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When is a character too skilled? - Printable Version

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When is a character too skilled? - Leggerless - 09-03-2015

Remember to have a clean discussion, follow rules, etc. etc. I'm just a poster, not a mod.

Here's the question I'm going to ask:

How many areas can a person be skilled in before they are considered "skilled in too many areas?"

Have at thee, RPC!

RE: When is a character too skilled? - Oli! - 09-03-2015

(09-03-2015, 02:48 PM)Leggerless Wrote: Remember to have a clean discussion, follow rules, etc. etc. I'm just a poster, not a mod.

Here's the question I'm going to ask:

How many areas can a person be skilled in before they are considered "skilled in too many areas?"

Have at thee, RPC!


Subjective.

You can be infinitely skilled if you want. Most people won't like it though.

Having more than one field of expertise is too skilled for some people.

Not to mention that it's more than just "areas," if you're literally the Best Bard Ever, are you too skilled even if you trip and fumble and fall on your own sword in every other category ever?

Depends on who you ask.

There's also the concept of Skill vs. Age. Is it more plausible to be the Best Arcanist in the Whole Wide World at the ripe old age of 89, or the tiny babby age of 13? Who knows. You'll get plenty of varying opinions on all of this though.

The can of worms has been OPENED.

RE: When is a character too skilled? - Cato - 09-03-2015

I'd say it's when there's no real room for another character to shine. Role-play is a group effort, so if one character can do everything or most things with minimal effort then it leads to stagnation. I consider the creation of a character who lacks any real or meaningful flaws to be incredibly selfish though, so I'm admittedly biased.

RE: When is a character too skilled? - Lydia Lightfoot - 09-03-2015

I don't think a metric can really be placed on it - in the real world, a person's potential for knowledge is affected by so many factors. Even outside of the basic physical limits that vary person to person, there's things like whether or not their environment was one which fostered learning or didn't, whether the elders and peers around them were constructive toward growth or not, and so on... as well as other personality factors such as ambition, critical thinking, attention to detail, and so on, which would serve to benefit or hinder the expansion of knowledge.

RE: When is a character too skilled? - Blue - 09-03-2015

To me it all comes with IC age and IC experience.

A 23yo mage who has been practicing since she was 15 (8 years) should not claim to be more skilled than a 56yo wizard who has been practicing magic since he was 20 (36 years). Sure, she started earlier than him and maybe that is a sign of talent, but he still has over x4 her experience, and thus, to me, should be more skilled than her.

With physical skills it's a bit more technical, since unlike magic, physique matters, and such while you grow more experienced with age, you also grow weaker. A middle-aged warrior who has been practicing since his twenties should rightfully be more skilled than the young one who just grabbed a sword and the old war veteran who could be his dad (though the war veteran would know more tricks, maybe some that could let him win despite his old age). As I said, more technical.

My general rule of thumb is that you shouldn't claim to be young and yet a MASTER at well... anything. Mastering comes with experience. Ane experience requires age. Sorry, but young-super skilled works only in anime.

RE: When is a character too skilled? - Oli! - 09-03-2015

(09-03-2015, 02:57 PM)Blue Wrote: With physical skills it's a bit more technical, since unlike magic, physique matters, and such  while you grow more experienced with age, you also grow weaker. A middle-aged warrior who has been practicing since his twenties should rightfully be more skilled than the young one who just grabbed a sword and the old war veteran who could be his dad (though the war veteran would know more tricks, maybe some that could let him win despite his old age). As I said, more technical.


Unless you're the Old Kung-Fu Master.

Aether Builds Strong Bones or something.

RE: When is a character too skilled? - Warren Castille - 09-03-2015

Overlapping skilltrees make a lot of sense to me. Someone who excels as the sneaky stuff can reliably make an excuse for infiltration, assassination, general spycraft and the like. It would be arguable that they could have a degree of magical ability to be able to aid them in that regard: Eavesdropping sorts of stuff, or glamour kits, or whatever.

It always makes me cock my head when someone's a master fighter and also a powerful mage and also super good at being undetected, but my biases come from tabletop settings where you're not really able to do everything on your sheet effortlessly, at least not until you're long established. That's a challenging concept to establish in an MMO, though - Random Walk Up doesn't know if you've been RPing a long, grudging storyline since the 1.0 beta or just a newcomer claiming you've got a rich history.

I suppose I'd consider someone "too skilled" when they have a defined archetype as a concept, and then also a half-dozen other things that are completely unrelated that they're also great at.

RE: When is a character too skilled? - Gegenji - 09-03-2015

I have a few personal beliefs on how many skills someone can have and how skilled they can be on them.

