'm not sure.

---------------------------

Related suggestions:

Mage force fields -> change to mage folding space. Mage spells generally
involve taking energy or matter from distant places and moving it to the
vicinity of the mage. What if force shields, magic missiles and floating
discs are the result of some sort of exotic spacial folding as a variant
of their elemental summoning techniques?

In this reflavoring, summon, teleport and group teleport could be added
to the tree (though still be kept obscure), and the perhaps the scrying
spells as well.

Corpsecutter could be made dependent on prepare zombie (or vice versa),
since both presumably involve messing with corpses.


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