Proper train-by-use skill system?

[DraQ]

Player will just manipulate his success chances by wearing/removing gear, buffing/debuffing himself and target (if applicable), etc, to have 50% chance of hitting a mudcrab. Or set spell duration exactly, so he can have 50% chance of summoning scamp.

Skill advancement should depend not on chance of success/failure, but on raw challenge level (i.e. level of enemy, complexity of door lock, etc), raw skill level of player, and resources spend on attempt (time, stamina, mana, money, etc)?

You can always operate on base, unmodified probabilities. It even makes sense - you shouldn't try to adapt your style to temporary buff or debuff, because they are temporary. Adapting to them won't benefit your ability as whole. If someone hangs heavy wieght on your forearm, it will impact your ability to use sword, but if you are good, you will know already why you have failed this time and adapting to it won't help your overall swordfighting skill.

When it comes to spellmaker, it really depends on how magic is implemented. At worst you can use costs to plug the holes.

In the end it's like in this joke about the effectiveness of .22 when chased by a bear - you don't need to shoot bear, shooting whomever else is running from it in the knee will do just fine.
Similarly here, you don't need to make your system airtight, you just need to make the desired way to play the game easiest, cheapest and most effective exploit player can use.

So let me get this straight- the amount of skill gain for a success is proportional to the chance of failure, and the gain for failure is proportional to the chance of success.
But this EXCLUDES modifiers.
So if I give myself a -20 to hit penalty and hti a mudcrab and miss, I gain eleventy billion xp because my hit chance should be 100%.

Only you're describing that the outcome should be the other way around, i.e. it's actually based on the modified skill. But if it's based on modified skill, then you can still train up by giving yourself penalties, it'll just be slower. Moreover, giving yourself bonuses would ultimately be pointless since your skill is going to balance out based on your modified skill. So a +20 sword just means your skill is 20 points shittier later on and it effectively gives no benefit at all.

My bad, 4h of sleep take their toll, it seems.

Will respond tommorow with (hopefully) more lucidity on my part.

Ok, I've just sat down and thought it through (sorry for not doing it earlier).

Now, I don't see any simple fix for that as long as we are operating on individual failure and success level (yet?).

However, do note that our goal is to have P(q)*P(~q) as our expected experience value (well, 1/2 of that, but meh, constants) and we can still do that - take base, unmodified probabilities and simply give player P(q)*P(~q) experience regardless of outcome. Done and done.
A *slight* bit more abstract, but doesn't really damage our use-based system as a whole.
On the upside, you can also used thus modified system for skills without actual failure states, because we no longer need actual probabilities - only stuff behaving like them. As long as we can still assign some measure of difficulty of a task - then we can just assign arbitrary probabilities based on this difficulty score. This frees us to use deterministic mechanics, straight roll probabilities and complex mechanics (probabilistic or not) as we see fit in our skill system.
You can also use the above as probabilistic mechanics - instead of using the above formula to calculate XP, you can use it to calculate probability of getting some fixed XP - statistically the outcome will be the same over time, but it may work better in some systems I'll detail below.

Of course acrobatics that can be raised by just bunnyhopping and similar shit is still out - drop whatever they are supposed to do directly on attribute scores.
I would also ditch free to use skills like sneak (as in moving undetected, not other stealthy activities) also relegating them to attribute checks accounting for modifiers, because there is no real cost associated with sneaking, you can always try it to get a drop on the enemy, even if you fail.
I'm not sure it would be all that necessary, though:
-cost in potential might be a sufficient deterrent
-you might try to include mechanics that makes sneaking undesirable, but it's tricky. The best shot would probably being non-berserk hostiles and neutrals acting with extreme prejudice towards what they deem suspicious. For example even with enemies walking up within certain distance of them openly might make them hold hostile actions, for example hoping you might parlay with them or otherwise let them benefit without risk of some of them getting killed, OTOH doing suspicious stuff - like getting detected sneaking, nocking an arrow or starting to cast any spell would invoke immediate hostility.

Daggerfall

I think one very important thing Daggerfall did *superbly* well was not telling the player everything they wanted to know. Disease notifications were hidden until the PC actually started feeling ill, skill increase information was withheld until rest and so on.
This is actually the case where Probabilistic mechanics I mentioned above would work much better than direct scaling of XP and I'd personally go with such system.

I'd say DF was designed with simulationist and, oh well... LARPing players in mind and less with number-crunchers and completionists.