First and foremost, I have an easier time thinking someone could be skilled in multiple combat abilities if there is a straight correlation between them. For example: Arcanima, Scholarly magic, and Allagan Summoning all use the same mathemagical baseline (delineated from Summoning, if I recall), so I can see someone being skilled in all of these with little issue because they're using the same baseline. It's all "good at Math" in the simplest terms.

Dark Knight and Warrior fall under this sort of thing too - not only are both about swinging big two-handed weapons, but they also delve into tapping into an inner power that needs to be tempered and controlled. And I'm sure the bow skills of an Archer/Bard can correlate decently well to a Mechanist in leading shots and aiming for weak points at a distance.

It's when the skill sets start moving apart is when I feel degradation will start to take place. And how many degrees removed also aids to that, in my mind. Someone used to a sword and shield might have a few skills that transliterate to using two daggers, but you'd figure they'd need a bit of practice (and often have to mentally shift) from having something big and bulky to block that incoming strike. And keeping up on your Monk training while also delving into unlocking a forbidden/lost art like Black or White magic would also likely leave little time for anything else.

And then, as you add more, I just start to wonder how they have time to actually socialize if they want to maintain "mastery" in all these things. If you're a Paladin, Dragoon, Scholar, and Dark Knight, I would expect there to be some give in that skill set - some of the skills being better than the others due to active practice - that I can jokingly compare to the degradation of spell damage for Flare and Holy. In fact, I'll quickly make up some arbitrary pseudo-skill percentages for my own personal amusement.

Focusing solely on one thing: 100% skill.
Study of two closely related skill sets: 95%(95%)
Study of two vaguely related skill sets (singular focus): 90%(70%)
Study of two vaguely related skill sets (equal focus): 80%(80%)
Study of two unrelated skill sets (singular focus): 85%(65%)
Study of two unrelated skill sets (equal focus): 70%(70%)
Study of three skills (all related): 85%(80%)[75%]
Study of three skills (two related, one non): 80%(70%)[40%]
Study of three skills (all unrelated): 75%(50%)[25%]

All of these numbers are completely and arbitrarily made up, of course. The idea is that taking on another skill hinders the "skill level" of the rest. Having correlation reduces that, while not having correlation increases it. And, overall, the ones who specialize more will - in the end - be more skillful in comparison because of it. Even if someone studies both the related fields of Scholarly magic and Summoning, their skill will ultimately be less than someone who focused solely on one or the other.

And all of this is using a baseline of the same type of person of the same age having spent the same amount of time divided over however many skills they claim to have. Adding in differences in age, bloodline, history, outside assistance... that makes the whole thing a cluster.

I'm... sure I had a point in there somewhere, but I think I lost it in favor of throwing out random percentages. Blush

RE: When is a character too skilled? - Ignacius - 09-03-2015

It depends.  It depends on the role you're playing, mostly.  Orleans has a pretty wide range of skills he's very skilled in, but he is something of a criminal kingpin.  People look up to him for former work he's put in, so he has a broad range of skills related to smuggling, combat, etc.  Because of his leadership position, it makes a lot of sense.

By that same token, you can't be infinitely skilled.  Orleans came up as a street-level crew chief (specializing in breaking-and-entering on installations while living in Garlean territory), then became an enforcer, but he has never, for example, produced drugs.  He is familiar with and skilled with firearms, but isn't a master sniper.  He certainly isn't an expert calligrapher, nor is he a master fisherman.  Orleans might be able to get his hands on a lot of what might be Garlean goods, he can steal and pirate very well, he's an exceptionally effective bruiser, but he isn't a whole gang unto himself.  That's why he has people with different experiences along with him.  That's so that the other Dancers can have their room to shine.  Orleans may be skilled, but as an RP character, he functions as a facilitator.

And that's an important distinction.  The more skilled a character is, the more you really need that character to move into the role of a facilitator.  That means that your character becomes a person that keeps other characters busy.  If you're playing a highly skilled character in several areas, but you intend to play that character as an actuator, people will be shut out, rather than empowered, RPing with you.

So watch how highly skilled you are.  You cannot be so highly skilled that there's no roles to fill around you.  The entire point of RP is interpersonal communication.  If you can do just about anything, you are basically making sure you have less need for other characters.  That intrinsically harms your RP.

RE: When is a character too skilled? - Flickering Ember - 09-03-2015

One of my pet peeves in RP forum discussions is the weird idea that it is realistic for characters to not be able to specialize in more than one skill/combat style. This is not balanced for sure, but if we are going for realism multiple advanced skills makes perfect sense. The whole 'jack of all trades' thing is coming from a very video game-y/min max point of view.

