Master / Apprentice- Training other players.

[Hark]

I know the plan for the game is to have training be conducted in Settlements, and to serve as a control for low rep players by limiting advanced training to advanced settlements. I find this quite unsatisfying as there is a lot of meaningful player interaction to be gained through players taking on students and training them themselves.

Since it is fairly easy to imagine how one might do players training players I'll focus on the major pitfall of it and how to address it. The obvious abuse of players training players is that it allows for easy advanced training to low rep characters. As I see it this is also an easy problem to deal with. One can simply link the reputation of the master it his students. If the students do something that lowers their reputation the Master also suffers a reputation hit. If the students do something to raise their reputation the Master may gain a much smaller reputation increase. Reputation changes could be scaled with how much the master has taught a given student. The master would need to be informed of the cause of the reputation changes. If the master finds that he has a problem student that causes serious reputation loss he can abandon the student at the cost of a major reputation hit. If the master decides to forgive a student and take them back they can take another reputation hit to accept the student and train them again.

This link to reputation would in particular benefit the Monk class as it basically encourages players to take members of their own companies and students basically allowing the players to form their own martial arts schools. It also mirrors the way 'honor' plays out in a martial arts school where the actions of a student may disgrace their teacher or reflect well on the master and the school.

The reputation link I think would also encourage players to stick with a single master forming a more solid Master/Apprentice relationship which is generally good. And caps on number of students would probably form interesting training lineages where a player might track the history of their training back to some great master.

If you want to encourage Genre conventions you could also link advancement in high end abilities to number of students and how advanced you have trained those students. This works particularly well for monks and wizards which both have strong associations with the Master/Apprentice relationship. Craftsmen also have this kind of relationship, and would work very well if there were links in production between advancement requirements of lower level craftsmen and the material requirements of higher level production (ex. a pre-req of early smithing advancement is the production of 10 steel ingots. It just so happens that it takes 10 steel ingots to product a suit of full plate, and to advance himself the master must produce 10 suits of full plate.)

Why have settlement training at all then? Wise old masters needed to learn from somewhere, not everyone wants the master/apprentice thing, not enough available teachers or teachers don't know the skills/abilities that you want, etc.

[DeciusBrutus]

SWG did that, resulting in a constant spam in cantinas of people looking for traing or offering it.

There will always be players offering to help players learn how to use their Abilities, even if PCs are not giving PCs the Skills.

It's established that requiring a significant amount of grinding to advance crafting is harmful to the economy, through the mechanism of encouraging people to make a bunch of stuff that they don't care about and dump it on the market.

[Hark]

Part of this suggestion is specifically to ensure you have a solid relationship with those you train. The master can't afford to train just anybody because after training somebody they bear a degree of responsibility for that persons actions. Thus a master taking a rep hit if the apprentice takes a rep hit. Adding a rep hit for abandoning an apprentice or leaving ones master a limiting the number of masters or apprentices in turn pushes players toward establishing a solid relationship with those they train with.

This is also being suggested as an alternative to training in a settlement, so there is little reason for people to stand around begging for training. Really the suggestion has very little in common with SWG outside of its most basic level, players training players.

As for the crafting bit, I'm very confident that it has been stated that junk items aren't really a thing. Even the greatest crafter in the world is going to need the steel that new players are producing. The example was more to show a relationship of how a Master may benefit from working with apprentices by establishing an apprentice behavior that is beneficial to a master.

The only concern I have with my suggestion is somebody actually putting in the time to max out a class and maintain a good rep then once maxed out going rogue and training lots of low rep players in the classes most advanced skills. To a certain degree this is intended to allow low rep players to get a little farther in training by finding a master willing to also take the rep hit, but I don't really want the best stuff accessible to low rep players. To that problem I would probably go with a Master requiring a training facility to work with, but the master somehow makes training in the most advanced stuff easier.

[Bad_Horse]

Perhaps for a Master to train an apprentice the Apprentice must have a reputation within one step of the Master. So if you want to train with a max reputation Master (7,500 - 10,000) you need to be at least be in the tier below them (5,000 - 7,500). That would stop high rep characters from training low rep characters.

