Why do tertiary skillsets exist today?

I've been away for a long time, and recently returned. I have been thinking about larger game design afresh, trying to look in from the outside despite having prior experiences. Needless to say, I've been wondering about this one.

The biggest thing I see tertiary skillsets doing to most players of most guilds is creating a need to fly around to 2-3 locations for hunting, finding ways to overhunt and underhunt, and creating a larger need for more and more hunting areas across the five provinces from designers and developers. More hunting areas is great and I'm not saying that should not be a constant improvement objective, but what I do wonder at is if some part of that need is derived from a larger design that is at least partially flawed.

I am going to say that the solo grind is the name of the game, and that it would require, in my mind, monumental effort to change. So the designer in me would ask if there are other, smaller changes that can align with making the grind less grind and the solo less solo.

To prove the "name of the game", I would posit that the only viable economical path across all player levels, and deeply incentivized by large systems, is hunting. Crafting is not there, especially at lower and possibly even mid circles. To further underscore from an angle different from economics, the given experience differential with hunting in terms of number of skills trained can be looked at. I don't have enough practical experience with Traders to know, but I am betting that hunting is superior overall. If not, that only impacts one guild, so is less relevant to large systems design anyway. As I have alluded, trying to fix large things like economics and experience or skills-at-once, is to be avoided if there are alternate, shorter paths to a design resulting in meeting design maxims such as "fun" and "less tedium" and "how did this game make you feel at the end of the last play session" and such.

I don't feel proving "monumental effort to change" the hunting/economy/experience trifecta is required.

Back to tertiary skillsets. The current solo grind, in particular the tertiary grind, is not all that fun unless "spreadsheet simulator" appeals to you. What we have across the board mostly is a number of bots playing the game for us and watching experience and wealth numbers tick up. How does that player experience feel at the end of a session across all player playstyles? The only thing that truly makes for a dopamine hit is seemingly TDP gain due to a) clown suits, b) weapon wagons, and c) having a ton of skills trainable during hunting, and loot accumulation. Both systems which reinforce the solo nature of this endeavor, by the way.

Perhaps those numbers ticking up is a part of the experience, which suits our game type, but it is likely disproportionate to other types of game play and requires disproportionately a lot from us. Especially when it comes to tertiary skillsets, where we are grinding something so that we can grind the fun thing that we want in an at-level scenario.

But there is no fix with hunting overall that is quick; this is simply me establishing the accepted status quo.

The only things I can think of for tertiary skillsets existing in the zeitgeist of DragonRealms player and GM minds as a good design, taking a look at it from the outside (or trying to despite prior experiences), are character individuality and very weak endgame content. Lets ignore the latter as I'm sure that's not the intention. And even if it was, grinding terts is not endgame exclusive, so I would say that point would not be entirely valid anyway.

Do tertiary skillsets really create significantly more character individuality beyond that created by primary skillset differences coupled with guild abilities? Seemingly not to me. This is especially not so given the necessary tertiary grind most endure to train the thing they want to train at-level or enable guild abilities to be fun and useful due to their reliance on a tertiary skillset. In other words, at the end of the day the tertiary skillset is painstakingly ground out anyways, so any individuality created by the system seems mostly mythical.

To say it most plainly, what I see again and again is that folks have to grind out tertiary skills in order to, at some other time and presumably some other play session, have fun in one of two other ways which all depend on the tertiary skills. First, in order to survive in a hunting ground where they can train a primary skill that is fun for them. Second, to make certain guild abilities viable which rely on tertiary skillset skills. The first instance seems more common, but the end result either way is a tedium cost for fun play experiences. This seems to be the current "design in motion" (that is to say, the practical playing out of the design, without including any design plans for large overhauls that may never occur or take very long to occur).

