Skills, skills skills, more skills

[cromcrom]

Ok fine, thanks for your attention, I will try to keep it concise.
First, "learn from failure". Each time you fail something, you have a chance to gain some experience, either general or in the skill. Chance is "intellect" dependant, the better the intellect, the better the chance to understand why you failed.

Then, the learning principles:
Skill ranks: novice, adept, journeyman,experienced, master, legendary or whatever.
Skill points: once you reach a certain amount of points, you benefit from the rank. like novice is 0-10, adept is 10-30, and so on.
Gaining points:
Basic system: gain only one point each time you succeed in using the skill, and you fail a test based on the current level in the skill, to reflect the fact that the better you are in a skill, the less there is to learn (and such a novice has many things to learn, and a master will hardly learn anything.

If the player visits a master, that teaches him the next rank, he will gain a bonus to experience he gains, untill he reaches that rank. For example, a master teaches the player how to be a journeyman in some skill, the player won't instantly become a journeyman, he will still have to practice, but he will gain much more skill points(like a random 3-5 exp, for example, instead of only one)
Finally, the player can receive lessons from a master, that will directly give him skills points, and maybe directly reach the next skill rank.

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As for the skills, they are highly dependant on world interactions, which seem pretty deep from what I saw in your presentation.

There should be high level of interactions in the world, but all tied to skills.
Some examples:
Mining: gain more ore from mineral veins you dig.
Prospection: identify veins, so that you can then use them.
Farming: more chance that seeds fully mature.
Herbalism: Identify wild plants.
Camping: better rest from camping in the wild.
Skinning: more/better external parts from animals.
Butchering: more/better internal parts from animals.
Tracking: make an animal appear if you succeed (there should me more tracks than animals in the more for this skill to be usefull).
Trapping: set up traps.
Logging: get more proper wood from falling trees.
Medic: treat poison and disease.
Surgeon: treat flesh wounds...

and so on.

All this means that a lot of system are already in place:
wound system, exhaustion, hunger/thirst...

A legendary skill should really feel legendary, and be the only way to gain some legendary benefit, like a legendary fisherman could be the only one to be able to catch that elusive "Nessie Fish", which would in return have a very high value in gold or reputation or whatever.

Of course, success in using skills would depend on the skill itself, the tools (bad or good...), the environment, the attributes, the state of the character (wounded...)

All this are just shared thoughts, make absolutely what you want of it, and keep up the great work :-)