Shattered Kingdoms

I don't really understand the level cap on mentoring skills. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense that mentors can only teach up to apprentice skills. I think a more realistic cap would be a two status gap. So GMs could teach master-level skills and spells, given appropriate mastery level of course.

The mentor system is all about encouraging player interaction, right? So why cap that interaction at apprentice? Doesn't make sense.

I guess the idea is to encourage player interaction, but not at the expense of removing interaction with the environment. You do realize that master-level skills and spells are as high as they go, right?

Yes, I do realize that. Is that even a question? That is kind of my point. In order to learn the highest level skills and spells it must be from a GM who has superb+ skills and spells, something that isn't as easy to do as mastering < jman skills and spells, since chance of improve increases based on how much above the level of the skill or spell you are. It encourages continued and long-term interaction with your "mentor" and encourages mentors to do more than "Here, let me get you to jman and then [REDACTED] you, you're on your own." It makes a mentorship something more in-depth, like a true mentorship should be.

Or the mentor can just... point them to the exact same location where they learned those skills, which allows them to interact with the rest of the game. They can even go to said trainers together!

'Kay, I'm just not even including you in this conversation until you make a different point. Others might, but I won't. The whole idea of the mentor system is to increase player interaction. It does this very effectively...right up to jman, at which point it basically disappears and so does any RP associated with mentoring. If it extended to the end of the scale of skills and spells, then it would reflect a true mentor/student relationship, and would encourage more RP. "Interaction with the environment?" Are you kidding? Typing Train is not an interaction with the environment, espcially when it ignores all language barriers otherwise applicable to any and all characters. It's a completely OOC command system that's based solely around getting people the skills they need to play the game IC. Better just to make the system IC, and leave the OOC system for those classes that are infrequently played or not otherwise (read: based on RP) available to characters when they're necessary.

You're taking a feature that was put in to encourage interaction with new players and creating a very slippery slope from it. It takes interaction with the game outside of your mentor teaching you basics in an inn to become a character of note. I don't think that's a bad thing.

Mentoring was put in to give new players an IC benefit for seeking out IC relationships, and to give IC mentors something more than just "hey, go here and train this skill" as a perk. It was not put into place so that new players did not have to ever travel about and explore the different areas of the game. Past the point of apprentice status, any new player will have already gotten used to the idea of exploring new areas for training. Removing the need to travel abroad to learn the advanced skills/spells of your class would detract from the world of SK, not add to it.

I agree that this r dumb idea.

It is likely this way to make players interact with more characters to reap the rewards of mentoring.

I can't believe I'm agreeing with Syn. But there it is.

Yeah, I frankly often feel like I have to break character to explain this nonsense.

I have yet to learn from a PC past very good, and many of these skills and spells have superb teachers and so it would still be good to go visit a NPC. This setup is certainly better than back in the day when there was no PC instruction, but I've always felt this still fell a little short.