Definitely. I just intend to eliminate the LARPing part by sealing the system up against munchkins, but without breaking the simulationism or freedom.

Skyrim lowered these requirements a bit (maybe to make it possible for players to become good at something through natural gameplay and not just through grind?) and as a result players became gods in a matter of hours via smithing.

Well, actually Skyrim did do some things right. For example it introduced a lot of context checks for stuff. For example protective spells onlyu make your skills go up when you're actually hit by something they are supposed to preotect you from and so forth. It's just that you can't really squeezee much context into something like smithing and without some difficulty measurement use-based system just can't work right.

I'm ambiguous towards unused stuff decreasing with time. On one hand it seems reasonable enough.
OTOH some part of me is just screaming in horror when I think about it and, much more importantly I'm deeply awerse to the idea of character development being reversible, so such system should make meaningful distinction between skill that has deteriorated and one that hasn't been raised yet.

The issues that must be addressed with this one run much deeper than just those who want to abuse the system. As others mentioned, even if I am playing normally, under this system, it becomes to my competitive disadvantage to ever use a more powerful weapon or any buffing items because they will lower my skill gain, making me a less powerful character by the endgame.

Adressed and debunked (scaling gain with magnitude of 'effect' caused and previous part of this post respectively).

Somebody who is sucky at the game will have lower skill level in the primary skills, but will gain experience faster than someone who knows what they are doing and whose skills are thus higher. And so, these two players' stats will trend towards being the same, thus weakening the importance of player skill, and making it seem that much more like one's choices don't matter in the game. Everyone will be the same anyways.

-Player skill should not manifest itself in effectiveness of grind, if it does, system is pathological. Eliminating such influence is desirable and intended.
-If one player has more skill points for whatever reason they are still ahead of the other one, becuase they will have progressed when the other player reaches their current position and equally slow development rate.
-Player skill should manifest in chosing the right combination of build and approach to in-game challenges. Poor players will be doing poorly because they will fail to develop build they would use well and fail to use build they will have. They will also fail numerous other layers involving decision making, tactics and resource management.
-If character development is bounded and this bound falls significantly below everything maxed out, then characters will differ and keep differing.

There is also the tiger/turtle conundrum. A turtle will earn me more experience than a tiger, even though it is no threat, because the turtle is harder to hit.

Ever tried hitting turtle? It's easy. They are more difficult to damage, but you can account for both. Lastly, I don't think any melee skill should be purely defensive or offensive. Fighting with sword doesn't involve just hitting stuff with it. Two expert swordsmen fighting against each other won't be hitting each other with every swing regardless of their skill and system should reflect that in the way its combat mechanics work.

Similarly, an enemy with a small bonus DEX will earn me more experience than that same enemy minus the DEX but with a ginormous STR.

More or less adressed above, exact nature of how it's adressed would have to depend on how combat works.

If there are different weapon speeds, faster but low-damaging weapons will earn me more experience than slower, high-damaging ones.

Trivial to adress through either XP/use scaling with skill (already used since forever, even in TES), scaling XP dynamically with effect caused damage (at whatever point of calculation - base or after reduction, which will make turtles especially poor punching bags).

It becomes in my best interest to use all primary skills as dumps, since they will soon be going up fast.

Conclusion is false or at best unjustified with presented reasoning due to the latter's faultiness.

TES skill system is just to complex and messy for train-by-use to work.

Why and how? You can't just throw unsupported statements around and expect to go away with it.

If it is not possible to tell what skill was used, give some free skill points instead.

Will need some work at places (such as adding Doctor and Outdoorsman skill sources), but because there are no spammable sources of exp, no mandatory scaling enemies, and it's easy to say what skill was used, it would work.

I thought you've just said something about TES system being messy.

 

[baturinsky]

TES skill system is just to complex and messy for train-by-use to work.

Why and how? You can't just throw unsupported statements around and expect to go away with it.

Because skills overlap a lot and it's hard or impossible to tell which skill was used to achieve something, and each was just spammed for "training"

For example, let's say you killed someone for a quest. In process you used Shiled on yourself from Alteration, buffs and healing from Restoration, Simmons or bounded weapon from Conjuration, Absorb attribute from Mysticism and Disintegrate Weapon on enemy. You also use weapon enchanted with use-on-strike. And drink potions to regain mana. Naturally, you use some weapon skill, and one or more armor skills. And you run around to escape hits. And may be leap to high ground to be out of reach too.

