I think my next two priorities for the project are:

1. getting the mudlib under source control
2. streamlining the newbie experience

source control

I’ve said this before, but just for completeness sake, we will be going with Mercurial - for reasons I don’t really care to discuss. A lot of research and experimentation has gone into this decision. Suffice it that there are way more pro’s than con’s and that while Git was considered, it fell flat when it came to offering what I actually needed.

We’ve attempted this at least twice in the past with miserable results. There are still remnants of CVS and SVN lying around, cluttering the place up. I will be scouring them.

As soon as everything is in hg, I will be attempting yet again to produce a vaguely distributable package of source. Since it has been so long, the administration will have to decide on licensing again, etc… Initially, the bundle will only be made available in response to individual requests from developers, but as we get this thing figured out, I hope to throw the doors open to the public after only 13+ years

My plans are that there will be something available by next Saturday (April 18th, 2009).

new newbie experience

Witac is awesome. However, it is also very brittle and frequently confusing. Acius has patched a few bugs out there recently, and I had to manually repair three broken NPC’s last week.

I plan on writing a much simpler (and more linear) newbie experience in the nearish future (once we’re under hg). Witac island will still stick around in some fashion or another - the specifics of which are yet to even be discussed. We may repair the quests and port them to the new (as-of-yet launched) quest journal system or we may scrap them entirely. We may leave the zone as a museum or turn it into a newbie city or something else entirely. I have no idea yet

But the new newbie world will be geographically smaller than Witac and will hopefully touch on the following topics:

1. The rules.
2. Moving around inside of rooms.
3. Basic gathering and crafting.
4. Basic combat.
5. Basic magic.

When newbies step out of the new experience (onto the docks of Candle Hill), they should have a few basic tools at their disposal, a few coins in their pockets, and a bit of advice as to what they might want to do next.

With the removal of Witac, some NPC’s will need to move to the mainland in order to handle hairdressing and such.

I have no ETA on this one, but I will be publishing details for discussion as the planning progresses. My goal is to have this done before the end of May, but I hope to have it ready much much sooner.

You can see who’s on IRC with the normal ‘who’ command:

% who
                         -----== PLAYERS ==-----
   [Admin]     Allaryin needs to write quest journals (right adjusted)
   [Admin]     Malap has several legs (chaotic banana)
  [Ancient]    Polar bears enjoy eating Sora (lawful good) [idle]
                        -----== CHAT USERS ==-----
    [irc]      @Acius
    [irc]      @allaryin
    [irc]      @Harkins

                 --== Players: 1, Wizards: 2, IRC: 3 ==--

When I add jabber support, it will be integrated together with this. Linking of IRC/MUD accounts is future tech that I don’t want to think about quite yet… but when the futuretime comes, I’ll try to set it up so all three services play happy together somehow.

It may not be used during combat and requires you to be seated.

When you rest, you will regenerate some endurance at the cost of a large amount of readiness plus 1 heartbeat of ‘busy’ status per point of endurance healed in this way. At present, the cost is 250 readiness + 75 per end. This means you will be able to recharge 13-15 points of endurance per activation but will be disabled for 40-50 seconds.

In the future, I will be changing the cost to include a (minor) stat debuff for a short period after resting in exchange for a slight reduction in the ‘busy’ cost. This change should reduce the complete disabling duration down to 20-30 seconds but will weaken you for 30-60 additional seconds.

In addition to this command and the longstanding invigorate spell, there should eventually be some guild-specific ways of recharging endurance as well as some crafted consumables.

Apart from my posts here and lots of discussions with community members, I’ve just launched a pair of new (big) features.

irc gateway

I still consider this highly experimental, but it seems to be working very reliably so far.

The mud is logging in to #walraven on freenode.

All IRC channel traffic is echoed to the mud’s main chat line - and vice versa. Login/logout messages are also echoed. IRC messages on mud chat are prepended by an @. Mud chat is all echoed to IRC by the SIMudBot user.

The bot is capable of providing a list of players currently logged in to the mud, but otherwise doesn’t do much else (apart from the whole chat echo relay thing, :P). Just /msg simudbot who to give it a try.

forum browser

The old forums are dead and buried. But they contained years of conversation and mountains of useful information. In stead of trying to export all of that data into some other format, I’ve built a simple forum browser site at mud.simud.org/forums. It’s not terribly user friendly… but it will help us dig up old posts for export to the codex/wiki or trac or whatever.