Also the level of skill a Master can train another in could be limited to the Masters rep score. So in order to train a skill from level 15 to 16 (and above) you need to be trained by a Master with maximum reputation.

Reputation Skill Level
0 – 2500 1-5
2500 – 5000 5-10
5000 – 7500 10-15
7500 – 10000 15-20

[Hark]

There are probably a lot of different ways one could prevent the high end skill training to low rep players abuses, some more natural than others.

How does the reputation linked relationship between master and apprentice sound?

Does it actually work to prevent players from engaging in annoying begging for easy training? Does it work to build a strong relationship between master and apprentice? Does it actually encourage players to form chartered companies as schools for training purposes?

[Bluddwolf]

I like the idea better than tying training to a settlement structure, but there in lies the rub. GW wants to tie everyone to player run settlements to such an extent that settlements are not just locations but entities of a character, like an attribute on the character sheet. I don't mind saying it is a weird and possible unnecessary concept.

There will be plenty of reasons for joining a specific settlement and conflicts between settlements without having to funnel players forcibly to them.

Would a Master - Apprentice system of training reduce the need for settlement training, yes it may. Could it lead to a vibrant system that supports human interaction, yes it could do that as well. I'm not sure which is better for the game.

[Hark]

Settlement based training probably fits the idea of a minimum viable product that they want to start with better than a robust Master - Apprentice system. Such I expect to see it first.

What a robust Master - Apprentice system adds is greater depth to the game and ties people together in strong relationships which helps to make the world more dynamic and engaging. It also provides more tools to use to build interesting game systems. It's really something to add on later, but I feel that the concept is useful enough to seriously consider now.

Questions of what is trying to be accomplished with settlement based training and what about master-apprentice based training are we trying to avoid are important to ask now. The answers to these questions and more can make a Master - Apprentice a viable option for in the future.

[ilkhan451]

This may work especially well with corner cases like Paladin. Whereas there may not be many dedicated Paladin trainers in the world. I like it.
But it would have to be a long term sort of arrangement.

[Hark]

I like how the idea supports things like Martial Arts Schools, Academies of various varieties, the knight and his Squire, and the Sorcerers Apprentice by essentially encouraging players to build chartered companies around the idea of training.

You could even directly the idea by making it possible to define a Chartered Company as for training purposes. Then you can get crazy s#!~ like school rivalries. You might even get people doing the kung fu movie thing where they travel to other schools and challenge people to fights in order to prove the superiority of their school.

[Pax Shane Gifford]

I like the idea. I think tying their reps together might help prevent abuse and it makes a lot of sense, but abuses would likely still happen after that. Still, I don't think that fact alone is a reason to dismiss this particular mechanic, as the pro's I can see would, in my opinion, outweigh the cons. The biggest caveat is that it needs to be implemented in a way that doesn't subvert the relationship between low rep and restriction on training.

Suggestions for restrictions: master must have access to facilities, must be part of his settlement or an alliance with his settlement, hard minimum for reputation to use it, and high cost to join or leave the tutoring relationship.

And one final possible restriction, instead of the rest of those: maybe something like this isn't used to train people without access to the building, but instead actually used as part of the training while using the building. You keep bringing up academies and the like, but those aren't really places that people just drop in to get some training, those are traditionally places where people dedicate their lives to an art; therefore it would make sense for the people who want to train at your school to be required to join your settlement.

[Hark]

I think I would want to avoid forcing students to become a member of the same settlement as the teacher. Allowing outsiders to train with a master has potential to create stronger foreign relations. It also could create situations in which a player experiences a conflict of interests and must choose a side.

For example Master lives in a different settlement, and the settlement you live in declares war on his settlement. You now have conflicted loyalties, do you stay loyal to your settlement or your master, or do you try your best to stay neutral? What if you aren't given the choice to stay neutral.

That kind of situation has the potential to be golden for naturally occurring stories, and I think difficult decisions concerning loyalties is probably the pinnacle of meaningful player interaction.