This is half of the skills existing in game, used in one fight. And it's impossible to measure amount of contribution of each.

In Fallout, you just use relevant weapon skill. Things are getting slightly more complex when you use primed explosives, but it's not hard to solve too. "Kill" ep for damage goes to trap skill, you get Sneak exp if you successfully dropped primed explosive on ground and Steal exp for planting it in inventory. Once per explosive, of cause.

Back to TES, even such simple thing as persuading someone can involve Speech skill, Illusion skill for Charm person and Restoration for boosting Charisma.

Speaking of restoration school, it's just one big headache for train-by-use, because thanks to Fortify Skill, it can be used in ANY task.

Lockpicking - ok, this one can work with train-by-use. But, again, Open Lock and Fortify Agility spells.

Alchemy could work, if reagents were hard to get. But as it were, Alchemy is easiest skill to max by far.

Well, you got the picture.

Fallout, on the other hand, does not have magic or armor skills, which are most problematic for t-b-u. Fallout skills usually don't overlap. And they are more about "what you are doing" than "how are you doing it". Game world mechanics is also much simpler than TES, so it's nearly always possible to say whether you got some significant result, and how (with which skills) did you do it.

For example, if you got Smiley out of Toxic Cave, and geckos are (mostly) alive and were not alerted, then you obviously did that by sneaking. Even if you technically did not was in "Sneak" mode, but just maneuvering around geckos - it was sneaking, and you should get sneak exp. If you just donned power armor and runned past them, ignoring bites - then solved quest without using ANY skill, so you should get "free" exp, but relatively smaller.

And it's one of the more complex cases, usually it's simpler. With Science or Repair, for example, it's just giving skill exp whenever you "use skill" from skill menu or pass relevant check in dialog with significant result. Pick quest, and I can deconstruct it to skills required for different paths. Pick skill, and I can tell when you should get exp to it.

 

[DraQ]

You do realize that to check which skill is used and where the system merely needs to bo notified of its value being checked, right?

And TES already uses train-by-use, with the notable ommisions of difficulty check and global progression check (over all skills) which causes most of its problems.

 

[baturinsky]

Problem is to differentiate between useful and useless skill uses. Because if you award for latter too, you are encouraging cheesing.

 

[DraQ]

Problem is to differentiate between useful and useless skill uses. Because if you award for latter too, you are encouraging cheesing.

Have you read that lengthy post of mine and recent follow up?

Because they pretty much cover those.

First idea is to determine uses eligible for raising skill by introducing difficulty measure. Second idea is to check context. Even beth is using the latter a lot (though not enough) - protective spells will only raise their respective skill if they are actually hit by something, offensive spells only if they hit something they can damage, you can further refine those, so that offensive spells don't raise skill if they hit their caster, his party or anything belonging to caster (like summon), defensive spells don't conmtribute if caster or his summons are source of absorbed damage and so on. It may seem like hopeless endavour but you don't need to make your system completely airtight. In a non-scaling system there is no benefit to artificially grinding before an encounter, or inversely, beating it at lowest possible level. If grinding to steamroll an encounter is going to be as resource consuming, complicated and risky as just tackling the encounter then it's really not much of an issue.

You don't want to bring player's goals into use based, because that's the reason why you want to have a system in the first place - to avoid placing character development tokens manually. If you want a *system* for dispensing character development tokens, that means that you can't afford to predict and evaluate all goals player may have, which means your games has a lot of potential freeform goals, which typically means it's a wide-open sandbox. And if you want a system, you want it use based, because XP based is essentially use-based where you pool all the gains together, therefore willingly forfeiting ability to discriminate betgween different kinds of experience. Whatever XP based *system* can do, use based can do just as well or better. The only reason to possibly want XPs is simplicity, but the only waty for this simplicity to not dump you in the middle of huge mess is when you forfeit any actual system and dispense XP rewards all by yourself (requiring you to pre-place them if we are talking of cRPG context - which is what PE team seems to be doing) which sadly breaks down if your game is a huge, sandbox world with relatively few formally specified quests in proportion to the entirety of content.

 

[baturinsky]

First idea is to determine uses eligible for raising skill by introducing difficulty measure.

Which is harder to do with complex skill system and complex game mechanics.

Second idea is to check context.

Which is MUCH harder to do with complex skill system and complex game mechanics.

And TES mechanics is one of the most complex and tangled. If not THE most.

