Continuing the discussion from On risk, reward, goals and purpose:
A typical approach to this in RPGs is to make character progression zero-sum, i.e. progression in one direction either prevents progression in another direction, or makes it significantly more expensive.
Skill rust is the closest thing we have to this mechanic, but it has been essentially rejected by both the developers and players (for good reason, it never met this goal, and also has other issues). It operates (in theory if not in practice) by introducing a maintenance cost to each skill that scales with the current level of the skill, at some point there arenāt enough hours in the day to maintain each skill, so the player is forced to choose some number of them to maintain. In practice, this also sounds like a nightmare to manage, both from the point of view of communicating it to the player and from the point of view of interacting with it, which requires the player to practice their skills regularly in order to avoid rust and to advance their desired skills.
A common option is making skills require exponential investment to advance as they level, which simply discourages advancement that the player doesnāt āneedā.
Adding advancement cost to skills based on the sum of skill levels rather than the value of each, actively rewards players for neglecting some skills by making the ones they do develop cheaper. A major drawback of this approach is itās entirely gamified, there is no rationale for skill advancement to work like this.
None of these present a compelling solution, Iāll think about this some more and see if anything comes to me.
