I wanted to float a different idea for cyclic experience as an alternative to a bell curve. I'm not promising to do it even if everybody loves it, but I wanted to have a discussion about it.
The problem with 3.0 cyclics (and HUM, and Forms, etc) is that they are what I call passive experience. It takes no effort to perform, causes no penalties, and is essentially free experience. In fact, if you DON'T have a cyclic up at all times, you're doing it wrong - You're losing TDPs and valuable circling experience.
However, a core concept in Dragonrealms is that you get rewarded for doing things with skills - With such a skill-based system, it's kind of sacrilegious to be using your skills in a challenging way but not gaining experience.
So, I started thinking of conceptual reasons why an adventurer wouldn't always keep training something passively like this - Why doesn't he always keep a cyclic, or a khri, or whatever going? The reason I kept coming back to was "It takes up valuable concentration that he doesn't want to spare". To effectively maintain this ability, the adventurer is giving up some of his mindshare.
Now, what kind of important way of representing 'focus' or 'concentration' or 'mindshare' do we have in DR? We have the Concentration stat, which is woefully underused, but it's underused to a degree that nobody really cares about it (like the debt system!). So that's out. The other representation of "ability to focus one's mind" we've had was the old Mindstate system (le gasp!). This system, for people who joined DR after 2009, is one where the more you learned, the slower your drain rate got. It was a mediocre to bad way of preventing scripting, and was removed when experience was rewritten.
This suggestion is that when running an ability where you learn passive experience, you suffer a penalty to your experience drain rate. There would also have to be a flag where you say "Don't teach me any cyclic experience and in turn don't reduce my drain rate". Additionally, if you're using a cyclic at a rate where you'd gain no experience (keeping an easy one up, for instance), you would suffer no drain rate penalty.
This would allow cyclics to continue to teach well (not QUITE as good as they do in 3.0 because that's still way too high) without a bell curve or a falloff or anything. You'd be sacrificing your current drain rate to train a skill or four with a cyclic.
What do people think?
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