You don't want to bring player's goals into use based, because that's the reason why you want to have a system in the first place - to avoid placing character development tokens manually. If you want a *system* for dispensing character development tokens, that means that you can't afford to predict and evaluate all goals player may have, which means your games has a lot of potential freeform goals, which typically means it's a wide-open sandbox.

Even in wide-open sandbox, there can be programmable goals. Kill enemy. Open chest in the end of dungeon. Find item like you never seen before. Visit place you never been. But I agree that it has it's limits.

So, probably it's better to look first and foremost not at what you gain by use skill, but what you give away.

There should be a price for raising a skill.

Price can be anything limited in-game. Spending some limited resource (mana will do, if it is only replenished by sleep). Losing some opportunity (if you kill a mudcrab with sword, you lose possibility to kill it with fireball) is a price. Money, reagents, etc. will do too, if economy is not as broken as MW. In-game time is a price, if it is limited.

But if you can gain skills for free, well, you'll be prone to get skills for free.

 

[DraQ]

First idea is to determine uses eligible for raising skill by introducing difficulty measure.

Which is harder to do with complex skill system and complex game mechanics.

No. It doesn't correlate with complexity of skill system at all, and with complex mechanics it merely boils down to finding stand-in for probability. Since the only mechanics complex enough for this to be nontrivial is melee combat and maybe some forms of spellcasting and then it's going to work more or less the same for other combat and casting skills it's a non-issue.

Which is MUCH harder to do with complex skill system and complex game mechanics.

Again, no. It merely amounts to a bunch of condition checks stringed together, and would only involve checks involving variables the game already know (for example - is target self?).

And TES mechanics is one of the most complex and tangled. If not THE most.

Again, no.
It's mostly pretty simple and transparent, at least in Morrowind. All it's problems boil down to fairly obvious and easily rectifiable flaws, plus some atrociously bad coding (see blind effect, dispel or pickpocket in vanilla).

Even in wide-open sandbox, there can be programmable goals. Kill enemy. Open chest in the end of dungeon. Find item like you never seen before. Visit place you never been.

But then you're reintroducing the problem you've hoped to get rid of by adopting sandbox and use-based system in the first place - making a game less of a world to be explored and more of a list of checkboxes to tick off in order to maximize character's growth and content experienced.

Sandbox methodology ought to be the most powerful tool ever devised against %completion mentality.

There should be a price for raising a skill.

Price can be anything limited in-game. Spending some limited resource (mana will do, if it is only replenished by sleep). Losing some opportunity (if you kill a mudcrab with sword, you lose possibility to kill it with fireball) is a price. Money, reagents, etc. will do too, if economy is not as broken as MW. In-game time is a price, if it is limited.

But if you can gain skills for free, well, you'll be prone to get skills for free.

I addressed this as well, if your character has limited potential - development slows down as it approaches some upper bound - then raising a skill is a price in itself.
And that's in addition to all the other prices, like time and upkeep cost.

 

[baturinsky]

But then you're reintroducing the problem you've hoped to get rid of by adopting sandbox and use-based system in the first place - making a game less of a world to be explored and more of a list of checkboxes to tick off in order to maximize character's growth and content experienced.

Sandbox methodology ought to be the most powerful tool ever devised against %completion mentality.

List of checkboxes makes world exploring much more interesting. So much more, that virtually any open-world game adds some collectables in nooks and cranny, to give player extra incentive to explore. OR quests that sends you here and there.

People like when they are given tasks and then cheered for achieving them. I think this is the main reason why people like playing games.

 

[DraQ]

List of checkboxes makes world exploring much more interesting.

No, they marely make exploration formulaic and tedious, when it should be the opposite.

Instead of tracking down an artifact of power based on some sketchy book, fuzzy half rumour and some pattern matching on paper map, you go to n-th dungeon then to n+1-th and so on because there are fucking XP falling out of boxes in each.

So much more, that virtually any open-world game adds some collectables in nooks and cranny, to give player extra incentive to explore. OR quests that sends you here and there.

Those are incentives but not checkboxes. Moreso, not every dungeon has quest sending you there and not every nook and cranny has a piece of phat lewt in it. Determining which ones do without just checking them all is half of the game.

People like when they are given tasks and then cheered for achieving them. I think this is the main reason why people like playing games.

Those are not people, those are mindless drones for whom the quest markers were invented.

 

[J1M]

I remain unconvinced.