At present, there aren’t very many objects that give stat buffs - and there aren’t any that give skill buffs. Aside from my strong desire to avoid unbalanced +con buffs floating all over the place, the biggest reason for this sort of thing is probably just how horribly difficult it is to implement reliably.

The current method for giving someone a temporary stat buff is by giving an object a query_str_bonus() method (or con, dex, spd, int, etc…) and dropping it in the player’s inventory. You then wait until recalc() is called on the living - it is called very frequently. The result of all query_str_bonus() calls on the player’s entire inventory is added together in a stat_bonus[] hash that’s stored on all living objects and the contents of stat_bonus[] are then added to all stat queries…

there is a better way

In stead of requiring individual objects to track every buff and in stead of requiring frequent iteration over a player’s inventory and calling 10 methods on every object they’re holding… I think a single buff manager is in order.

The buff manager should be able to track bonuses to both stats and skills. While I will only address the topic of stats here, almost everything should be the same when it comes time to add skill buffs to the mud.

The buff manager should be able to handle both “permanent” and “temporary” buffs. A temporary buff is one that has a set duration measured in heartbeats - such as the result of drinking a potion. Permanent buffs are those that don’t necessarily have a measurable duration - like a bonus that lasts as long as you are wearing a pair of magic gloves.

The interface for dealing with buff manager should be trivial.

A potion that gives you +5 strength for 100 heartbeats might simply implement the following:

int on_consume( int max ) {
    object manager = this_player()->get_buff_manager();
    manager->add_buff( "alchemy", "str", 5, 100 );
    return ::on_consume( max );
}

Gloves of +2 dexterity, a “permanent” buff might have code on them similar to this:

string buff_id;

int on_wear() {
    object manager = this_player()->get_buff_manager();
    buff_id = manager->add_buff( "equipment", "dex", 2 );
    return 0;
}

int on_remove() {
    object manager = this_player()->get_buff_manager();
    manager->remove_buff( buff_id );
    buff_id = "";
    return 0;
}

The buff_id’s in this case would be necessary to distinguish between different “+2 dex from equipment” buffs, and would only be important for eventually expiring permanent buffs.

stacking bonuses

We are going to take a nod from d20 for how buffs interact. Every bonus is assigned a category. If multiple bonuses from any given category improve the same stat, the largest value is used.

Thus, if you drink two of the aforementioned strength potions, you will only get +5 str since they both provide an “alchemy” bonus. However, if the gloves were changed to provide +2 str, the “equipment” bonus would stack with the alchemical one for a total of +7 points.

• alchemy - potions
• divine - prayers and priest/druid style spells
• equipment - bonuses from worn equipment
• food - see the hunger system post for more here
• magic - scrolls and other normal channeled planeswalker style magic
• skill - bonuses generated by performing special abilities (like a ’sprint’ command that may give you +speed)

99% of all buffs should fall into one of these categories.

the opposite of buffs

The system should also handle stat penalties. Similarly, I think penalties from similar sources should combine - with only the worst one taking effect.

The list of categories for debuffs should include all of the buff categories already mentioned (boots that give you -dexterity, etc…) as well as a few others that are unlikely to be used for positive effects:

• curse - different than a normal ‘magic’ debuff, this one likely involves spirits
• disease - dragon pox!
• poison - poisons should be distinct than both alchemy and disease
• wound - take a nasty bump to the head? -1 int for a while…

In the event that both positive and negative effects of an identical source are active at the same time, the resultant bonus is the sum of the most positive value and the most negative value.

Example:

1. One of my party members has an aura that grants +1 magic bonus to every stat to all nearby group members.
2. I cast a spell on myself for +3 con.
3. I am hit by a weakness spell that gives me -1 con for its duration.

Assuming all of these effects are of the “magic” variety, this gives me +1+3-1 con as well as +1 in all other stats. The +3 bonus overrides the +1 to con from the aura, but doesn’t affect the aura’s ability to improve my other numbers. The debuff is then added. Since there’s only one of them, the math is pretty easy - the final result is that I am at +2 con and +1 in my other stats.

future expansion

In addition to expanding the system to include skill modifiers, we might be able to get away with other modifiers as well: armour, damage absorption, hp/mana/end regeneration, carrying capacity, etc…

It should be possible to dispel some types of buffs and debuffs.

The command to show you the list of all of your current active buffs should simply be ‘buffs’.

