Sure, extensive simplification was already on the table. Logically you could remove all other skills, and Fabrication covers all creation, carpentry, carving, and all metalworking, Mechanics covers all complex machinery, from firearms to clockmaking to engines to pumps. Forget survival, working with stone is fabrication too.
The same issue still applies - working in wood is a different skillset to working in metal is a different skillset to working in stone. Knowing how to fabricate up an IKEA cabinet and knowing how to fire up an arc welder is not a natural progression from one to the next.
To remove the attachments youâre giving to the existing names for skills, the skills weâre talking about are:
Cooking, Metalworking, Carpentry, Sculpting, Mechanics, Electronics, Textiles.
(Cooking, Mechanics, Fabrication, Survival, Trapping, Electronics, Tailoring)
For a simplified system, that would be:
Cooking, Fabrication(Metalworking, Carpentry, Sculpting, Trapping [simple]), Mechanics (Also Trapping [complex]), Electronics, Tailoring.
So to make a car requires Fabrication for putting together the frame and anything that involves âworking with basic materialsâ, Mechanics for the engine, possibly steering, and possibly doors, Electronics for the headlights, Tailoring for the seat padding (the frame of the seat is fabrication again).
[quote=âCoolthulhu, post:36, topic:12277â]For tailoring, it would be OK to unlock recipes from the start. It makes sense that someone would come up with a way of sewing up pants from leather without having much tailoring knowledge. The sewing projects of this kind would most likely fail, but the worst side effect here would be a pin prick.
Cooking is worse. Here âcritical failureâ could result in damaged tools, poisonous food, cut fingers and housefires. Simulating those (instead of keeping recipes skill-locked) would lead to this kind of anti-realism I described above - for example, collecting a lot of disposable tools and âvolatileâ food, cooking until you get cut badly, sleeping off the damage and leveling up cooking that way. Only specific cooking recipes could be autolearned before their difficulty.
As for book locking:
You wonât figure out how to make software to hack robots by yourself. Youâd need in-depth documentation of their AI at the very least.
Similar for katanas, plate armor, reflex-recurve bows, lemon batteries, atomic lamps, zombie pheromones, biodiesel, meth, heroin, oxidizer powder, ammonia, RDX etc.[/quote]
You do not need to be âable to do something flawlesslyâ to be able to visualise it, and for things that seem complex to a layman, an expert could easily conceptualise them.
Skill failure for things like cooking already exists, and should arguably carry serious consequences already (youâre mixing bleach and ammonia with poison for twenty hours a day while Dead Tired and fighting off zombears with your bare hands), but as already suggested earlier, this could easily be abstracted to be the same for all skills:
1: Your attempt fails without further incident.
2: You waste some materials (burnt/poisonous food, lose some raw materials as you do while repairing or modifying clothing).
3: You damage your tool (I assure you, you can most assuredly break your needles while sewing, itâs much harder to damage a pot but still doable, especially working with chemicals).
4: You hurt yourself (cut finger, breathed in poison gas, tried poisonous food, electrocuted yourself).
5: Your attempt succeeds without further incident.
Thinking up a super basic system:
1+SkillD100 divided by Difficulty Level +1. (Skill 10 = 11-1100 result, difficulty level 10 = /11 so 1-100 result, heavily skewed towards middle results because of the law of averages). Roll 1DX, stop further rolls on 1 or 5.
Result table with 0-10 âRoll 1D4 x 4 for results.â, 11-25 âRoll 1D4 x 3 for resultsâ 26-50 âRoll 1D6-1 x 2 for results, autofail if you donât roll a 5â, 51-75 âRoll 1D5 x 2 for results, autosuccess if you donât roll a 1â, 76-90 âRoll 1D4+1, autosuccessâ, 91+ âAutosuccessâ.
This obviously is very crude and may overrepresent problems occurring at equal skill/difficulty, but if you had, say, 5 skill and tried a DC10 recipe, you would have a small, but tangible, chance of success âwith problemsâ, with a highest possible result of 54 giving a better than 40% chance of success, and a ~15% chance of success on a 26-50 roll.
Yes, you theoretically could keep trying a complex dish and keep failing and sleeping until you succeeded - it would be realistic, it would be tedious, and it would be inefficient. It would be more efficient to just take those same materials and âexperimentâ for the same skill gain. In the ideal system you craft because you want something, not because you want skills.
For booklocking:
Hacking - Youâd need to know their OS, perhaps. but how many types of code does someone know at Computers 1? Computers 3? Computers 10? It might not be feasible to straight up start coding in subroutines into their code, but with any remote access laptop you could try putting in a bunch of extra data into the code at random and see if something unusual happens (Itâs much easier to crash code than it is to make it work, after all).
