Skills
The purpose of the system is to allow for players to experience progression with their characters in a semi-realistic manner based on usage, while at the same time negating skill-grinding.
The initial concept of the system so far:
When a character is first created, and they go through the initial creation system and appear in the world, the first thing that happens is everything they just set is erased and all skills are set to zero. They are then provided a menu from which they select the skills they want. The first menu consists of skills that are infeasible for someone without training to be able to dive into. They have a pool of points with which to select skills, and each skill they choose takes a chunk out of their pool. As the number of chosen skills goes higher, the more points each additional skill added will remove from the pool. Also, the player may assign more points to any particular skill, up to perhaps 35, but the higher they raise the skill above the minimum, the more points taken from the pool for each point raised in the skill. After the player decides they are done with this menu, they can move on to the next menu which will allow them to assign starting proficiency in skills that "anyone can just do". The first menu will be the only way for a player to be able to access those skills without learning them IC during the course of game-play. The second menu gives the player an initial boost in skills that they can still attempt to use and raise with no special training.
Skillgain will be handled via a system of weekly allotments. Each week a quantity of points will be allotted to all active characters. These points can be redeemed via a menu for gains in various skills of a player's choice. There are two factors that will determine how much a skill goes up. They are how high a particular skill is, and how focused a character is on the skills of his choice. The higher a skill is, the more points that must be redeemed for gains in it; and the more skills a character has, the more points that must be redeemed for skills in general as their efforts are split between skills. The skills that points may be allotted to are ones that the character has been using during the week. A character need only use a skill casually in order to qualify for progression in it.
Skillgain never ceases, there are no maximums to hit. However, the higher the level of a skill, or the higher the number of skills, the exponentially slower gains become. So a character with a level of skill in say, smithing, who is at 129 skill, may take 3 months to get to 130, and later at 150, may take 2 years to reach 151, as an example. Also to be recalled is that the more skills a player has in general, and the higher they are, also slows down the gain of all skills, in addition to the normal slowdown for high levels in an individual skill, resulting in the difficulty of a jack-of-all-trades type of character of acheiving very much proficiency in any of them. The more a player focuses on a small group of skills, the faster they will rise, but an effective character will need to have some diversity of skills.
And my mind is jammed at the moment, so this is as far as this page goes for now!