So what design maxim or "mission statement" design bullet point do tertiary skillsets align with? Or is it out of alignment? It must be one or the other. Does it promote less tedium, a feeling of excitement and satisfaction at the end of a play session, a 'cool' factor, balance, character individuality, or some other maxim (with an emphasis on the first two in this list)? I only assume, as I don't know what an actual design maxim "mission statement" list is, if one exists, but those are pretty common and universally valuable. If out of alignment with whatever does exist for current designers, is there a mere status quo keeping embracing change at bay?

I'm aware that, if tertiary was gone, one would still have dissonance between secondary and primary skillets. This is obvious, but the divide would be quite a bit smaller and far less tedious in my mind. If, to your thinking, the issues mentioned herein would remain, I would ask what resolution you would seek for players across the board (not just yourself)? Would it be secondary skillset rates across the board for guilded players? And would that be terribly bad anyways? Slower circling with greater well-roundedness, and individuality existing as a matter of guild abilities alone? With a micro transaction possibility for consumables granting temporary hours of a primary skillset rate to a given skillset? Wild!

Caveat: I never had the HLC nor, then, End Game experience, not before and definitely not now, after choosing to start anew from scratch. It's very plausible there's something here I don't see related to HLC or End Game. There's also a chance I've just missed something in general. ;)

Just a thought! Possibly a late night, drunken, silly one. :D

I'm well aware of rexp, offline drain, and wall rank removal. I think they are wonderful things. But they don't remove what is also a regular rat race grind to be able to do the thing that is actually fun that you want to do, though it's certainly improved over previous years. It still seems an imperfect design to me.

Tertiary as a description of what abilities exist and who gets what I suppose makes sense conceptually outside of the exp rat race grind. Although I'm not sure given the supernatural skillset relative to magic terts with plenty of such guild abilities. Khri, dance. I suppose it's more about what those abilities help with, more than what skillset is involved, then. So not a perfect case but a point well taken.

Also, I did start fresh.

> Might have been missed in the original post, but what is the fun thing that folks want to do that the rat race grind (particularly of tertiary skills) is getting in the way of?

I mean, let's say you are caster, with at least armor tert. The fun thing you want to do - magic in combat - and get any experience for it - means that you need to an unfun grind to do a fun thing (for you).

Let's say you have a fun combat ability/spell but are super/magic tert. To be successful, you will actually need to hunt otherwise weak things, and can't actually use the ability effectively against a foe at-level doing the rest of the fun (to you) things you normally do.

I'll admit I don't have the experience of playing every guild to a moderate level, but between myself and what I observe, there's a strong acceptance of do unfun thing to enable me to do fun thing, and in general that is bad design I think, no matter how long folks have been used to it.

But my original ask is, what purpose does tert rate serve ultimately, if any, given these consequences, and is it aligned with current design objectives? An open question, really. I do think we are trying to solve with large skill rank ranges in higher level monsters, but not so much low and mid, along with more monsters in general "nearby". Although that is attempting to address symptoms over root causes... welcome but not part of the question.

I like your point with more change-of-pace across the mid and high game when it comes to monsters, but I do think that changing nothing else but skill ranges of monsters would result in - even if we had the amount of monster types to do it - you hunting in more locations, similar to what lower players often have to do to train primary/secondary and tertiary stuffs. It often happens less from my observation at high levels because of vast skill ranges of some monsters in the hundreds of ranks category. We as a practice-to-learn experience system rather than a simpler one coupled with three tiers of learning rates result in all kinds of issues relative to pacing of fun in general I think. You could try to rewrite the whole damn thing, but I think the biggest tedium is tert rate to be allowed to - by the system - train other things you may wish to. It seems to be that collapsing the skill range of higher level monsters would be helpful for your issue, but you would need a lot more monster availability to do that, in which case you would feel my issue more.

Hopefully that made sense. It's late again. ;)

Rhadyn,

Thank you for your thoughtful response!

I was going to respond with some more insights, but honestly this is such a larger conversations that gets to the root of the game's current state as it relates to many subsystems.

Anyway, thanks.