Here is the brutal honest part in reality. For some people 'what they are best at' is merely average for many other people. Some people are barely capable of pushing a single mediocre skill, some have talents in skills that aren't really useful, others are only really skilled in whatever their job skill set is, others are talented in multiple other areas, and still more are incredibly talented. "Life is not fair" should probably be a phrase that needs some more emphasis in the modern world. It's not. It's absolutely brutal. 

Real life does not have a perfect spread of point allocation like in an RPG. Some people are born very lucky and others get a raw deal. This is a bit of a downer post but I will say, what's truly important is that you live the life you want, which often means being happy. There are multiple roads to get there. 


To answer this question you have to ask what RP style you prefer. Do you prefer realism? Do you prefer well-balanced characters?

If you're going for realism on this consider that talent also comes with time. Artists may have a creative disposition but they didn't get to where they are by not sinking time practicing their artwork. To be talented in many things, depending on what it is, requires time investment. If you're RPing a character who spends every night at the Quicksand then it doesn't seem that plausible to me. If your character is young (pre-30/40's) then it is also increasingly unbelievable the younger your character is. Prodigies are a thing but they're a bit rare and overdone as well.

My overall opinion is that while I do enjoy and need a healthy dosage of realism in RP, it isn't always fun to be realistic. I think it is more fun to limit how much your character is skilled at, that way your character isn't constantly hogging the spotlight.

RE: When is a character too skilled? - Amelia - 09-03-2015

I tend to go with the phrase: "Jack of all trades, master of none".

As Wikipedia puts it, the phrase "is a figure of speech used in reference to a person that is competent with many skills, but spends too much time learning each new skill that he/she can not become a master in any particular one."

Realistically, a normal person can have more than one skill. They can also be exceptional at more than one skill. Such as a painter who also has the voice of an angel.

But you usually cannot be a master of everything, let alone more than a couple things, unless you've lived a lengthy life that would have the time to master more than a few arts.

So using someone else's example; if your character is 16 years old and taking up several different skills, where would they have the time to master any of them, compared to someone in their 40's or 50's or even 60's?

RE: When is a character too skilled? - Dis - 09-03-2015

I play a super skilled character.  She's got a super long list of skills, but only one of them consistently maintained as mastery.  She also has a unique condition that contributes to her being able to learn anything quickly, but that again, doesn't provide her mastery.  She spends most of her time with her crafts, and with researching and trying to expand her skillset.  If I had to knock off all of her other skills, however, I'd probably give her 1.0 Conjury (dem elemental spells, yo'), and Monk (which I need to level on her), on the combat side of things.  On the crafting side of things, Cooking and Alchemy, or alchemical cooking, as she rather enjoys. 

Everything else is fluff to give her a kind of in to talk to others about, or as a general skillset that she's started picking up since I began playing with her a little over a year ago, because of IC things that have happened, people she's come into conflict with, or just in general because she's a 'I want to learn everything' type of person.  Typically, if she focuses too much on one area, she starts to slip in other areas, with the exception of healing, because she spent too many years in conjury to have that slide away from her, even if she doesn't heal someone every day. 

I think that, like was said earlier, when your character becomes the central focus of an RP and leaves absolutely no room for others to positively contribute, then, your character has become too skilled.  It's all about checks and balances, just like anything else is.

RE: When is a character too skilled? - Warren Castille - 09-03-2015

I think there's something to be said for someone's given potential in a field without ever actually realizing said potential. Someone who was raised on the streets as a tough in Limsa, who never got to partake in formal education or do more than subsist in the underbelly, might actually have a huge spark of personal aether that could have gone a long way in Ul'dah, or under the tutelage of a mage. This hypothetical ghetto kid might have grown up into an honest-to-Twelve axe-swinging Marauder to End All Marauders before getting out to experience the world outside. There, it might be possible for him to "play catch up" to his inner talents, but that would likely come as a result of doubling-down on learning how to do what might have come naturally.

In effect, you could end up with a badass axe guy who is also capable of fireballs. It'd work, and be pretty interesting I think, but at the end of the day Joe Random is going to see "Super tough axe man who can also throw Flare" with all of the negative power-playing implications that come as a result of that.

RE: When is a character too skilled? - Spethah - 09-03-2015

I like the use of the phrase "Jack of all trades, master of none" but no one cites the full darn thing! It's actually quite important!

"Jack of all trades, master of none, certainly better than a master of one."


It's better to have lots of skills at a good to great level, than just have one skilled mastered. My old music teacher taught me that when I was only focused on singing (due to voice acting training) when I actually have a talent for being able to pick up any kind of instrument. It's better to learn more than one to fit the occasion than just learn one, perfect it and only be able to partake in certain things.


