Let's start with a fairly standard skill point system. Each character has skill points which can be used to learn skills and to level up existing skills. Each skill has a cap beyond which it can't be improved (and the cap is feasibly reachable), and some skill levels are prerequisites for other skills. (For example, maybe Party Heal requires Heal level 5, and both skills are capped at level 10.) This is fairly typical, right? (This is how the Etrian Odyssey series handles things, for example.)

Now, our first change: You can deallocate skill points freely. In other words, if you put a skill point in a skill, and then decide you don't want it, just go into the menu, deallocate the skill point, and reallocate it somewhere else. (In other words, you can respec pretty much anytime, except maybe during combat.)

Our second change: You don't get that many skill points. You might get a few when you start, but getting more would be rather infrequent, but that will be counterbalanced by the third change.

Now, our third, and most interesting change: Everytime you use a skill, you will gain experience in that skill. If you get enough skill experience, you will gain a permanent level for that skill; this means that one skill point that you spent in the skill is now free to be used elsewhere. These permanent levels can't be deallocated, but they do not cost skill points, and they do count for every other purpose (in particular, they count for prerequisites, so getting permanent levels of Heal means you don't need to spend as many skill points to learn Party Heal).

How does this skill system sound to you?

It sounds good to me but I still think you should test things like that.

Oh, and you should think up a plausible sounding reason for you being able to swith around like that. A good one would be part of making the game's story good.

The way I see it, mechanics don't need plausible explanations. Does there need to be a reason that Mario gets big when he eats a mushroom?

On the other hand, one plausible explanation would be that, when allocating skill points, you are choosing which sills you want to work on learning, and that you don't *really* know the skill until you've gained permanent levels in it.

(Anyway, I haven't actually specified the type of game; for all I know, this system could even be implemented in something like an abstract puzzle game!)

Sounds good, except for two points: first, is the cognitive problem of having two separate sets of "skill points", which could make it hard to get into for many people. And second, what do you do with your "global" skill points once you fully max every skill with only "local" skill points; completionists might not appreciate having "spares" they cannot invest into anything worthwhile.

Thus, a potential improvement I'd suggest, which I'm not even sure is an improvement or just adds more confusion into the mix, would be to limit the level of "grindable" skill points lower than the actual max; so maybe you can grind your Heal up to lv5 and get Party Heal, but to level it to 10 and get a +50% effectivity and a three-turn regen bonus, you need to spend another 5 points of your "globals" no matter how much you use it.

The 'movable' skill points + permanent skill points reminds me of gear + skills in a game like oblivion. That is, you only have a limited number of gear slots to equip items and armour to increase your prowess for a certain style of gameplay, and you can't change it in the middle of combat (I think?). And that style of gameplay then levels the skills buffed by the items your wearing.
For example, putting on [url=http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Shrouded_Armor_(Oblivion)]Shrouded Armour[/url] before you sneak into some location. The better your sneaking becomes the less you need to rely on the armour.

I'm not sure I would like the ability to be able to freely move around skill points as is in an rpg. One, because it would hamper replayability, and two because I can't think of a system in which it would not mess with my immersion. Why would my character suddenly forget how to fight with swords only to gain a sudden proficiency with alchemy? But that might only be due to a lack of imagination on my part :P Perhaps some sort of sci-fi rpg with a broken robot that reroutes power to its various systems and repairs them in the progress?

So what happens when I level Heal to 5 with a combination of permanent points and skill points, then put skill points into party heal. If I remove the skill points from Heal (dropping it below 5 again) do I lose access to Party Heal, and therefore regain that skill point, or is it considered an allowable exploit to stack skill points to gain early access to a higher tiered skill?

Maxing every skill would, needless to say, take a while. Only a small minority of players will run into the situation of having skill points and no way to spend them (though it is still a situation that should be tested, just to make sure you can't softlock the game that way).

Also, perhaps there are some skills that aren't "used" in the conventional sense; for example, passive skills. While some could be said to get experience, how would you handle a skill like HP up (which increases the max HP of the character possessing the skill)? Also, don't forget that there are some skills that are infrequently used, but when you need them, you *need* them; for example, status cures and revives (assuming there isn't some other skill (or combination of skills) that allows for a strategy where character death is commonplace and accepted (like if a skill kills the caster)). I could mention that some JRPGs let you do something along these lines. For example, Final Fantasy 5 lets you change a character's Job and secondary Ability anytime you can access the menu; so you can, for example, instantly turn your Knight into a White Mage. That is an interesting question. I am thinking that you would lose access to Party Heal in this situation.

