Multi-skill practice shenanigans

[jerc]

With all of the fun new toys that have been added over the past week, I can't help but see a lot of potential for skillgain shenanigans, particularly with regard to skills with a wide gap that get combined for some check.

As things currently work, you get

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Base Practice * Skill Weight * Challenge Die / Your Die

, or thereabouts. For example, a cryomancy/sorcery cast has the respective skills weighted 50/50, so at max challenge, you'd get 0.0125 toward both. This makes sense when the skills are roughly equivalent, but gets wonky with a wide gap between them. If my sorcery were 700 and cryomancy 50, I'd be rolling the average of the two, which ends up being about half of my sorcery. But practice-wise, I still get full sorcery skill gain, despite it being greatly over-skilled, allowing me to practice sorcery against mobs well below my "normal" skill level. The same goes for shield use and sorcery with the cryosorcerous disk. It's not as pronounced, but with a gap of several hundred between shield use and sorcery, I can continue getting full shield use practice off of mobs for much longer just by switching from a hard shield to a sorcerous shield after they stop giving practice with just shield use.

So how do we fix this? I propose that, instead of using the skill's roll multiplier for its practice multiplier, instead use the ratio of its contribution to the roll to what its contribution should be if all input skills were equal. This way, you wouldn't get gains on sorcery for combined cryo/sorcery casts if sorcery is far above your cryomancy, and you wouldn't get marksmanship/melee practice "for free" just by training lower-level weapon skills. Skills that are intended to be raised in tandem would also tend toward the same level if they got "out of sync".

Taking the previous example of 700 sorcery/50 cryomancy and ignoring marksmanship and the base d100 for simplicity, you'd end up with a roll of 375. Each should contribute 188ish, but sorcery contributes 350 while cryomancy contributes 25. This would scale the practice gains for sorcery down by 188/350 and cryomancy up by 188/25, both subject so some minimum/maximum cutoff.

This could be similarly used to fix the melee/marksmanship only growing at 25% the rate of weapon skills and effectively forcing diversification.

[Dean]

I can continue getting full shield use practice off of mobs for much longer just by switching from a hard shield to a sorcerous shield after they stop giving practice with just shield use.

Minor nitpick, but when I used Cryosorcerous Disk, I only received Shield Use practice, not Sorcery practice. Using the sorcerous shield actually made it harder to train Shield Use, not easier, because it both increased my die sides for the defense and required two open channels of energy drain.

I haven't picked up the ability since the series of crashes, since I realized it's... sort of just worse than using a normal shield because of that for a character that's fine with lugging around a shield (which mine is, but others mightn't be).

[jerc]

I can continue getting full shield use practice off of mobs for much longer just by switching from a hard shield to a sorcerous shield after they stop giving practice with just shield use.

Minor nitpick, but when I used Cryosorcerous Disk, I only received Shield Use practice, not Sorcery practice. Using the sorcerous shield actually made it harder to train Shield Use, not easier, because it both increased my die sides for the defense and required two open channels of energy drain.

I haven't picked up the ability since the series of crashes, since I realized it's... sort of just worse than using a normal shield because of that for a character that's fine with lugging around a shield (which mine is, but others mightn't be).

Invert the relative skill levels and then think about that again. If shield use is far above sorcery, then switching to disk will lower your block die. You're correct that it only provides shield practice and not sorcery - I wasn't implying otherwise. This means that if you're only training shield use, then your block die will grow at 50% of the rate that your shield use grows.