Not only is this too complex and involved, it’s too harsh and arbitrary. Yes, player characters should need to eat (it’s part of the mudlib’s original vision). No, they shouldn’t die because they idled out. Yes, wolves should eat deer. No, peasants shouldn’t starve to death because their employer’s player went on vacation for a week.

What we need is a simpler system that motivates people to eat - requires them to eat if they want to play the game at all, but does not penalize them for periods of inactivity and does not require the balancing of quite so many variables.

The current base rate of food/drink decay is 4 points per minute RL. There are reductions in rate for sitting or lying down when a tick occurs. An average player’s food capacity is around 1000 points, and drink capacity is slightly less. Starvation is defined as having zero food when the food tick comes around. That means that players can currently take roughly 4 hours before going from completely stuffed to the brink of negative consequences.

I was logged in for 10 hours today - idle 99% of it. That’s a lot of coconuts.

I’d like to see players eating much more frequently than once every 2-3 hours while playing actively, but I don’t want it to be a hassle and a danger while chatting in town.

food as fuel

Food is fuel. When you live an active lifestyle, you burn more calories. When I was in highschool, I could eat 6000 calories a day and not gain a pound. Now that I live at a desk? Heh…

In stead of ticking food down at the current rate and eventually imposing starvation penalties and weight loss on players, what if the rate of food consumption was tied into the character’s activity level? If I’m asleep at Malap’s tree or playing Mafia at Connol’s pub, I shouldn’t be burning through nearly as much food as when I’m digging for silver or hunting polar bears.

I propose that food and drink be tied directly into hp and mana regeneration rates respectively. If you’re not burning endurance, you don’t burn as much food. If you’re not spending a lot of mana, you’re not going to get as thirsty. (Yes, water to mana has been done before, it’s an accepted trope of the genre - and NO, it was hardly Blizzard’s idea).

In stead of subtracting at a rate of 4 food per minute tick (give or take a point or two for race and throw in a multiplier for the accident of stance at the time of the tick…), I think subtracting food at a rate of 1 unit per minute (keep the ticks the same) is a good idea. This lets players sit completely idle for 16 hours before they run out now.

Now… to drain food and drink when players exert themselves. Once, we had a system where bleeding caused direct water loss. It was the most brutal thing I’d ever seen. With all of the debuffs from extreme dehydration, it was possible to hit someone with one blow of a knife that only did like 5% of their life total but cut their stats in half because their thirst became critical. A few more hits like that, and they could die from thirst before their health ever dipped into the yellow - they could even die while shielded and at full health by using magic. We don’t want a repeat of that

hypothetical numbers

In stead of directly damaging food and drink when damage occurs to one of the stats, we should debit from these pools whenever health and endurance and mana regenerate naturally. If 1 point of food translates to 1 point of natural hp regen and 1 point of drink translates to 1 point of natural mana regen… Well, the natural rate of regen is capped at 1 point of hp per 10 seconds and 1 point of mana per 20. That’s 6 hp and 3 mana per minute. Thus, a player who is recovering naturally from an injury would go through food at almost 2x the current rate… until fully healed, at which point, they’ll drop back to 1/4 current.

But there is an additional monkey wrench to be thrown into all of this. If players never spend mana (it is possible, really), then they’re never using water. But worse yet, if they meditate or are healed/channeled/etc… they can wreak absolute havoc on the system. It might very well be possible to meditate spam charge crystals for hours on end w/o needing to eat.

And while I can appreciate the RL analogue… this is a gameplay balance issue. I don’t want a silly thematic insight to completely obviate an entire sector of the mud economy.

Endurance regen needs to drain from this pool as well. Endurance regenerates at a maximum rate of 1 point every 2 seconds - 30 points per minute of very active gameplay. There are currently very few ways to spend this much endurance, and they all involve combat. If we go ahead and debit 1 point of food per point of endurance regenerated, then we’re getting somewhere. 30 points per minute is still less than 10x the current rate - and if they’re actually burning that much endurance, it’s a good rate. I don’t want people to be able to sustain that level of activity indefinitely - hunger makes a nice limiter for this sort of thing. At 30 points of food a minute, players can still run at full burn for half an hour before taking a lunch break.

The simplest change to prevent meditation abuse would be to treat all mana regenerated through meditation as natural regen - thus, meditating for 200 points of mana costs 200 water. Simple enough.

food as power

I want players to be able to receive buffs from the foods they eat. I want people to gravitate toward specific foods because of the sorts of activities they’re engaged in. We’ve already established a list of food ingredients and possible related stats to modify, so I won’t get into that here. I like it, I want to keep it.