These attempts to close grinding loopholes and impose skill degradation are just wankery that moves or hides where grinding will take place (and it will).

The only way to do a use-based system that I would not find distasteful would be to have levelup/training raise a skill cap and usage raise actual skill level until it hit that cap.

 

[DraQ]

I remain unconvinced.

These attempts to close grinding loopholes and impose skill degradation are just wankery that moves or hides where grinding will take place (and it will).

Substance or GTFO.

 

[J1M]

I remain unconvinced.

These attempts to close grinding loopholes and impose skill degradation are just wankery that moves or hides where grinding will take place (and it will).

The only way to do a use-based system that I would not find distasteful would be to have levelup/training raise a skill cap and usage raise actual skill level until it hit that cap.

Substance or GTFO.

Others are doing just fine pointing out flaws in your increasingly complicated proposals.

The substance I offer is a summary of this thread's progress.

 

[DraQ]

I remain unconvinced.

These attempts to close grinding loopholes and impose skill degradation are just wankery that moves or hides where grinding will take place (and it will).

The only way to do a use-based system that I would not find distasteful would be to have levelup/training raise a skill cap and usage raise actual skill level until it hit that cap.

Substance or GTFO.

Others are doing just fine pointing out flaws in your increasingly complicated proposals.

I must have missed it somehow, then.

 

[Lancehead]

I've been playing FIFA 13 for a while now, and I find the use-based system in Be A Pro mode quite decent. The system has sets of Accomplishments based things you do on the pitch. E.g. scoring goals, completing passes. Each Accomplishment gives an increase to one of the player attributes. The attribute increases are mostly logical with actions performed, and many actions increment more than one attribute. E.g. winning headers can improve Balance and Heading.

A couple of things to note here. One, the list of Accomplishments is finite and diverse, so becoming a cream-of-the-crop player requires the player be versatile and excellent. Second, many Accomplishments are focussed on succeeding (e.g. scoring goals), but there are also many Accomplishments that give abstracted increments. For example, simply playing matches can increase various attributes.

I'd like to read what others think of the system, if anyone's played the game. I think Carrion plays/played it.

 

[Jagged Appliance]

I've been playing FIFA 13 for a while now, and I find the use-based system in Be A Pro mode quite decent.

FIFA 13's system is interesting but it seems difficult to translate into an RPG. Creating a list of tasks diverse and numerous enough would be very difficult. It would also make people alter their playstyle to try and accomplish some arbitrary tasks which may or may not be enjoyable.

 

[Carrion]

I'd like to read what others think of the system, if anyone's played the game. I think Carrion plays/played it.

I hate it, more or less. It's a gimmicky system that encourages you to play the game in some ridiculous ways, and it's also pretty exploitable because you can "grind" a lot of that stuff both in matches and in the practice mode (like always passing the ball to your nearest player to get a passing achievement, or swinging your right stick like a maniac for a while to get five-star skills). I suppose you could tweak it by adjusting the accomplishments so that they'd reward long-term gameplay rather than short-term one, but as it is, the system just encourages metagaming too much, and that pretty effectively ruins a use-based system for me.

Then again, I have only played Be A Pro in FIFA 12 for a couple of hours or so before I got annoyed with it, so I don't know if FIFA 13 changed anything. Maybe it gets better once you exhaust the most obvious and easiest achievements.

I'm not sure how you'd make a similar system work in an RPG. Behead an enemy to get +1 to your Long Sword skill, kill 10 enemies to unlock a combo? Like Jagged Appliance said, it'd be hard to create a big enough of list achievements, especially if you want to avoid making the whole game feel like a grind. I suppose you could make the system somewhat similar to quest XP, like rewarding you for doing specific tasks and giving you skill points accordingly (blow up the radscorpion cave for +5 in Explosives or shoot them all for +5 in Small Guns), but I'm not sure if that'd be any kind of an improvement over regular quest XP.

 

[Karmapowered]

I remain unconvinced.

These attempts to close grinding loopholes and impose skill degradation are just wankery that moves or hides where grinding will take place (and it will).

Substance or GTFO.

I am equally unconvinced by skill-based (or level-less) systems in cRPGs.

Most of their pitfalls (grind, abuses, etc.) that I can think of have already been adequatly covered by previous posters, so I will not repeat them, and I fail to see any obvious long-standing advantages to them.

