CLSWiki: Tea/CamoReset

By which I mean:

It's essentially useless at low levels and in many of the places we regularly play
It's godlike at high levels, and in locations such as Little Abington

These both strike me as flaws in the design of a skill tree. So I'm thinking about how to replace and rehash it into a fixed state.

There are three main thematically cool things "Rangers" tend to do with their camouflage abilities, I think:

So a new replacement system should work well for all 3 of these.

It should also satisfy my two key features of a TT skill tree:

The starting levels should be powerful enough to be interesting, meaningful, and a non-stupid choice to take
The top levels should not be so powerful that low level characters are useless by comparison.

Things that might be interesting to throw into this:

Hiding durations? Instead of the current binary state of "hidden forever" or "visible", could we allow hiding only for a couple of minutes at a time?
Ambush skills - relatively early in the tree
Time to hide: Needs to have a not too huge basic value - 30s? and a not too small best value - 10s?
Movement: Stationary camo is generally a bit sucky as a PC ability. Sprints are way good.
Terrainless hiding to deal with GM lack of cover?

So here's a very rough tree:

Hide in terrain in 30 seconds. Remain hidden for up to 2 mins. Stop hiding in 5s. Move at a slow sneak while hidden.
Can hide on flat ground without terrain, such as grass or the like. No movement permitted on flat ground.
If hidden in terrain, can now break cover in 0 seconds
While hidden in terrain, can move at a walk. On flat ground can move at a slow crawl
Hide in 20s, not 30s
May hide for up to 5 minutes
While hidden in terrain, can move at a jog. On flat ground can move at a fast crawl
Hide in 10s, not 20s

Do we even need a camouflage skill tree? Answers on a postcard please...

I agree that your points about power levels are very desirable in the abstract, but is applying them to one skill tree when they arguably don't apply to others a good idea?

: I think so - TT tends to evolve by rebalancing and replacing individual skill trees at the moment, so if any skill tree refit is better balanced/better designed for progression, the system itself gets iteratively closer to ideal balance. --Tea

My answer to "do you need a camouflage skill tree" is "if and only if wilderness remains a skill tree in its own right" - I like the idea of wilderness skills being something you buy as an adjoint to another tree, but I think most people don't. TT as a game would be fine without soft-skills scouting, but rangers as a class wouldn't, I think.
"Wait here while I scout ahead" is dull for the rest of the party, usually not much use, and often doesn't fit well with linear-setting. In an ideal world, a camouflage skill would mostly be used in encounters, rather than between them, I think.
A big decision to make: is the skill useable in any way in interactives?

--Jacob

Things a tree might have:

An ability to ask a ref what's in the next encounter (to a visual examination) during the armour repair etc faff time?
A very short duration invisibility, possibly increasing in duration as you level up?
The ability to resist detection calls?

--Tea

: Stating the hopefully obvious - it might be better to allow it to /ignore/ detects as opposed to calling RESIST, despite this being an exception to usual system rules. --MorkaisChosen

Another thought: a lot of uses of camouflage fall foul of the "rogue's dilemma". How about some limited forms of mass concealment at the top end of the tree - a 5-min mass static invisibility effect once per day, perhaps, or a 30s slow-moving mass invis? --Jacob