But I want to simplify it. Currently… it is possible to maintain food buffs forever, in all stats. I like the idea of allowing players to eat “meals” of multiple food items that combine themselves into a single buff, but I don’t want to see someone eat 1000 cherries and buy themselves a few hours of bonus will power. I’m not yet sure how to allow someone to eat a steak + potatoes + corn + milk as a single meal and gain some sort of synergistic bonus from it without allowing someone to eat a pile of sugar cookies and dragon jerky for a similar bonus… so I won’t worry about it right now.

Really simple meal = bread and water. For now, let’s allow a player to maintain exactly one buff from a food item and one buff from a drink item at any given moment.

Then, in stead of trying to track stacking durations, etc… I like the idea of setting the duration of the food buff to the actual duration of the food itself. Thus, if you eat an apple for 50 points of food, the food buff will last as long as those 50 points of food do. If you eat another apple before the buff expires, the timer will simply be reset back to 50. If you eat a banana, the banana’s buff will replace that of the apple and set its own timer.

This system is easy to learn and easy to balance. We don’t have to calculate separate buff durations, etc… because the durations are built into the character’s activity level.

It’s not a perfect system, and it still encourages strange eating habits… but it’s better than what we have at present.

limits for sanity

The final topic I want to address is that of death and stat debuffs and weight loss from starvation.

Weight loss doesn’t really affect much of anything in the game at present, but it is something that players are aware of. By changing the rate at which players burn through food so dramatically (in both directions), the current weight system will only become that more skewed. I think it needs to be disabled for now until we can come up with something better. A better system would only allow weight to fluxuate gradually - over the course of an extended period of time. Perhaps we compare natural food decay with accelerated decay due to activity and determine a good ratio for maintaining a constant weight? Shrug.

The stat penalties from hunger are huge. They’re actually the real cause of starvation death behind the scenes - the victim’s constitution is reduced to zero.

I’d like to see the stat penalties go entirely, but there are just as many good reasons to keep the penalties as to get rid of them. Playing the simplicity card again, however… I’d like to see a different breed of hunger penalty.

Since food and drink are being used to fuel regeneration, what if starvation just turned into a major reduction in regen rates? When a player goes from being able to regenerate 30 endurance a minute to only regenerating 5… they’ll feel it, and there’s no need to recalculate their constitution score (and all that entails).

This means that starvation is still bad - it cripples your ability to do very much of anything without actively deteriorating from your chance of success in any given action. It doesn’t kill idle players, and it doesn’t kill npc workers who’ve been locked in a barn during finals week… but it does kill the starving player who gets into a fight with a lion.

This doesn’t play nicely with the whole food chain background simulation we always wanted… but we’ve been talking about abstracting that sort of thing out to a pure numerical simulation for ages now anyway

Initially, this means two things:

1. forums
2. mudmail

We have existing systems for both of these, but both systems stink for one reason or another. Malap’s forum system served us very well for a number of years, but eventually began to fade around the edges, showing age and lack of maintenance. Mudmail… is pretty much a joke. The in-game client is mediocre at best and unusable in many cases.

My first project is going to be writing a very simple forum system - completely independent of Malap’s code but using his database schema. This will allow us to import the many years of existing forum content we already have without all of the overhead of the old site.

As part of bringing forums back, I want to build an in-game forum client. Muds have had bulletin board systems forever - we have had several previous attempts. It’s high time people can read the same forums from both inside and outside of the game.

Similarly, I am going to build a simple mudmail client for the web site - and only after it is fully functional on the web page will I build an in-game interface. Mudmail will have folders and will actually keep copies of sent messages for you

Both of these systems will be indexed for easy searching from the web site.

Talk has been thrown around of post ratings and user karma for the forum system, about whether or not we will keep the current tree view, and about a few dozen other possible features. No decisions have been made either way on any of these extra features, so who knows?

Once mail and forums are running, we will continue looking into ways of improving communication. Twitter integration, the long-dreamed-of Jabber server, IRC capabilities of some sort or another, and even a mudmail-to-email gateway are all possible possibilities.

I still have every intention of reviving the project, but am the only admin with any active interest at present (others have poked their heads in, but I haven’t heard any overwhelming desire to dive back in from any of them).

I’ve spent a few hours today pondering the ponderables. Garvin has been a valuable sounding board and will be receiving wizard credentials (on an additional character specifically for performing wiz duties). A few of the other select old guard players will also be given this opportunity if they come back.

