This series takes the Developers Journals and gives you all the information in easy to manage parts. No turbos, no superchargers or any whooping v8s. If you want discussion then you are going to have to wait for the Journal Discussed which will hit sometime this week.

Skills to pay the bills, is how the saying goes. But which skills are you going to pick? There are so many different options in Chronicles of Elyria. This Developer Journal focuses on how you can customise and build the character you want to play. You get to decide your role in society and how you are going to go about earning your crust. You can read the full version over at MMORPG.com, then get a recap with the abridged version below.

Character Roles and Skill Advancement

• It is expected that most characters will choose to focus on a small set of specialised skills, as they have a limited life span in which to learn skills.

• Players will be able to choose what skills to focus on that best suit the game play they enjoy and the amount of risk they want to take.

Division of Labour

There are four main broad roles characters will take on Producers, Suppliers, Explorers and Champions.

Producers

• Craft and sell goods, often within the borders of towns and villages.

• Rely on others to bring them the materials they need.

• Examples given were blacksmiths, bakers, alchemists, and tailors.

Suppliers

• Includes gathers and merchants who supply Producers.

• Gathers supply the raw materials, examples given were miners, lumberjacks, and farmers.

• Merchants supply rare or extraordinary materials often travelling long distances to source them.

• Both transport their wares in large wagons accompanied by body guards.

Explorers

• Specialise in survival skills to travel long distances into the wilderness.

• They are treasure hunters, who map and chart the world.

Champions

• Those who focus on combat.

• They protect merchants, they delve into dungeons, they clear the way through the wilderness.

• Examples given were bodyguards, sell-sword, soldiers, and dungeon-delvers.

• The different roles will require different tools and equipment. Examples given were:
  • Blacksmith needing a forge, tools for working with metal, fire proof clothing including gloves and a place to store materials.
  • Merchants and miners will need wagons to carry cargo or heavy loads.

Skills in Chronicles of Elyria

There a six top-level categories of skills which each character can mix and match from. The skill trees are:

Combat

• Focus of those taking a Campion role.

• Relates to the characters ability to fight and use weapons.

• Examples given are unarmed, one-handed weapons, two-handed weapons, thrown, ranged weapons and also tactics such as fighting with two weapons and sneak attacks.

Survival

• Focus of those taking an Explorer role.

• Relates to the characters ability to survive in the wilderness.

• Examples given are finding food and water, tracking prey, bandaging wounds, and navigation.

Crafting

• Focus of those taking a Producer role.

• Relates to the characters ability to produce goods.

• Examples given are crafting food and drinks, armours and weapons, furniture, and jewellery.

Gathering

• Focus of those taking a Supplier role.

• Relates to the characters ability to gather and process raw materials.

• Examples given are identifying and handling plant, animal by-products, metals and gems.

Deviant

• Adds a darker edge to any of the roles.

• Relates to the characters ability to carry out less socially acceptable skills.

• Examples given are pickpocketing, purse cutting, crafting false identities, and forging documents.

Bardic

• Adds discovery and learning to any of the roles.

• Relates to characters ability to carry out academic or performance based skills.

• Examples given are performing music, reading ancient languages, performing forensic analysis, or creating finely detailed maps.

Skill Hierarchy

Beneath those top-level categories there are two layers of parent skills, or secondary and tertiary skills.

Example given was for the combat tree:

• Within Combat there are the secondary skills Melee, Ranged, Thrown, Defensive, and Tactics.

• Within Melee are the tertiary skills Brawling, One-Handed and Two-Handed.

• Within One-Handed are Axes, Swords, Rapiers, Maces and Daggers

Anything you learn within a parent skill will contribute, in a small way, to all other skills under that parent, i.e.  using daggers gives a slight boost to all other one handed weapons.

Skill Advancement

• Advancing your skill is done by trying things you might fail. If you know how to do something 100% it will not cause any improvement to your skill.

Skill Tiers

• There are nine tiers of mastery in each skill.

• Each tier shows increased proficiency, it becomes harder to raise your skill between tiers so each tier will have fewer members of the population will reaching them.
  • Starts at Novice which covers the first 29% of your skill, and obtainable by 100 percent of people.
  • Apprentice, Journeyman, Expert, Artisan, Renowned, Master and Grandmaster each cover an additional 10% mastery, up to 99%. They will be known by between 70% and 10% of the population respectively, with 10% between each tier.
  • The final tier is Legendary this 100% mastery and likely to be known by only 1% of the population.

• The percentage of population achieving a skill is monitored by the Soulborn Engine which can slow down progress in a particular skill across a server if it appears people are levelling too quickly to keep the above distributions.

• It is likely to take at least one lifetime to become a Master, multiple to be a Grandmaster and even more to be Legendary.

Minimum Skill

If you have 0% skill you will fail! To attempt a skill for the first time you have to receive some training.

Training can be received from:

Books

• In most cases these give enough training to start using a skill.

• If you read enough you might reach Apprentice.

• You can gain skill beyond that but it requires rare texts to do so.

Teaching

• If you have the scholarship skill you can teach others skills you know.

• This normally requires both players online. However, if the teacher is highly skilled they can teach as an OPC.

• Teaching require sufficient skills in both what you are teaching and in Scholarship.

• Teachers will gain a small amount of skill in the topic while teaching.

Observation.

• If you have above 0% observing another person perform a skill can increase yours.

• Your skills will not increase above apprentice this way.

Practice

• Once you are are above 0% you can carry out your skill on practice equipment.

• Practice tools can only take you to the Journeyman skill.

• Practice crafting does not use materials to learn, you are spending time not money to boost your skills this way.

• Combat skills can also be practised on practice dummies.

Well that was a lot of ground to get through, and the exciting bit is that is only part one of the journal on skills, we can look forward to another part pretty soon! I am most interested in the idea of actually be taught a skill. How will that work? Will it be as social as it sounds forcing people to actually communicate to learn? Will we be visiting a Grandmaster in his Dojo? Also the amount of versatility. There are just so many different options to suit all play styles. I am designing a hundred and one characters in my head now. Do I play the explorer that has a musical side? The merchant that is actually a bit of a deviant? What about the gatherer that has some survival skills to go out exploring to identify new sources of raw materials? Options, options, options!