Skill Apprenticeship - Masters Helping Students

One common theme in this game is specialization; the plan is to make the cost of leveling a skill so high that nobody can do several of them. I think this has one particularly non-fun impact in the area of crafting skills.

Getting a single set of complete combat gear in this game is phenomenally difficult, (almost impossible) for a solo-preference player. I'm >1000 hours in and wasn't that close to a 70 set. Presumably 80 will be harder.

One common advice is "let someone else craft for you." This is, frankly, galling, because of two ways it siphons fun from the crafting system:

1. You spent all the time and effort gathering high-level materials to have enough of a chance of getting a single usable piece, (probably several dozen hours), and even if you're <10 levels away in the crafting skill, you hand them to another player, and get 0 experience for all those mats! Worse, they (being maxed), don't get any XP either! It's painful to watch all that time you put in go (possibly 100%) to waste, and be forced to choose between gathering for lower level recipes that you won't use, or higher level recipes that do nobody any good except for the small chance of getting a gear upgrade.

2. You don't even get the RNG-rush of watching the crafting bar and seeing what comes out! Again, huge time investment to get there, and then you just twiddle your thunbs while some player who's already pretty used to the process sees what comes out. In a game like PG where a significant source of fun is shaking the RNG tree for hundreds of hours and sharing the results (good or hilariously bad) with your friends, it's a huge loss to take an entire major category of the game (crafting for gear upgrades), and lose that aspect of the fun.

As a result, what you see most commonly in game is a community haves and have-nots, of super-players who are in-game 40 hours a week, have 2-5 thousand hours or more in game and have maxed every crafting skill and have 8 sets of maxed gear for their various maxed combat skills. They're nice, and a great community, but it's also incredibly exclusive and the barrier to entry requires a time/life sacrifice few can afford.

Here's a proposal to lessen that crafting-god divide in a way that addresses both of the above, while still keeping to the spirit of PG:

Skill Apprenticeship:

Two players working together can perform a crafting action where the higher-skill-level player helps the other complete a recipe that they are too low-level to complete on their own. Like a master/apprentice relationship in real-life crafting, this lets a higher level master invest time to help a lower level student learn in ways they could never do on their own.

- With a UI like the trade window interaction, the higher level player chooses the recipe to be performed, and both players see a window with the usual slots to place items, the repeat checkbox, and checkboxes for both players to approve. Both must be near, and remain near, both each other and the appropriate crafting station.
- The lower level player places the necessary materials, optional repeat, and checks the "ready" checkbox.
- The higher level player checks the "begin" checkbox, and crafting proceeds as normal.
- The materials are subtracted from the lower level player's inventory and they receive the resulting crafted item as if the higher level player had created it.
- The lower level player receives a percent (25%-30%) of the normal XP for that combine, advancing slowly, but better than 0. Maybe a reverse-level XP drop, where you learn more the closer you are to the level of the recipe you're attempting. (Since you better understand what you're doing.)
- The resulting item is attuned to the lower-level player.
- The high level player receives some Civic Pride/Compassion XP (Or add a "Teaching" skill with an absurdly slow progression/frustration rate (just like real life) to give the truly uber players one more goal to chase.) The reward is proportional to the quality tier of the item produced.
- Maybe even have the high level player receive random item rewards from teaching? Make some high-level recipes require that they farm newbie crafters just to get rolls on the Teaching reward table? (After all, most masters of anything say they learned the most about it by teaching!)

This would make it so skill mastery is still required for anyone to acquire some crafted gear, but not completely take away the skill XP gain for the non-maxed player, and also let two people together share in the RNG thrill, instead of the lower level player getting a "I'm done" report and pile of stuff in trade at the end.

I think it would also lessen the current "early high level players get/need handouts to advance" nature of PG. There's plenty of situations where most players get over the hurdle of their first gear set basically on charity; either by being carried through GK runs, starting with pure charity runs where they don't really contribute at all, until they have enough gear to start helping, or by being handed high level gear by uber-players to whom 100K (or more) Councils has become chump change.

In either case, having charity be central to progression in PG is probably bad, and it'd be nice to see that pure charity model turn more into a collaboration model where the lower level person both invests and receives something meaningful, instead of that "get your first gear" step be such a pure handout model like it is now.

Thinking about it more, I love the idea of a "Teaching" skill that gives synergy levels to crafting skills, maybe even with per-associated crafting subskills (ala phrenology or performance), so the only way to truly master a crafting skill is to teach it.

Here's another use case for a XP/material sharing interaction like this: Guild uniforms.

The current situation is: spend 20 hours farming cotton, (maybe 2ish tailoring levels if you put it into crafting?) but with Tailoring in the 60's, you can't personally make guild uniforms yet. You've got new guildies that need them, and your choice is to donate the cotton so newbies can have clothes, but personally get no XP from any of it, (and whoever's doing the crafting is already maxed in the skill) or else feel guilty for using it to level.

With something like Skill Apprenticeship, you could contribute to the guild by making gear to share, and still get some XP out of the process, even if it was less than what you'd get from putting the materials into leveling.

This is especially relevant with the XP penalty recently added for doing lower-level recipes. That hit Tailoring hard, because sewing pockets used to be a path for progression, which is gone now.

I like this more than the current system.

When we get housing in the future, it maybe an idea to have a few recruitable npc's in the homestead that you could train up to perform some basic tasks for you in a kind of hang out like way.
While I'm gone grow these or cook that kinda thing. As they develop they could perhaps be able to make a few things that we actually can not, or earn you a tiny amount of coin.

As for helping other players to learn I feel that idea has plenty of merit, if it is easily implementable or not I'm not so sure.
This could perhaps be done in a hang out kind of way also , each player could learn from one and teach 1. Choose you skill and whilst linked together a trickle of skill exp points will roll in slowly over time.