Katanas - Knowledge needed - âThose are the swords where they folded the metal a bunch of times, right?â More in depth would be the knowledge that this was done to remove impurities from the metal, even more in-depth was that the end result wasnât actually much different to what Westerners forging with superior steel were producing as standard and sticking to making broadswords. You really want to forge a katana, start folding steel and see what works. It might not be the next Masamune brand sword, but from that extremely basic âletâs try folding steel to make a swordâ and a solid foundation in metallurgy that a high skill level represents you could come out with something that performed pretty katana-ley. Even if you only knew the most basic âlong, curved swordâ, you could emulate the shape alone and still produce something that did the job.
Plate Armour - This is extremely easy to conceptualise, and is a well recognised âtropeâ, but does not involve any particular secret, so much as a solid understanding of the fundamentals: You need to know how to make plates move together seamlessly, how to keep those plates in place, how to shape them so as to distribute force, and how to fit them together so you can move easily, with the correct underlying materials to permit maximum protection and mobility. A level 6 Tailor is a âfashion designerâ, who understands the properties of textiles and how to work them, as well as how to correctly fit fabric together and size garments. A level 6 Metallurgist is capable of advanced shaping of metal, is familiar with the properties of metal and how to make armour out of that metal. If they want to combine their skillsets then thereâs nothing stopping them from sitting down and designing full plate on paper, then putting that into practise/refining their method until itâs perfect.
Reflex-recurve bows - Iâm not actually sure how a bow can be reflex without also being recurve, but I assume a more experienced archer might know. Regardless, as an archer with deep knowledge into the properties of materials and how they work (high fabrication, high archery), I know what I need from a bow, and can conceptualise stronger draw bows by changing the material, length (screw recurve, Iâm going straight limb English longbow) changing the shape, and changing the shape of the bow and which way the bow flexes when unstrung - or in other words, whether the bow is reflex, recurve, or both.
Lemon batteries - Seriously? Itâs two different types of metal in a fruit. The underlying physics are pretty basic. If my electronics skill is sufficient to craft a flying robot, I should hope I understand electricity well enough to understand how basic electrical cells work.
Biodiesel - To a non-chemist, this may be inconceivable, but what are you doing to bring your skill up to level 7? Do you understand catalysed reactions? Combining Hydrogen Peroxide and Methanol to reduce oils to a mixture of glycerine and thin usable fuel?
Atomic X - Thereâs several ways this might be achieved, honestly. Using the radioactives as either a light source in themselves or to produce a constant amount of power to a light. Honestly the biggest strangeness is that an atomic power converter doesnât achieve the same âperpetual powerâ already. Now, you might say that any ânuclear energyâ source is a specialist skillset, which Iâd be willing to accept, but then youâd have the other possible that knowing one recipe then unlocks others through familiarity - if you know how to make an atomic lamp, why wouldnât you know how to make an atomic nightlight?
Specific chemicals are the most compelling case, since you do not necessarily know what youâre attempting to achieve, and different compounds can have different gross physical properties. We can assume that mutagens are complex chemical treatments using catalysts and difficult processes to produce with trial and error being time and resource prohibitive. The player might feasibly try breaking down some zombie meat to reproduce their smell and achieve âzombie pheromoneâ, or know that chlorine + X reacts together to produce another basic chemical when treated - from basic chemical knowledge that they have accumulated while working with chemicals sufficient to bring their skill level up in the first place.
While I concede the necessity and importance of books to a layman, and the majority of chemistry recipes can be difficult to reliably replicate without some fundamental understanding of what youâre trying to achieve, it is not unreasonable that high skill levels include more than raw procedural knowledge. This includes the knowledge that you are not born with. Your average American hamburger eater has a cooking skill of 0-1 for preparing frozen food. Getting to higher cooking levels precisely involves âfiguring out low level cooking processesâ, and this includes âEw, these were horrible and crunchy. Maybe Iâll try soaking them like they were beansâ for something like cooked acorns.
So to tl;dr that, and clarify my position:
If you have the recipe in a book: Should be able to attempt it, regardless of skill level. Potentially huge failure chance, but even laymen can follow clear instructions for some hope of success. I cannot make pudding, but I can google up a recipe and have a good chance of pudding success.
Unlock certain âobviousâ recipes and should be able to attempt them before skill level reaches the difficulty level (leather pants), or for specific âcomplexâ recipes (secret blend of herbs and spices), once their skill level far exceeds their difficulty level. They might be difficult to achieve but obvious to conceptualise (fireproof armour that doesnât weigh you down), or be simple to achieve, but require a deep understanding to come to that realisation on your own (acorns are edible, but require soaking and draining).
Very rare, and very specific recipes could be booklocked, but these would be the exception, not the rule, and would likely be mainly restricted to chemical processes or highly technical specialised fields of study.
Traits or professions may grant familiarity in those booklocked fields to allow them to be unlocked by increase in skill, or be available from the start, depending.
