What would a rogue's skill wheel look like?

Anyone who's been following the boards knows that I was pushing for increased rogue skills and rogue types a while back. It looks so far like they're going in another direction. DarkStarr recently showed up in chat and pointed out that the stealth skills are under the combat and magic schools, and the only thing left for discussion was stealing.

I didn't get a chance to push him for more details on things like lockpicking, disarming traps, and possible agility skills if things like jumping and climbing eventually make their way into the game. A lot is left out if you just focus on stealth and stealing.

At any rate, I'm not expecting them to change directions on this... but I was thinking about it a bit and was wondering "what would a rogue's skill wheel look like?" -- so I decided to do a thought experiment.



The sigils borrow their images from parts of the body. A rogue is not just a dex class: a rogue is someone who works in the underbelly of society, and uses their natural prowess -- dexterity, agility, brawn, wit, cunning, and so on -- in order to make their way -- rather than relying on weapons or magic. Its primarily oriented around dex, but a fighter uses his intelligence and dexterity too, as well, and a mage his strength and dexterity. The skills at near the top gravitate towards being intelligence skills, and at the bottom, towards being strength skills. Dexterity is spread throughout.

There are also opposing skills here. Acuity, which involves detecting traps, is opposite to artifice, which involves setting them. Cunning can beat brawn, and brawn can overpower cunning. The skills in discernment have to do with detecting poisons and deceptions, and tumblers and jugglers were thought to be tricksters. Stealth is an opposite approach to wit; in the shadows, versus direct.

In my rogue types thread, I list possible characters that derive from these skills -- thief, acrobat, brute, trapan, assassin, ranger.

I hope you guys enjoy this :>

 

Nice work.

I am not sure I agree with the entire way the skills are being done per se.

We are "classless" supposedly, yet, they have these wheels of synergistic skills.

My mage can't detect poison? and snoop?

My fighter can't cast spells?

Of course they can, which is why the point of specific class wheels seem diminished IMO.

Taking it from what you have, I'd stick persuasion under cunning, actually the entire WIT column doesn't fit with wit per se.

Maybe make cunning the top level category and put wit under that.

You have agility under agility and climbing twice.

I'd also stick climbing under Brawn -- though its a weird one cause you need fast hands and strength.

 

Sure, but nobody is restricting you to one wheel. You can dabble in more than one skillset.

I was thinking of wit as speech related skills, where you would have to think on your feet, while not cunning, which would require planning and forethought... though I know 'wit' means more than that. Good points, though.

 

You've mixed combat, RP, crafting, and a bunch of other stuff together. Split the stuff apart and put it where it belongs.

 

There's no real crafting there. Poisoning but I was thinking of applying poisons and detecting them. A herbalist is really the one that should be crafting them. Yes, some physical stuff that would apply to combat, but the combat skill wheel is all about weapons and armor. I'm thinking about unarmed skills.

 

Um, half the wheel is crafting...locks, traps, poison. And all that dodging, wrestling, misdirection, etc. is combat.

I'm not sure what of this belongs in the game, but it really doesn't need it's own tree. It heavily overlaps the roles of the existing trees.

 

Lock picking can fit under tinkering and detecting poisons under alchemy, I guess, though I don't see why they would... but in general I don't get your point.... since the magic tree is also a mix of combat and non-combat skills... you could say it overlaps with the combat tree. Except, that doesn't invalidate the point of the magic tree.

But, yea, I think they're keeping it to two skill wheels in the game because they want to make it simpler.

 

Early on it was mentioned that we would have 6 skill trees, with a split of skill points, subterfuge, combat, magic, in one and gathering, refining, crafting in another. So I'm surprised when they said everything is there already. I guess they changed their mind on how to handle that.

 

The only thing not there is subterfuge.. they combined the gathering/refining/crafting wheels. But, yea they rolled in some of the stealth stuff into the light armor skills, and some of the thievery stuff can happen under craft skills.. but its sort of a reductiion of the concept.

 

I guess I don't even understand the purpose of the wheels when we have trees.. It feels sort of shoe-horned in there to fill someone's desire to create a combat and crafting sigil, rather than a need. They can both be limiting factors in adding new things and require stretches to make them fit within systems.

 

And welcome to the system.

It was been flat out confirmed, by RG and DarkStarr, two seperate occassions in the IRC, stealth has some skills, already in the trees they are implementing.

Not saying I agree, just saying that is where they are going.

And plenty (including me) are not loving the diminished role playing available for Stealth/Rogue like characters.

Just not designed for in their current system.

 

Yea, like I said ... I'm not expecting them to change the design. I just was doing a thought experiment and thought this was a neat concept for a skill wheel.

 

Poison should in the rogue skills would not be for crafting, as a lot of people seem to think, but more about applying the poison to things like weapon tips and traps.

 

It would be great to see more Subterfuge / Stealth skills but it looks like an uphill battle at this point.

It's neat how you've designed the sigil with body part for categorization but I'm not sure if it really works. Like under Acuity (Hearing) you have Detect Trap. That seems appropriate, but it's also just as appropriate under the Eye category since you should be able to see traps as well. Similarly, Detect Lie is under the Nose, which can also go under Eye or Ear.

It's probably better to divide these into active/innate and generalized/specialized skills and find where they best fit under the existing skill trees, especially since they already have some Stealth skills scattered throughout those. It would be great to see an entire sigil with 8 new skill trees just for Subterfuge but I really doubt that's going to happen....but you never know.

 

Yea, to accept the way I categorized things you have to more take for granted that people associate certain acumens with certain body parts, and not actually conceptually limit those skills to the body parts. So, like when people say "he has a nose for things," or an "eye for things," it wouldn't necessarily mean that literally; its more about symbolism.

I was thinking another reason they might want to stick to three skill trees is it might fit the formula of 3s and stand in for truth (int), love (dex) and courage (str), where combat is courage, magic is truth, and crafting is love. Crafting would also be associated with dexterity. Plus, playing a real thief with subterfuge skills really wouldn't fit any virtues, they would more fit anti-virtues, falsehood, cowardice, hatred. But I guess we have to see more of the lore of the game to figure out what's happening in that regard.

 

What would a rouge skill wheel look like?

Nothing. Because a rouge stole it!

Hahaha.

 

Here's an alternate version of a rogue's skill wheel, for those so inclined, >:}

 

LOL

 

Okay, here's a thought on this. Forgive me if I'm a little slow on uptake here and with putting this together, but like I've said I've been gone for a while and only recently started reading some of information released by the dev team. So I didn't get into reading Chris' post on the subject until recently.

Chris detailed a "Focus" skill tree, with skills like Instinct, Epiphany, Brainstorm, and so on. These could easily fit into some of the categories on the "Rogue" skill wheel I drew up. And since the announcement of jumping being added to the game, in addition to some of the combat-oriented stealth skills that are on the light armor tree, we'll also probably need out of combat skills like running, jumping, tumbling and so on.

The idea being that instead of a "Focus" skill tree that's disembodied from any skill wheel, it could be rolled into something like this, along with out of combat physical skills -- and some in combat physical skills -- and along with skills like lockpicking and disarming traps, and that could appear very much like the idea I came up with. A pure rogue character would then stick very closely to these fundamentals and be able to be much better at Focus skills than other characters that oriented their character progression around combat or magic.

 

Don't forget snooping and stealing...la


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