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Seven gremlins in a trench coat
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And had the time. That would be a big thing there.
So under this particular hypothetical our Expression tree would look like this:
Expression [some rank less than A]
Music A
Dance [some rank less than A but higher than Expression]
And we would be focused on progressing music and dance. But the only skills which we need to worry and care about are the Music and Dance specialties. The question of course is with a raw skill like Empathy, how do we specialize it? The logical answer is that we base it off of the set of choices we make in the adventure mode.
Art makes sense given that we have literally never touched it ever, but we understand the thematic qualities which touch expression. The whole idea of "Even if a cultivator has never done X task before, if they are advanced enough on their Path, they can do X task better than any mortal journeyman or master" in application.
Dance doesn't really however, if they all split at the same time. It came after we had gained reason to dance, which is PLR, which came in the last five-ish months of the year IIRC.
The way it is now kinda makes sense if they split off at different times and were caused by specific actions we took, but that should mean Art should not exist, because we never had cause to even really think about the visual medium, unless you construe PLR to cause it as well as Dance due to the colorful patterns in the mist.
A thought I had @Erebeal. I will use Expression of Past Ling Qi from like several months ago as an example. We keep the progression as is, with the first split being at the advancement from C to B. We thus presume that our overall Expression score, at the time of the split(this stipulation is important), is B. We preform the split into Music and Dance. Given that Music and Dance are specializations on Expressions, I would think that the sum of their new ranks must be B. This pushes Music a little higher than B, which makes some sense as a specialization, and puts Dance around low C.
Expression and Art are gone. If we ever take up an option for Art, we generate it out of the ether based on our Music and Dance upon investing some significant fraction of our time into taking up Art.
Still a mess and a headache in the future honestly.
The way I'm really tempted to support to fix it is have no specialties. You have Expression, and then a note of text which says "Ling Qi is specialized in Music, treat all Expression based tests which use Music as [whatever rank is appropriate at the time]."
But that's because I'm a fan of qualitative tracking.
E: Yet another option is to use the idea of "Cultivators find a Thing, and then apply that Thing everywhere." Such that when we would normally derive a subskill from Expression due to reaching a cap, we consume it with a singular skill, Music. And Music persists throughout B rank, until we get to the A rank transition and eat it with another skill, like Vocals.
This whole idea is based of metaphors like "Dance is the music of motion", "Dance is the music of the body in motion" etc etc. or "Art is the music of color."
Stuff like that. But overall I think I am around to the idea of leaving it in place for now and actually experiencing it for a time.
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