Community Suggestion: Add a Skills Category with Eventual Skills Tree
Add a Skills Category with Eventual Skills Tree
New Feature Addition · Articles & templates · Created by LeftEarHear
closed
Skills -Moves Tree Techniques category new-article template categories ability
I have lots of different Roles, Titles, Accolades etc that all come with a variety of new skills and techniques that are learned along the way and as one progresses. Roles are extremely strict and require specific skills and techniques in order to play that role effectively. It would be incredibly useful to have an entire category or article template dedicated to moves and skills.
For example, just start with basic categories such as:
Dialogue, Crafting, Combat, etc
Each of these can have their own subcategories. For example, under Combat:
Melee, Ranged, Magic, etc
Melee can then contain:
Unarmed, 1H, 2H, etc...
Then 1H:
Swords, Axes, Hammers...
These just allow buckets for easy organization. Each Character article would need updated with a new Tab to include moves, skills, etc.
It can be up to creators to create these buckets however makes sense to them, but a basic starting point and general categories to get us started and keep things organized is high on my list.
Later a Skills Tree would be excellent, kind of like the Family Trees in how they have to have a parent ability to stem from.
Follow up
To clarify, updates to existing templates could absolutely work. Dragonheart and Auraguard make good points. And I think that the Family Tree could absolutely be updated for the skills/moves or spells tree. However, there are limitations to the family tree right now that only allow things to stretch so far and wide. That's totally fine, but if there is also a push in the community to update family trees then it makes sense to consider how this could also be utilized to build a Skills Tree, Spell Tree, or any tree in general. As for the skills themselves, there is no place for skills in the professions tab. Honestly, it makes sense for there to be a spot for skills on the Professions tab, something like "Associated Skills" but there still needs to be a main bucket or source to organize them all or pull them from. But skills are not even referenced under the professions template. As for the Characters template...there is only one box that comes close to referencing skills of any sort and it is labeled "special abilities" which to me is not really a "moves" or a "skills" reference, rather something unique to that individual that only they or very few can do. Contrast that with something like a backhand slash or something like meteor strike. These may be very basic combat moves in someones world. Where does something like "backhand Slash" go? Meteor Strike can maybe go into spells, but thats very limited and leaves everything else just hanging out in limbo. I absolutely love the detail in the characters template and I use most of these prompts. Some of them have helped give me insight to characters that I never thought of. But there really is not any good place to organize and keep Skills, Moves, Buffs and debuffs, etc. I guess my main argument to make my case would simply be, where are we supposed to keep all of the above referenced material? This is crucially vital to the worldbuilding and moves and skills can drive many narratives, especially interactive narratives forward. If there is already a way that others in the community utilize an existing template or table etc and would like to share I am all ears. Thanks for the feedback!
The Team's Response
Thanks for your suggestion! For a visual skill tree, Content Trees (guide here), or Whiteboards (guide) if you need more freedom, might do the trick for you. An update to the Spell template is planned, and it could address some of what you need. If a template doesn't quite meet your needs but you still want a template with specific sections, take a look at custom article templates. If you want to write about the rules of your system in general, we recommend using the Generic Article template. We're closing this because we feel like the planned Spell template update and the features we already have cover this.
Current score
28/300 Votes · +6502 points
Votes Cast
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+300
by Grota Mistrza Gry
on 2025-01-24 00:18 -
+300
by SoulLink
on 2025-01-23 06:30I would love to see an expansion of the Spell template to be more useful for any kind of skill / ability / game move etc. As for a tree, are you aware that there is a content tree feature with which you can build tree structures and visualize them?
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+300
by Charlotte and Clara
on 2025-01-22 20:48 -
+100
by spooktacular
on 2025-01-20 08:10 -
+1
by morganarcher
on 2025-01-19 14:37 -
+300
by Beaglesrule65
on 2025-01-19 01:58 -
+300
by GhoulPenguin
on 2025-01-17 11:36 -
+300
by trossm
on 2025-01-15 23:33 -
+100
by Bleichmeister
on 2025-01-15 12:57 -
+300
by Shimagoto
on 2025-01-15 01:38 -
+300
by MasterTamari
on 2025-01-14 00:55 -
+300
by A Uncontrollable Unicorn
on 2025-01-12 13:09 -
+300
by Writing Bishop
on 2025-01-12 08:02 -
+300
by BloodsireArchitectGM
on 2025-01-11 06:57As someone who likes to design there own Homebrew Mechanics, a skill tree would be nice visual to show my players.
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+300
by A Adorable Unicorn
on 2025-01-11 03:09 -
+300
by PoppaeaSabina
on 2025-01-09 18:04 -
+300
by A Uncontrollable Orc
on 2025-01-08 07:06I'm guessing the easiest way to do this with the system as is would be to use a generic article and just code the headers etc. directly. And then use a content tree or diplomacy web (I see someone suggested using family trees - that would super clever). That said, I'm throwing coins at it because I do feel like WA could maybe use more or more flexible ways to present abilities. Just as this has come up about superpowers before.
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+100
by Jupiter Melichios
on 2025-01-07 19:58 -
+1
by benne_
on 2025-01-06 18:37 -
+100
by BCGR_Wurth
on 2025-01-04 20:26 -
+100
by JoellaKay
on 2025-01-04 16:42I think that including skills somewhere would be good. Not sure about what would work best.
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+100
by Bonus Action
on 2025-01-03 13:19 -
+100
by ss2020
on 2025-01-03 06:51 -
+300
by Alexandria the Great
on 2025-01-03 05:52 -
+300
by A Uncontrollable Cthulhu
on 2025-01-03 05:07 -
+100
by DragonHeart[8787]
on 2025-01-03 02:26seems like this is similar to the spell template, so maybe that current template could be generalized.
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+300
by Ratha
on 2025-01-02 19:04 -
+300
by AuraGuard
on 2025-01-02 16:15To memory, the character template already has an abilities field, and the profession template has places for skillsets and the like. The title template covers titles. While I support the idea of a dedicated skill/ability/power template for ease of consolidating specific capabilities into one article, you might want to explain why it's worth the (stated to be considerable, as it would require reworking the database to a degree) effort to create a new template instead of modifying an existing one, as that appears to be your suggestion here. It's been stated before that new templates need to have an extremely convincing argument before approval is considered. So you might be better off reworking this suggestion into a modification suggestion for an existing template, or otherwise do your best to make as convincing an argument as possible to make this new template. As for skill trees in particular...maybe the existing diplomacy web/family tree code could be modified to work with skill/ability/power articles? The existing "blank article" template could be modified to have a "blank tree" that can link to any article type - essentially adapting it to have a blank, any-template version of the family tree or diplomacy web systems, so as to add the desired use case to an existing article template in a hyper-flexible fashion (as allowing any article to link into this type of tree would accommodate anything else that could desire a tree/web type visual representation, and the blank template would be the most flexible template to utilize this). (Coins in the hope this all gets some discussion, even if the suggestion doesn't get accepted in its current state.)
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+300
by LeftEarHear
on 2025-01-02 14:26
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