The only (PnP) RPG in which I saw a skill-based system working half-decently was Runescape. If my memory serves me right, players could cross some skills if they successfully had used them *and* received the acknowledgement of the DM to do so. At the end of the game session, if skills had enough crosses, players could increase them. Without human supervision, I don't see it working in a (single-player) computer game however, at least it didn't in the TES games.

What does work and remains desirable in my mind is a mix of level-based and skill-based system, to avoid "paladins" becoming experts in lockpicking without ever practicing it, for example, but in effect such safe-guards are already present in most level-based systems.

 

[Lancehead]

I'd like to read what others think of the system, if anyone's played the game. I think Carrion plays/played it.

I hate it, more or less. It's a gimmicky system that encourages you to play the game in some ridiculous ways, and it's also pretty exploitable because you can "grind" a lot of that stuff both in matches and in the practice mode (like always passing the ball to your nearest player to get a passing achievement, or swinging your right stick like a maniac for a while to get five-star skills). I suppose you could tweak it by adjusting the accomplishments so that they'd reward long-term gameplay rather than short-term one, but as it is, the system just encourages metagaming too much, and that pretty effectively ruins a use-based system for me.

Then again, I have only played Be A Pro in FIFA 12 for a couple of hours or so before I got annoyed with it, so I don't know if FIFA 13 changed anything. Maybe it gets better once you exhaust the most obvious and easiest achievements.

I haven't played FIFA 12 but metagaming is definitely possible in FIFA 13, although I'm not sure it's as bad as describe it. By a cursory estimation I would say getting your wanted attributes for the player to 80-85 range is pretty easy, and metagaming would be far less of an issue when trying to get to 90 or more. I must say that my impression of the system formed without taking metagaming into consideration since I never felt like doing it.

I'm not sure how you'd make a similar system work in an RPG. Behead an enemy to get +1 to your Long Sword skill, kill 10 enemies to unlock a combo? Like Jagged Appliance said, it'd be hard to create a big enough of list achievements, especially if you want to avoid making the whole game feel like a grind. I suppose you could make the system somewhat similar to quest XP, like rewarding you for doing specific tasks and giving you skill points accordingly (blow up the radscorpion cave for +5 in Explosives or shoot them all for +5 in Small Guns), but I'm not sure if that'd be any kind of an improvement over regular quest XP.

FIFA 13's system is interesting but it seems difficult to translate into an RPG. Creating a list of tasks diverse and numerous enough would be very difficult. It would also make people alter their playstyle to try and accomplish some arbitrary tasks which may or may not be enjoyable.

I don't think it'd work in a single character RPG, but may in party-based RPG since you'd have different party members to play different roles, like in football, to reduce grind.

 

[Esterhaze]

Prelude to Darkness. Train-by-use can't really stand alone, it needs the equivalent of xp to support it.

 

[Hitoshura]

I generally don't like these train-by-use system. Basically, the game rewards you for doing the same thing over and over: the more bored you get, the more powerful your virtual character becomes. That's plain awful game design. Additionally, you end up in situation where tactically, using skill X makes sense but will not train skill Y you are looking to develop, it's a lose/lose situation. I certainly prefer a system where I can invert point in advance and use that skill at the right time in the future, more strategic and thoughtful.

The only game I've seen an attempt at train-by-use system that is somewhat working is Romancing Saga: Minstrel Song. Using a combat skill doesn't add points to a bucket to eventually improve that skill, you have a random chance of progress. So basically if you are looking for more sword skills, use swords predominantly but you can use other skill without penalty if it makes sense tactically. The other skill you use also have a chance to get better and create a different (more versatile) character you had in mind, thus increasing the replay value of the game.

 

[Abelian]

I prefer the method of stat distribution at level-up, myself. Sure, it's a break from reality (ex. you fight with a mace exclusively, but you choose to improve the sword skill), but allows the players to do what they want and not have to grind to become proficient.

 

[MoLAoS]

Train by use is extremely realistic. Training IS boring. If gaining skills was fun we'd all be crazy talented.

The problem is more of a mindset. The activity that trains skills should be fun. This is easy for combat. Hacking people to bits is what a lot of people play games for. Crafting is a little harder. As our other non-combat things.

 

[Newfag-er]

That's why we pay so much for education/extra help right?

The idea itself is extremely realistic, and that itself can be a problem if you take realism into account.

Of course, in the real world. (and in many many rpg's) Gaining xp by doing things and level up isn't the only way to obtain moar powah.