Hunting & Camping out

Also agree a lot with most of what is proposed here.

Hunting should be really tricky and benefit from cooperation and maybe hunting dogs. Wind could carry smells and sounds as it does in real world.

Choosing where to camp should be important.
At the top of a tree we would be safe but fatigue wouldn't decrease much.
An escarpment with a single access and good visibility for the watch would be the ideal.
Making fire could take away wolves and animals in general but strong monsters and hostile players could see you from further and try a sneak attack.

Some regions should be very dangerous at night, making an incentive for players to group.

 

I made a thread for hunting specifically to the wish list. I'm hoping that hunting will be a viable profession, and I see good ideas here regarding going into the wilderness to hunt. I hope the whole aspect of hunting & survival skills will have it's place in hunting and contribute to the economy and have a place in PVP too.

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...a-bit-more-realistic-hunting.1289/#post-15731

 

@Bowen: You said, "how much skill does it take to pitch a tent? I have no hunting skill in RL but I can pitch a tent without any real difficulty."

I'm going to ask you to re-evaluate just how much skill you actually had and used, basing on a comparison to tenderfeet (Cub scouts on their first outing, or city folk likewise). Including in that evaluation how well- (or ill-) designed the tent was to block many possible degrees of misapplication. A modern dome tent with snap-cord poles has a great deal of subtle cuing and unique orientation/fit elements which most people barely notice. Stringing a central loadline and anchoring it, siting possible stake-down sets, and matching all of these to the terrain and undergrowth, and then physically getting a taut-but-not-overtight canvas, takes practice and real-world experience.

The more advanced the tool, the less experience is needed on the part of the user. Bivvy-sacks and modern domes are far, far easier to use than shelter-halfs, and those were much easier to use than greatkilts and/or cloaks. Paracord sold, and sells, as well as it does for a very good reason (if you've ever tried balancing different diameters of rope, needing those Boy Scout knot skills to do so).

Just go ask the Rangers at any National Park (or many State parks) for their best stories about tourist fumbles.

 

heh.. skill implies that something has been learned and then practiced to an increasing degree of proficiency.. I draw a distinction in this case between skill and intelligence. These days if you can read.. you should be able to pitch a modern day tent with no skill. I have however assisted in pitching more medieval style tents and those didn't take a great deal of skill either. Once you know how.. it's a little too simple to translate that ability into a skill you continue to improve on in a game. Just how many levels of proficiency do you need?

Maybe if you plan on pitching a tent in the middle of a blizzard or in a pitch black cave with no light source or in very high winds.. but how often would that scenario occur in-game? Probably not often enough to justify turning pitching a tent into a skill.

 

Then this becomes a question of 'granularity' of the skillset implemented in the game. Should there be a very broad 'Ranger' skill (tracking and concealment thrown into the package)? A somewhat-less broad, 'outdoor survival' skill (weather adaptation, waterfinding and avoidance, thrown into the package)?

Suppose there are several distinct classes of skills as follows: (a) complex skills with many detailed sub-stages; the sort of 'skill' class most games and perhaps players are thinking of -- combat, magery, crafting (per craft); (b) abstract skills which require all of experiential, 'taught' or educational exposure, and theoretical (methodologies and discussion forms used in the topic/subject area) exposure, in order to be rated on a societal, but even-interval, "display of expertise" competency (lawyering, barbering (hairstyles and personal appearance, not the medieval barber/surgeon); and (c) basic 'background' skills with binary or perhaps quarternary internal levels (present/absent, or 'none/poor/fair/best'), for skills such as camping, wagon-riding, own-use crafting from prepared material sets (the IKEA equivalent for SOTA). These might include some 'ordinary life' skills which recently-arisen Avatars will have some problems with from the lack of 'social context' and have to work around.

As an example: societal norm skills (taking off shoes at the entrance to the mosque, standing when a Lord of higher rank enters your collective personal space) would be binary. Individual 'glitches' would be forgiveable as long as the avatar/player learns by observation and adjusts his/her own behavior to 'suit' and blend in. (Quick -- which fork do you pick up for fish instead of vegetables? Do you dip your fingers into, or sip from, the lemon-scented water bowl ahead and to your right as you were seated? Do you pick up your fork and put the tines so the convex curvature is uppermost, or lowermost? Get that one wrong and you show an ignorance that can be dangerous.....

Also, I wanted to remind folks that just because _we_ may be accustomed to a skill, enough to have made many of its expressions in our lives unconscious or nearly so, that doesn't mean there wasn't a great deal of learning and training to get there.

 

There's a difference between skill and knowledge.. anyone can take off their shoes at the right time if they know when that time is. You wouldn't turn it into a skillset for a game. Now.. take archery. Anyone who knows how can string a bow.. notch an arrow.. aim and shoot. That's easy as it only requires knowledge to do. However, it takes considerable amount of skill to hit a target consistently. Especially under adverse conditions. That's not just something anyone can do simply by knowing how to shoot.