We’ve got big plans and I hope to see some of them actually happen.

The first thing I’ll be doing is installing an authentic bug tracking system (something better than the old forums we had).

I’ll be updating here - and on our twitter feed as things progress.

(And no, I don’t plan on making the entire site live inside of Wordpress, this is just the easiest way to get the dynamic blog and front page for now.)

Since it was introduced, mining has been one of the biggest and most popular activities in the game. It’s easy to get into, it’s relatively safe, it practices skills that are later useful in combat, it produces valuable resources for crafting, etc… Oh, and it’s fun too

Mining is so popular that it is traditionally one of THE first activities a newbie engages in - usually at the advice of older players.

The problem with this is that the materials newbies actually need for any of their crafting recipes are best found in the desert area outside of Candle Hill. This is not the safest place in the game. It is also relatively devoid of convenient lumber with which to construct the mine. Your average newbie who wants to go digging for copper is going to take 2 or 3 trips between the forest and one of the mountain ranges in the desert. Odds are high that he’ll get eaten by a lion. There aren’t many lions out there, but after that much travel, the newbie’s bound to bump into something aggro. And at that point in their career, they’re not prepared for it.

So… we need to improve the safety for newbies who want to dig copper in the desert and make it more convenient for them as well. Nobody wants to trudge across the desert 5 times just so they can dig a hole that they’ll accidentally flood two minutes later

Second, the city of Candle Hill has a problem. They lack material resources. They lack economic activity. I’ve always planned on spurring this by introducing NPC merchants and quest givers. It is currently easier for high level players to do things for themselves than it is to get another player to do things for them. People have no reason to trade, it’s too inconvenient.

Enter the mining guild.

I’ve always planned that the Miners would be one of the more influential organizations in town. They were originally intended to be a place where players could buy and sell minerals and tools (an open market), where they could get some training, and where they could hire some pack mule type NPC’s to help them with their mines.

They’ll still be most of that. But the new idea expands on things a bit more:

• As a crafting guild, the Miners will have a traditional apprentice/journeyman/master path of advancement. New members may buy membership in the guild for a small fee (first year’s dues up front), and should ideally have a higher level (master rank) member sponsor them. Any one master may sponsor any number of apprentices for now.
• The primary benefit of membership is eventual access to a number of helpful building recipes for improved types of mines - and the recipe for mining camps (more on these later).
• It will be possible for members to post jobs with the guild - ie mines that are looking for workers. Both guild members and non-members may accept these jobs, which will be recorded in the player’s quest journal.

Guild members will have access to special parts of the guild hall, including a private storage room where they may keep supplies safe from other players.

mining camps

The biggest elements to the new mining guild’s operations will all be centered around the mining camps. These camps will be very expensive to build, and will need to be built in rooms with existing mines (owned by the builder of the camp, of course). Players will be limited to the number of mining camps they are allowed to own at once. This limit will be based on their guild ranking.

Mining camps will improve their associated mines in a number of ways.

The mining camp is a large two-room tent with an attached storage bin and a place for vehicles to park (similar to docks). The front room of the tent will be suitable for setting as a home location and the back room will store food and supplies. The storage bin will be accessible from the outside of the building, and is meant as a place to keep ore produced by the mine.

They will come with a total of four npc’s. Two of these NPC’s will be guards that will help keep the mine entrance safe from wild animals. One will be a mining supervisor, who keeps the key to the mine, and the last npc will be a mine worker.

The worker will occasionally wander into the mine, pick up any minerals that players left lying around, and haul them to the storage bin. If he can’t find anything when he enters the mine, he will emote mining actions and will produce a very small amount of ore to bring up to the bin. Thus, any mine with a camp will constantly produce materials (howbeit at a terribly slow rate), even if it has otherwise been cleared out by players.

Mines with camps are nominally owned by the guild but are managed by the player who established them. The guild maintains a number of supply carts that perform a regular circuit of the camps, providing food and tools as needed. It is possible for players to hop a ride on these carts in order to travel to remote mines safely and quickly.

shipping cart

There is also a single shipping cart that the guild operates to help ease the delivery of minerals back to town from the mines.

At any time that the cart isn’t already in use, the player managing a mine may request a shipment be scheduled by the mining supervisor. A few minutes later, the cart will arrive. The worker npc will unload the storage bin into the cart. When he is done loading the cart, it will return back to the guild, where the load will be quickly dumped into the player’s storage vault.