But where does "too skilled" hit? That depends on the person, the age and the limitations that person would have physically and mentally. A thirteen year old shouldn't be able to have a load of skills that are at a great or adept level, but there are a lot of thirteen year olds out there that have mastered one particular thing. Someone in their thirties can be much more skilled due to experience and time and perhaps mastered one particular thing on top. An even older person might be able to master two things, but be weaker at others. The physical and mental limitations come in based on their attributes. Someone not entirely fit shouldn't be able to be skilled a multiple sport or martial arts, someone who's has difficulty processing information in their head shouldn't be able to be skilled at multiple mental skills or magic. Note the multiple, they can probably handle one or two, but not a lot. Even the environment they are in is a factor. So many factors.


tl;dr: There's no exact answer, it should be based on numerous factors in that person's life and the person in question. It cannot be a fixed number, but for a writer perhaps setting on based on those factors is a good idea. 


That said though, it's better to have multiple skills and a great level than be a master of just one. 

RE: When is a character too skilled? - Corelyn - 09-03-2015

In my opinion, there are a lot of factors that can come into play here.

Skill Similarity:
How similar are these skills? For example, a warrior and a dark knight may find far more ease in switching between one another's skill sets, both using similar weapons.
On the other hand, a paladin may have trouble balancing both her martial arts and, for example, summoning, the two being absolutely nothing alike.

Combination and Cross-Class Skills:
Especially in FFXIV, we have a system of "cross-class skills," essentially allowing us to borrow skills and styles from other classes. The way this would, in the most extreme sense, translate to RP that essentially hybridizes a person's chosen class or skill set. However, this can both detract from and support the individual as a whole, because while they may focus on one "hybrid" skill set, they may neglect elements from the primary. A gladiator who shares skills with a rogue, for example, might wield a longsword in one hand and a dagger in the other. Similarly, a machinist that wields a gunblade, fighting in both close and mid-to-long range. Both examples will have places in which they excel greatly, but others in which they may fall short because of neglect from the non-shared aspects of combined skill sets.

Physical vs. Intellectual:
Is the character an Adonis? An Einstein? Or a combination of both? A character may train themselves to be the pinnacle of physical perfection and skill, yet that leaves little time to pursue the magical or intellectual arts. Similarly, a character who spends all their time immersed in books, magic, and the like may not be the best physical fighter in the world.

Age:
Age provides a very interesting bell curve to this equation. As a character ages, they gain invaluable experience and knowledge of their chosen skills and abilities. With time, a young person can become not only wiser but stronger. However, at the peak of this bell curve, there is little room for further improvement through age alone, as most (though not all, admittedly) people decline as age goes on, in mind, body, or both.

Nature vs. Nurture:
Are these skills they were trained in explicitly? Or do have they mastered a style all their own? This can add into age, as well, as either can take more time or be more difficult.

The Skill of Skill:
Just how skilled is this person at learned their skills? Often referred to, especially in interviews as being a "quick learner," this means a character can understand, grasp, advance, and master said skills.

Time Investment:
How much does this character keep up on each skill? Do they even have the time? While this could tie in with "The Skill of Skill," which can make some characters able to pick up and drop certain styles, skills, and other things as though they are second nature, this is a rare ability, and the more skills to which one tries to apply this ability, the more rare and unreliable it can become. This stands to reason that if a character who, for example, does not spend all his time fighting, but attempts to be a fighter proficient in as many of the physical disciplines as he can, he will begin to grow "rusty" over time.

Spotlight Syndrome:
An important question to ask is why does this character have so many skills? Many people try to make their character as multi-faceted as possible, but this can oftentimes detract from others' enjoyment, making their roles feel threatened by a character perceived as potentially omnipotent in their range of skills. This can lead to all kinds of resentment, misunderstandings, and the like.

Suspension of Disbelief and Group Mentality:
This is purely subjective. Some people like to apply this factor, and some do not. Realism in my vidja gaymez? HOW DARE YOU! However, many people like to use this as a "balancing" factor to make sure that everyone involved can have fun and contribute, preventing Spotlight Syndrome. This level of "realism" that people desire, and often, use as a point of judgement for others (fearing godmode, powerplaying, or the like out of inexperienced, naive, or simply just "bad" roleplayers) can vary wildly between one person and the next. It is for this reason that it is important to know your audience, as well as your peers in any given situation. While no one likes to subscribe to another's system of belief, it's always best, especially in these events, to find a happy medium and go with that. If you need to tone down or buff up your character so everyone can have a good time, even for a single RP scene, then don't be afraid to do so.

tl;dr, there are so many factors that can go into learning, practising, and mastering multiple skill sets that it's really a far more complicated question than "how much" or "why". Many of these principles are situational, so the most important factor is to be ready to adapt to others, ready to communicate where everyone's boundaries will fall and how to compromise and negotiate them, and how to judge what best suits your character, both realistically and logically from many different angles.