Preamble.
Hey everyone and welcome back to my YT channel. In this Dev Diary entry, we’re going to talk about the expertise system. Before we get started, let me talk about today's sponsor. Have you ever dream of becoming an astronaut and are willing to be flushed into space like garbage? If so then, I've got the game for you: Lethal Company. Thx for sponsoring me. Much wow.
Anyways, from what we saw in the first year of TS2, the expertise system felt a bit lacking, yet very powerful when you stack them via specific mastery selection. The automatic assignment was originally intended to make the system more streamlined, but the feedback we got often was that you guys didn’t like the lack of choice. Even if you could choose which expertise a mastery gives you, there was still a pressure to stack a particular expertise.
After a lot of thinking about it, I figured there was a better way to do expertise, so that it’s flavorful and more importantly, substantial to your character development.
Introducing Expertise 2.0!
Now, your character will no longer have the 5 stats (Fitness, Knack, Awareness, Knowledge, and Presence). Instead, you will have expertise slots, which work exactly the same way masteries do - you start with 3 expertise slots and cap at 6. The ranks work the exact same way as masteries do, with the same progression rate.
https://terrarp.com/db/ooc/dd2-expertise-list.png
What’s so different about the new expertise anyways?
- Build Chat. You can combine them the same way you do mastery, with other expertises or masteries. So I guess now you have 12 slots to cry on #Build-chat about
- Bleedover. Expertise and specific masteries will now bleed over into the real world. The more deaths you have, the stronger the bleed. Physical masteries such as weapon use will in fact bleedover and give your otherwise NEET IRL character the muscle memory to use swords. The skills and knowledge obtained from your set of expertise will bleed over as well, allowing you to do those things IRL. Or, in the case of the Athletic Expertise, your body can drastically change if you stimulate it the right way. The only thing the bleedover can’t do is to fix pre-existing disabilities.
https://terrarp.com/db/ooc/dd2-culinary.png
https://terrarp.com/db/ooc/dd2-naturalism.png
https://terrarp.com/db/ooc/dd2-archeology.png
(For those wondering what that gaze link is… here you go.)
Lifeskilling.
So, for the one person who is a hardcore lifeskillers, what exactly does focusing on leveling up expertise get you anyways, considering how masteries make you stronger in content that features combat?
Life skilling is about making the gps for the new type of endgame: property (but that’s for another entry).
Each week or every other week, a thread will pop up that will allow you to automatically convert some amount of MP to GP (total = a set amount + an RNG amount). The higher ranked you are in a particular expertise, the more GP you can make.
In this thread, you must post, summarizing what your character did to earn said GP, or you can summarize a post where you had earned money with your expertise.
But wait! Each of these threads will have a few different expertise that will net you a bonus amount of gold based on what is happening around the world. This system is meant to incentivize you to level up a variety of expertise.
While lifeskilling isn’t for everyone, it’s not a trap either, consider what kind of content you enjoy!
Skill-up Challenge.
To give y’all an excuse to roleplay more, there will also be an optional skill challenge (similar to the faction rank-up tests) where you can attempt to beat a DC to rank up your expertise. If you fail, you will have to try again in another week. There’s a small MP reward for doing this and abiding by the rule of the challenge. This is akin to taking a ranking test for your expertise. More details on this later, if the idea survives until the relaunch.
New Ranking Structure.
Hokay, that was a lot of talking. We have to briefly talk about another big thing that will have to be elaborated on in another Dev Diary entry.
So, it is no longer the case that you can S-rank every single mastery anymore. We are moving to a pyramid or a tapeworm structure, where you may only have:
- 1 U-rank mastery/expertise
- 2 S-ranks masteries/expertises
- 3 A-ranks masteries/expertises
- 1 U-rank mastery/expertise
- 2 S-ranks masteries/expertises
- 2 A-ranks masteries/expertises
- 1 B-ranks masteries/expertises
That's all I've got for you today. See you in the next Dev Diary. Send me a your preferred choice of caffeine and let's crank the rest of this out.
PS. For those wondering, yes, all the new art pieces are AI-art prompted and edited by me. They are not human art. I'm just really good at fixing or hiding those fucked-up sausages.
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