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I've always disliked that character advancement is tied to level advancement.  I believe a characters skills and abilities should be advanced separately.  

There are a few things that can be done along this line in NWN and I'd like to propose starting with skill advancement.  I believe it is better to give a player the choice of using their earned experience to advance their skills instead of advancing their level.

This could be accomplished through a trainer that you visit instead of leveling up.  Caps per level would be in place so you could not advance your skill beyond a certain point without advancing your level first.

What do you think?

very good idea for some of the skills. the ones that wouldnt be good for is bluff and intemadate. but that such could be done as a person does so many quests there apprise gets a boost

i agree totally.  some skills should be able to be improved upon without leveling up, but not exceeding the level max, either by visiting a trainer or just constantly using the ability.  you know, something along the lines of 'practice, practice, practice...'  this could also be interesting for cross class skills, for example, a fighter who wants to pick locks, would have to take rogue (or whatever) first, and then lvl up his pick locks, but it would make more sense (as i see it) for him to take pick locks first, decide he really likes this, and maybe advance as a rogue.  i dont know how it would work, but the crafting system works pretty well this way, and i dont know if anyone played uo, so i'll stop here

Must say I like this idea :D , the more you use certain skills the better you should become at them. If you never level up your skills will never advance although you mayspend forever using and training on them.

So I'll work on this after I finish the rest of the map.  I would love to do this with weapons as well.  I think its ridiculous that you can't even "hold" a katana without the feat but as soon as you have the feat you are now an expert.

Absolutly, I am even for advancing the stats this way ... but I have been told it would through the balance of the game off as this cannot be done in D&D. I would like to have it an extreme amount and perhaps use the DB to track the XP that you have put towards advancing a stat so that it takes a long while to add +1 to strength, but if you save up for it why not. Is this 2 much, or will this work as well?

well about lvling pick lock to be a rouge.. that is something of another topic but i dont think we should restrict feats beyond biowares hardcoded skills

We aren't restricting feats, although one of us should learn to write 2da files and increase the number of available feats!

I just think you should be able to "practice" your skills and get better at them as you increase levels.  The method I favor is forcing a player to use their experience they have earned to buy the skill points, if they so choose.  It will slow down leveling while giving a player extra goals to work for, and it doesn't require a ton of scripting on my part and that is always great in my opinion.

lol ...

Don't know if you'll remember a game called "Darklands", written by Microprose in the early 90's I believe. The system used in that was, the more you used a skill the better it became, so skills that were never used, never advanced.
There was also no limitation on what you could use as there is in the DnD game. If you didn't have the skill to use a specific Item or feat, the game didn't stop you using it, you just done it very badly.
The basic principle goes along the lines of what your hoping to achieve, just thought I'd mention it to give you some extra "review material" for considering how you will implement this.  :wink: Good Luck & I look forward to reading your progress

I am still mixed on how to go about this ... to do the more you use it, we are probably going to have to do an override on the way NWN does things. I like the idea of a trainer that will cost you XP to advance a skill, feat, or stat. This is easier to implement. It also allows to provide a cost system for doing such things. I want to get where if you use a longsword over time you will get better at hitting a target. If you like hiding or picking locks the more you do it the more skilled you are at it. Thanks for the feed back.

Morrowind uses a similar system where every thing you can do is a skill from a school of magic to using a longsword, and the more you use it the better you become.

I really don't think doing this with weapons is going to be feasible, as much as I would love to see it.  As for skills, I would prefer to use a trainer and a system where players use their XP to further advance their skills instead of leveling.  We could use sql to keep track of when a player uses a skill and then use the accumulating values to advance a players skill but it would require a great deal of scripting, which I'm against on principle alone!

well what if they gave a certain amount of xp to get training pt.s and then from there usde them how they wish that way its alittle eaiser for the player to keep track (or they pay in gold for training) hence they are paying for the training

i really prefer to keep the currency in skill advancement as XP and not gold ... The points thing .. sounds ok to me ... seems like an extra step though ...

I think that we would remove a certain amount of XP from the player for a certain amount of skill gain the player would choose.  This would allow you to advance only skills you are really interested in at the expense of XP only when you are willing to loose it.