There are some things that are appropriate for turning into a game's skill and some things that are not.

 

Weren't there some dream sequences with premonition in the earlier Ultimas? It's long since i've played the classic ones.... Astral travelling would be an interesting skill but it shouldn't be overpowering. I'd like to fish in peace and listen to the soothing "Stones" without instantly being torched alive by a crazed dragon

 

Read the bible and tell me there is no skill in building a tent. - http://tinyurl.com/o2zy2an
Yes you can have very simple ones but you could also have very well designed tents.
Yea those would be used for more then just camping.
But to tell me there is no skill in building a tent, yea right.
If you want to increase your skill in tent making all the way up to something like above then great but yes you should need little skill in putting up a small tent to sleep in.

 

First of all.. we're not building the tabernacle of the ark.. Secondly.. we haven't been talking about building or making tents.. we're been talking about pitching tents. Huge difference.

Making a tent.. is not putting the tent up. Plus neither requires any particular survival skill. Making/building the tent is a crafting skill. Putting it up so that it doesn't fall over.. is simply knowledge. Once you know.. you know.. at most the skill you need is to be able to hit pegs into the ground with a hammer. Modern tents.. medieval tents.. yeah.. *raises hand* been there.. done that. Life experience talking.

 

You might not be putting up the tabernacle but a player with 100 skill in pitching tents might be.
It is like any other skill, when you first start out your not doing anything to complicated.
If you want just a tent to sleep in then yea you only need a few skill points.
If you want to put up a tent to worship in then you might need some more.
That tabernacle had lots of measurements that had to be exactly right and that takes skill in putting it up.

 

Well yeah it and it also required specific materials and designs needing a wide variety of crafters to build.. but we're not talking about a place of worship or even a place for families dwell in for 3o or 40 years. We're talking stuff one person or a mule could carry out and pitch for a few days. Is there really any need in-game for anything more complicated than that? To my knowledge none have been established.

The most we'll ever need is a tent that a small group could sleep in. They don't need rooms.. rare materials.. indoor plumping with running water or anything special. Canvas pieces.. rope.. tent pegs, a few rods and maybe some pieces to build a simple framework for some styles of tent. Let's not over complicate something that doesn't need it.

 

Yea if that is all we get then it might be better not to have a skill for pitching tents.
But in the end it would be nice to pitch all sizes and shapes of tents which I think we need a skill for.
Maybe even a design tool that maps out your tent before you place it.

 

Well if there was going to be a massive and complex tent.. ok maybe.. but you also wouldn't be able to pitch a tent like that by yourself.

 

If there's no skill involved in pitching tents, why do the Boy Scouts (as an organization, and as individuals) go to such efforts to master just that?

Be the adult on a Scout overnight...I'd advise delegation to the more experienced and 'teaching-capable' Scouts, to keep you sanity high.

 

What are we? A bunch of kids now? Who I might add have never learned how to pitch a tent.. as I've been saying there's a difference between knowledge and skill. Skills are something that knowledge alone doesn't cover. Shooting a bow.. knowledge.. hitting a moving target with bow.. skill. Swinging a sword.. knowledge.. fighting with a sword and not getting killed in the process.. skill.

Pitching a tent.. knowledge.. pitching a tent.. still knowledge.. it doesn't take hundreds of hours of practice to master. Those kids are learning the knowledge.. will they have to spend 20.. 40.. 100+ hours to master that knowledge? No.. Will they be any better at it after 100 times than after 4 or 5? Very unlikely. It's just not something that translates well into a game skill.

Why are folks so hung up and turning pitching tents into a skill?

 

As long as my nomad and his tribe can hunt and camp I don`t care how the devs implement it.

 

Waitaminute,waitaminute -- I actually agree with Bowen's position! Also, I suspect, I might agree with his definitions -- in the SOTA 'game' world.

A "skill" is a broad term, best viewed as a collection of both knowledge and experiences about a connected and interacting web of cause/effect and action/response pairings. Thus, "hunting" would be a skill, while "pitching a tent" would not -- for SOTA. I've seen generations of games that try to enforce or implement the micro-level of skill and activity development. I've yet to know of one which really succeeded for all but a very, very small group of ... umm ... "focused" individuals.

Mostly, my hope is that the DevTeam will consult with both experienced and novice individuals when considering how much should be wrapped into any 'skill', to avoid the perspective errors which can arise. That which appears to be a nigh-insuperable barrier to the novice, may later be seen as a minor thing to an expert; just as that which may be seen as 'simple' to the novice, a source of a wealth of meaningful variations and opportunities.

Well, my other hope is that we help them craft a world-shaking, premise-breaking, stupefyingly magnificent, tremendously successful and above all else, FUN, game!

 

I have only played Ultima IV but if they did that in other games I approve!

Don't understand what you mean about astral travelling, fishing and the crazed dragon. maybe a reference to another game I haven't played...