Well, as of now, my website is live. It's going to be a place where I put allllllll my rules documents, nicely formatted and hyperlinked so that both the players and I can easily access them during the game. There's no easy way to keep the rules all in my computer and still actually use them.
I'll be transferring them from the plain format text I've been using to the format which my programs turn into a webpage, one by one.
I tackled the subject of training non-leveled individuals a few times recently, and having gotten some feedback from Alexis, I believe I've arrived at a useable version which can serve as a good foundation for future improvement. At any rate I'm going to set them aside at the moment, and focus on another little project which I'll be posting here very soon. Stay tuned for that, and in the meantime, here are the Training and Instruction rules as I'm going to use them for now:
Training is the process by which a leveled trainer teaches an unleveled person, called a trainee. By this process, the trainee literally gains experience, and thus XP, over time. Through this XP gain, the trainee can eventually count as combat-trained, or even reach 1st level in the trainer's character class.
Here I'll continue to talk about training non-leveled persons to 1st level, as I have been discussing these past few days. Let me remind you that when I say "training," I'm not talking about gaining levels, I'm talking about gaining actual experience (as well as the quantified version, experience points) for the purpose of becoming a 1st level character.
Alexis brings up the point that just rolling a die for the number of years necessary for training isn't enough. Training has to be less cut and dry than that, and it has to include the possibility of failure.
Today I'll try to define some potential outcomes of the training process talk about the potential outcomes of the training process. Consider the following continuum of results, arranged from worst to best:
Alexis left a comment on my post about training soldiers, asking how I'd handle the party training one lone individual instead of a group of them. Here's what he had to say:
"I can see the logic here - particularly in establishing a minimum time. I find I want some sort of random roll, however, based on a person's temperament, ability, intelligence, failure to get his or her self injured, etc. The above seems a bit, well, pat for me. It works for mass armies - but supposing the players pick up a lone, non-combat trained person in their travels, who wants to become an adventurer - say, a 15 year old boy. How would the system deal with that?"
Lately I've been playing with rules for Alchemy, a knowledge specialty accessible to mages, and maybe druids too. I haven't decided on that. I'm still on the fence over whether classes will share any trees. Thief/assassin, druid/ranger, paladin/cleric, fighter/other fighter-types, mage/cleric: all of these pairings might conceivably share one or more skill trees.
OK, no more preamble. Here's what I have so far. None of this is written in stone of course -- tear it apart, please. I wish I had a tree-like visualization for you, but not yet.