[Deutha, Dyla] Introduction: The activities of players on Discworld are currently centred around obtaining and then spending experience points. While quests can by no means be ignored as far as obtaining experience points is concerned, most players will have completed most of the quests quite early on in their playing career; for the rest of the time, the usual method of slaughtering NPCs is used to obtain experience, often with a wyrm sword, holy blade or scythe obtained from one of those quests completed early on. It is our belief that this central role of experience points in the game is the primary obstacle to a greater degree of role- playing, player involvement and player enjoyment in the game. In considering this problem, we have concluded that the two crucial areas in promoting these things in the game are the skills system and the structure of guilds. Skills: Once a player has amassed enough experience points, she can exchange them for an increase in skill levels, either by learning at her guild (which also requires some money to be spent), by being taught by another player with a higher level in the skill to be advanced or by teaching herself. A considerable criticism of this system is that a non-fighter must advance her level in her most relevant skills, which generally will not include fighting, by spending experience obtained from fighting; this means that _all_ players, whether they _should_ be fighting, _must_ fight if they wish to advance beyond a certain level. One suggestion is that the casting of magic spells, the use of prayers and the "steal" command, for example, give experience, or more than at present, but this still suffers from the problem that a player can advance her level in one skill through using another, unrelated skill. It is also much more difficult to gauge how much experience should be given as the reward for these tasks - the combat system gives quite homogeneous amounts of experience given that a typical fight lasts a reasonable length of time with plenty of numbers (attack strengths, damages, etc.) being generated from which to calculate the reward. However, the casting of spells and the use of commands are generally of short duration, with little from which to calculate experience gains compared to the combat system. Our suggestion is that experience be taken out of the loop altogether, with, following the completion of a task in which a certain skill is used, that skill directly increased by an amount depending on such parameters as the current level in the skill and the difficulty of the task; there should also be increases in skill level following a failure, since mistakes are often as educating as successes. The functions to do this can be put into the piece of code where skills are handled, with the same formulae applied regardless of the skill involved. In this way practice will become important, the emphasis on slaughter in the mud removed and more diverse guilds can appear, as well as allowing a player to move up in her guild in an appropriate way: a thief through daring robberies, an assassin through dangerous inhumations, a priest through great religious acts and a wizard though mysterious feats of magic. Quests can still give raw experience points which may be used, as at the moment, to advance any set of skills of the player's choice. Guilds: The biggest problem with the guilds at the moment is that they are all too much alike. As discussed above, of whatever guild a player is a member, she spends most of her time killing things for experience; she probably also has the same, complete set of commands as everyone else. This rather goes against the principle of a guild, which exists to protect the livelihoods of its members and its craft secrets. Besides which, it just makes the game plain boring if everyone is the same. As pointed out in _The Streets of Ankh-Morpork_, "one of the strengths of Ankh-Morpork in the books ... is that it has a vast bustling civic life that continues quite independently of the activities of the plot-line - it needs brewers, bakers and other tradesmen" - this point extends equally well to Quirm, Pseudopolis, Sto Lat, Lancre and many other towns and cities. Now trade guilds do not have much of a role in a hack 'n' slash mud, where players rank themselves on the number of innocents they have slaughtered or the amount of damage they can do to something in one hit of a weapon or one casting of a spell. However, if the pivotal role of experience (and hence slaughter) can be lessened and a system provided so that a player can advance a particular skill by using that skill, then a much broader, more interesting range of guilds is possible. Players could become smiths, weavers, alchemists, brewers, apothecaries, etc. trading their required materials and their produce either directly with players or via the merchants' guild, which would also organise trade between other cities of the Sto Plains, the Klatchian cities on the coast of the Circle Sea and beyond. Players of any guild, given sufficient funds, could rent premises for a shop, although, job protection being what it is, a player would have to be a merchant to own a shop outright. With players becoming rich and influential, the pickings would be good for thieves and assassins, and fighters could be hired as bodyguards and guild porters. There are also a number of guilds for players who are not so much bothered about being renowned or rich, but just want to enjoy themselves, have fun and maybe do a bit of role-playing by becoming fools, gamblers, beggars, musicians, conjurors and seamstresses, amongst others. We believe that the existence of such guilds will greatly add to the interest and depth of the game. Conclusion: As pointed out already, a number of these ideas have arisen before, but it seems that what has stopped them being implemented is not how well they have been thought out or how sound they are, but how enthusiastic the creators are. Let's face it, we have some damn ingenious people here and there are some _very_ fancy pieces of code in the game which go quite a bit beyond most or all of our proposals above. A lot of what is suggested here is the province of independents, lords and above, but there is a lot that can be done by creators also - quests (and more general activities) and objects that require use of the skills (at a wide range of bonus values) that are not so used at the moment need to be coded in bulk if a system of advancing skills through using skills is to be feasible. As usual, comments please.