The guild will keep a 10% cut of all goods shipped in this way, in order to pay for their expenses (ie, keeping the npc’s alive and the carts running, etc…). This is on top of yearly membership dues.

While the shipping cart is stopped at a camp, the supply cart will skip them on the rotation. Likewise, the shipping cart’s arrival will be delayed if requested while the supply cart is already parked at the camp.

Players may not ride the shipping cart.

guild line

Guild members will have a chat line, just like any other guild in the game. NPC’s will also be capable of chatting over this line as well. Announcements of new camps being connected to the network, players joining the guild or being advanced in rank, and the status of the shipment cart will all spam the channel.

jobs

Any mining camp will have the option to hire workers. Both guild members and non-members may take on jobs.

Players will be able to list jobs at the guild hall, requesting x-many of a certain ore their mine produces, and offering a percentage of the profit to the miner. Thus, if I established a copper mining camp in the Candle Hill desert, I could list jobs for 50 copper and a reward of 20%.

Thus, if a newbie takes my job, goes out to the mine, and digs 56 copper, they will be given 11 copper’s worth of cash when they return to the guild hall to report the job done.

Mining supervisors track the player’s progress on jobs. When a player arrives at the mine (probably having come on the supply wagon), they must check in with the supervisor. The supervisor makes a quick check of the player’s inventory and gives them a pick if they don’t have one. He then unlocks the door and lets them into the mine. When the player leaves the mine, the supervisor checks their inventory again and takes the pick away from them if he loaned one. They player is expected to dump the goods they dug into the storage bin. Upon doing so, the supervisor will check them off and give them a receipt for their work. The player must then return the receipt in at the guild for their reward.

These should be enough checks to stop casual theft attempts on the part of diggers.

More heinous thefts (and armed robbery of the camp itself) will be announced to the guild line. It’s not difficult to get yourself permanently blacklisted by the guild for misbehaving.

I don’t remember if there was any more to this idea, I wrote this post several days ago and never published it. So… may as well push it and hope for the best, ne?

update

After referring with Vopisk and Sora a bit on the subject, it’s been decided that a few more protections need to be put in place for mining camps. The following minor changes will be made to the above:

• The insides of guild mines will be flagged as no-teleport, no-combat, and no-magic.
• An NPC will tag along behind the player and collect all ore that drops when they dig.

This pretty much obliviates any way of stealing goods from the mine short of somehow scripting a bot to jump on the ore the instant it drops and hoping you get it before the npc does - since the npc should be entering in the grab command before players even see the message.

Messages
  96..    presence
  76..95  very close
  10..75
  -1..9   brief rumble
 -14..-2  loud rumble, displeased
 -29..-15 bolt
    ..-30 death

When receiving divine punishment, your favor will be reset to zero - as the vented frustration has been, well, vented.

Skills
  blessing   - casting buffing spells
  devotion   - generating worship energy
  healing    - casting healing magic
  judgement  - casting nukes and debuffs
  prayer     - skill with individual high level prayers
  repentance - ability to regain favor
  saccrifice - used in certain spells
  knowledge  - know the teachings, predict changes in favor
               learn new prayers

The blessing, healing, judgement, and saccrifice skills are primarily used when casting spells. There might be other uses for them later.

The devotion skill is a measurement of how much worship energy you produce, and therefore is an indication of how much interest the gods will take in your actions. This should be our two-edged sword:

• it increases a player’s chances of receiving the answer to their prayer, and improves the strength of their answers
• it also increases the amount of favor lost for transgression

The repentance skill is a measurement of how good the player is at getting out of the spiritual doghouse. It should act as a logarithmic bonus to favor gained by good deeds, ie:

• if your favor is negative, then a high repentance should help you to zero out quickly
• if your favor is low, then it should have a measurable impact on favor gains
• if your favor is high, even a large repentance skill shouldn’t affect things very much

The prayer skills each correspond to an individual high level prayer and are like the magic.spell skills. The higher your prayer skill gets, the more powerful, faster, efficient, etc… that particular prayer becomes.

The knowledge skills are a measure of how much you know about a particular god and his teachings/commandments. When you do things that could potentially alter your favor, a high knowledge will inform you of the potential change. High knowledge should also make you more accountable. The gods are not as willing to forgive someone who should know better.

Learning new prayers is predicated on sufficient knowledge skill. The success of prayers depends on your casting skills.