On the other hand, what if the player has gained a permanent level of Party Heal, but then removes skill points from Heal? My first idea would be that the player would lose access to Party Heal, but the game would still remember the permanent skill level that was gained, and if the player gains access to it again (by putting the points back into Heal), the permanent level of Party Heal would still be there.

It's an interesting idea and could probably be made to work. Personally, I prefer simplicity and would also far rather a developer spend time making all skills useful rather than what you tend to get in games that have skill systems: a handful of must-haves with a bunch of useless or marginal other skills.

By having overskill. Titan Quest does this, where each skill has a max number of points you can put into them, but you can also pick up items that add additional skill points. No matter what, you can always allocate the max number of skill points to a skill ignoring any item bonuses, and there can be up to 4 items you're wearing which can add such a bonus making the maximum skill points in any given skill up to 4 units beyond the base maximum. For these points in excess of the maximum, the game continues to scale the skills similarly as if there were 4 additional skill levels beyond the maximum, however they can ONLY be reached by using item bonuses. Another way of visualizing it is that the maximum number of points you can manually put into a skill are 4 less than the absolute maximum the game allows for that skill, requiring you to wear items with bonuses to reach maximum skill achievement.

I have been a big fan of the modder Tejon on the Elder Scrolls games. And in Oblivion especially, he made many mods to address stats at character creation, leveling, skill increasing. His basic approach was to keep the gain-skill-points-by-using-the-skill system. But to get rid of leveling up. It all happens in the background. One of my favorite twists of his was having skills degrade with disuse.

I'm not a big fan of respeccing. It seems to me it has its place in arpgs where the endgame - which you can't foresee - calls for a substantially different approach than the earlier game. In that case, respeccing saves the player frustration. But better still would be to design the endgame better.

Outside of that, I don't like respeccing, especially if it can be done often.

What about games like Etrian Odyssey, which are clearly not what are sometimes called ARPGs, but where the endgame does require specific setups?

I personally love respecing; that actually is part of the reason why Final Fantasy 5 is one of my favorite games, as you can change your setup anytime you can access the menu. Want to change your Knight into a White Mage? You can do that in an instant, and you can easily change back whenever you want. (This idea wouldn't be that extreme, especially since you wouldn't have *that* many skill points.)

I *really* don't like this idea. In fact, I would prefer some way to get some level of a skill without having to actively use it, especially if it's a rarely used skill (like resurrection in typical setups, for example). Personally, I would be inclined to do the reverse; you could put skill points into Party Heal up to level 5, but to get any more levels of that skill, you have to actually use this. (Wizardry 8 does something like this; you get 9 skill points at level up, of which 3 can be spent on any one skill, but you can't raise a skill past 75 this way; you actually have to use the skill to get the last 25 points.)

To me, I don't see leftover skill points as being an issue; rather, I see the fact that using a permanently maxed skill gives you no bonus as being a bigger issue. One idea is to make it so that using such skills, or performing actions that aren't related to skill use (like basic attacks, defending, item use, or running away), would be how you get "global" skill points; they would be gained much more slowly than skill levels, however.

In addition to the skills, you could have a job system attached that also requires skill points to activate. You have enough skill points to activate all jobs from the get-go, but this would prevent you from improving skills. So you focus on a job or two, master all the skills, then focus on another skill tree. Once every skill in the game has been mastered, the player can use all of their flexible skill points to activate all jobs.

The jobs more or less exist as a way to package together a competent and compatible skill set - mastering skills is a gradual removal of the training wheels, allowing the player to mix and match.

Daggerfall had that mechanics. On one hand it will probably put too much attention on reordering skill points, on the other hand it will mean one can experiment with skills and invest in a skill without being worried about future implications.

Seems interesting. :)

If you can reallocate every skill point at any time, why do you want a skill system in the first place?

Two things:

First, there is one reason that a skill system where you can reallocate can be desired; passive skills. Passive skills are skills that are continuously active (like the "HP Up" skill I mentioned that raises your maximum HP), rather than skills you activate. Since it doesn't take a turn to activate them, having lots of passive skills will make you very powerful and be potentially gamebreaking; the skill system then serves to limit how many of them you can have active at once.

Second, the system I described does not let you reallocate skill levels gained through usage, and the idea is that most of your skill levels will come from usage, with skill points being only a small factor. If you only have 3 skill points and want Party Heal (using the example above), you would need to learn Heal by spending SP, use Heal until you gain 3 permanent levels, and only then would you be able to use SP to get Heal level 5 and Party Heal level 1.