CLOK BBS

This usually wouldn't be a problem, but one of the quirks of CLOK is that too much skill can be a bad thing. Whenever someone has difficulty completing tasks, the advice we hear from GMs is something along the lines of "Your skills are out of balance. You need to train X until it catches up to Y." I've even been given the impression that 300 sword + 700 melee is worse than 500 sword + 500 melee. Unfortunately, catching up can be difficult to do as training X often trains Y at the same time.

Or maybe you just want your character to never learn any more about something for some reason or another. Maybe they are just inherently bad at it, and you want to RP that.

I think a good (hopefully simple) solution to both problems is a command to "cap <skill> <amount>". As in "cap melee 500" or "cap dodge 200". What it does is that once your skill hits the specified amount it stops increasing so that you can continue training other skills without trying to catch up to an ever-increasing target. "skills category capped" (or maybe just "cap" with no arguments) would show you which skills you have capped at what amount and if you check your skills while something is at its cap it says (capped) next to it like (penalized) is listed next to other skills.

I just wanted to say that this sounds reasonable and useful.

I am not sure how you would explain that ICly. Did your character just decide he would not learn anymore about melee fighting?

Ardor wrote:I am not sure how you would explain that ICly. Did your character just decide he would not learn anymore about melee fighting?

Yes. I think learning is a conscious decision. Not some by product of repetition. You can learn up to a point with repetition, but people choose not to transcend that barrier all the time due to laziness and pride. Both of which are also conscious decisions.

You could also explain it as just an inability to learn if, for instance, you didn't want to raise a particular skill past 0 ever.

Ardor wrote:I am not sure how you would explain that ICly. Did your character just decide he would not learn anymore about melee fighting?

I'm not sure it really needs an IC explanation. Who would know that you've capped your skills? How do we explain the fact that we don't learn any more swimming?

If you were pressed to explain why you aren't learning more melee, you could just say that you've focused on improving your sword technique instead or something along those lines.

Brought up something like this a few times myself, so yeah I'd like to see.

I think this is a nifty idea. On the to-do list.