Subject: Experience and Education Date: 17 Feb 2002 13:04:56 GMT From: Philip Swartzleonard Organization: Ruby Dragon Outpost o_o Newsgroups: rec.games.roguelike.development ---[Sun 17 Feb 2002 ( 4:02a)] Experience and Education It's a late night, and i felt i should write something before i go to bed and lose this sanguine mood. In real life, there tends to be two discrete ways of learning something. There is the understanding gained through direct practice, execution, and raw effort, and there is the knowledge gained through reading, teaching, thinking, and being a person of your field. For some fields, such as kenjutsu, fencing, plowing, and dancing, the greater measure of how good you are is your practical experience and training; you just need a little knowledge of the form to get started, and then you practice, practice, practice. Occasionally, you will gain insights, or learn new details, but it is your blood and sweat that will allow you to actually understand and use this theory. In other fields, like math, engineering, physics, and so on, and nearly completely based on knowledge and learning. Of course, you will need some training in pushing variables around on a piece of paper, but the core ideas are understanding, thinking, and communicating; and how fast you can solve a seventh degree polynomial or fifth dimensional partial derivatives (or if you even can without looking up how ;) doesn't matter all that much. And in yet other fields, like magic (sometimes), programming, architecture, and tinkering (guessing here), the levels are about even. Understanding how spells work is important, but you also have to be able to fling your fingers around just right to get them to actually zap; and in programming you often have to understand a structure in order to use it, and use it in order to understand it =). And this is how i want my system to work. Each skill will have two parts, experience and knowledge (perhaps better names will avail themselves...), and a percentage factor that determines how balanced these are in affecting the effect of the skill. Experience is gained in most of the standard ways that one is used to raising skill levels. Knowledge is different. You gain this in many ways. The most obvious are books, trainers, and schools. But it is also accumulated over time, consciously and unconsciously. We tend to spend some time each day thinking about things that we have done lately, things that we like, things that trouble us. (For example, I've been thinking about recursive shadowcasting for a week or two now, and i think I've gotten a few ideas just from this =). Even when we are not taking boring trips and lectures, we tend to have a subconscious process working on what it thinks we think is important :). Which leads me to something i just thought of right now, 'being'. We tend to label ourselves, 'i am a programmer', 'i am a writer', 'i am a teacher', 'i am a fencer'. When we do this, i think, we tend to devote some part of our mind to being and becoming this. Would it not be better to declare 'from here, i am a fencer', and learn your craft, become great, than to decide 'i am a fencer' and be immediately shaped by this? And finally, the two are not so separate. A series of particularly good hits can lead to a sudden increase in knowledge as you see the world more clearly, and a sudden increase in knowledge (from examining a book) would lead to experiment that fruitful lay increases experience. Perhaps a second set of variables, the rate of change or stagnation, will be needed as well. There is a reason behind all of this abstract thought. The system i envision will involve developing a character over a span of years, perhaps nothing more than a common person, exploring his world between classes and work and bed. Or a merchant, tending shop and seeking out the innovations of neighboring lands on the weekends. Modeling time reasonably becomes a major issue here, not only because of the scheduling but because it is to be expected that things take reasonable amounts of time (e.g. no eating six times a day to live and taking minutes to walk what should take seconds... e.g. turns must be precluded by specific real-time values). But i digress, the important thing here is that modeling the development of a character over such a significant period seems to require a more complex method. There is more i should say, but it has been nearly an hour since i started this and my mind fails here. "... for man knows, nothing will happen, unless he moves; and nothing can begin, unless he speaks." -- Philip Sw "Starweaver" [rasx] :: www.rubydragon.com