Avoiding that tie, you can go to a game that is entirely skill based (no levels, but you can’t improve your skills fighting stuff that is below your skill level beyond a certain point), or one that detaches the non-combat/magic skills from your level- the “craft” skills could be their own branch of the skill tree. And if you want to tie it to level or combat prowess without doing so directly, you say “to improve your skill, you need this new kind of ore, which oh look only appears in this area with higher level monsters.”

Whether I would tie all skills to combat level in zwol’s roguelike-to-be depends on what the skills end up being. :)

It strikes me as a good way to implement what you propose in the first paragraph- doing them to raise the cap would be, in essence, how you could tell that someone had done the activity enough to deserve being able to spend points in it.

I would suggest that the limit to how high you can raise the caps be level dependent, so you cannot at level 1 raise your cap to a point that cannot be satisfied until you are level 15, pointswise. However, I wouldn’t bother restricting how many skills they can increase the cap on.

To clarify: say your cap is 5*level. Say you get 20 points to spend each time you level. So while working on level 6, with caps currently at 25, you could cast a bunch of Nature spells (raising its cap to 30), pick some locks, fight with a sword, use a shield, hide in shadows, cast some shadow spells, and use a bow. You raise all 7 of those skills’ caps to 30, but when you hit level 6, you only get 20 points to spend, and it would take 35 points to have your actual values in those skills reach the cap.

Now the next time you level up, you get 20 more points, and you can backfill in skills that you had previously raised the cap in. You would probably never go a level without raising the cap on _something_, since your primary skills you will always want to be matching your level progression, but you could spread the points more thinly among secondary skills.

Sounds definitely doable to me.

Another way of doing it is to have a typical skill-point system where practice improve your _maximum_ skill. Real improvements in the numbers only come from level-ups or doing something to earn skill points. That should defuse the part of the powergamer’s mind that wants to see numbers increase.

This leads to the Quest For Glory syndrome- players spending an hour bored out of their skulls climbing a tree over and over to get their Climb skill raised, locking and re-picking the same door, etc etc. In theory it’s a great idea, IMO, but in practice it’s really hard not to create something where the powergamer feels obligated to bore himself to death getting skills up way before he needs them, just because they are available to be raised.

Also, wrt unpracticed skills, keep in mind the time frame of the game. If you’ve been playing for a while but in character it’s only been a few days, you shouldn’t already be losing unpracticed skills.