Forgetting skills

In real life if you don’t do something for years and years you tend to lose a significant degree of effectiveness; maybe you need to reread the reference manuals, maybe you need to just do it a few times to get back the muscle memory, etc. I think it would be nice to have a player begin to drop percentage points in a skill after a certain number of inactive days. This would force players to specialize e.g. an engineer that’s been making ships for the past RL month can’t expect to up and make a perfect blaster. Also, I think we could make the player more likely to forget based on how many skills they have adepted at the given moment so a player with all sciences adepted would have a difficult time maintaining that state without a significant effort.

I don’t like this idea. It already takes forever to master all of your skills, and I am sure the majority at the very least agree that it would be annoying if your sciences dropped from 100% to even 99% because you had to take 5 days to move to a new house.

I agree with Slyth actually. It would make the game more realistic. But would also make the game partically impossible for those who master lots of skills such as engineer or science so that they can do their jobs well.

Have to agree with Spet. It would make it kind of impossible to uphold… not to mention, who really wants to spend ALL of their time on LotJ researching? When you roll a character, you spend a good hour already doing that, and countless more practicing up to that 100%. It’s a game, and not reality, for a reason.

there’s a difference between making things more realistic and accepting breaks from reality. No.

Woah guys. I’m not advocating forgetting skills after five minutes of inactivity, nore am I advocating (heaven forbid!) anyone spend anymore time in self-imposed isolation while they get every class up to 150 and become a Luke Skywalker action figure complete with batteries and “noooo!” button.
Consider the following scinarios and tell me if this is something we really want in a roleplay mud.
*Joe engineer learnes everything there is to know about everything, then spends a huge amount of time doing nothing but ships. Joe then picks up a set of parts and makes a perfect blaster despite not having even thought of it in forever.
*John thug trains on all possible weapons until he is completely adept. For the next twenty years John uses only blades. Eventually a bounty hunter is after his head. After running out of battery he turns, picks up a blaster and, despite not having touched one in twenty years, delivers a long range stunning headshot worthy of the most determined sniper known to man.
*Rip the ubermensch, with all levels and stats magically maxed, goes to sleep at the beginning of the old republic era and wakes up in the middle of the new republic. Somehow, he is just as capable of doing everything he did before he went to sleep for god knows how many years.

Forgetting skills allows for a much more fluid and RP-based specialty system. Clans can recruit people with certain skills rather than any average joe who can have his computer bot him up to max.
And just to reiterate: I’m advocating a sane time after which you begin to forget. We have the same thing for greets/dubs so its not completely unprecedented.

example a is not a good one because technology like blasters and ships can just be roleplayed as being done automatically by workshop droids or something once an engineer has come up with the proper schematics

example b is not a good one because nobody delivers long range stunning headshots ever not even in prison rp at point blank range

example c is not good because that rarely actually happens, people who disappear for that long are going to be worthless anyhow

there would be nothing fluid and rp-based about this. clans have a bad enough time keeping activity up as it is, and the playerbase isn’t ever going to be big enough to cherry pick who you do and don’t recruit. greets/dubs are hugely different from skills because there isn’t an implicit disadvantage over not knowing someone vs logging in after a particularly grueling 4 weeks of work irl only to get murdered by some sperglord that plays 24/7 because his blaster mastery didn’t degrade

Touche on the last point. None of the workarounds I can think of address that to my satisfaction.