Suggestion to improve leveling and immersion: Add books, teachers and learning

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In real life, there are multiple ways to learn a skill:
- You can go out and just try doing it yourself to learn by trial-and-error and your own experience.
- You can find resources for self-study
- Or you can find someone knowledgeable in the subject to show you the rope.
,etc..

Currently in Bannerlord, you can only do the first one, and a lot of people have expressed that the current system feels awfully slow, unsatisfying and need tweaking. I agree with that and also think that having alternative ways to improve skills would make the game experience less monotonous and more immersive for RP purpose. It would also enable you to alter your playstyle to a certain extent.

1. Weapon trainers:
This is not a super necessary addition to the game, since combat skills are in a pretty good spot, mostly just need adjustment to the EXP gain rate, IMO. You can fight for real or do practice fights, tournaments...

I am thinking about adding weapon trainers that you can pay to spar with using certain weapons and gain skill experience.You can balance this by scaling the cost to your current weapon skill level and/or putting a cap on it, say if your skill is 50+, trainers won't train you anymore. You can also make the training into a challenge, for example: you have to beat the trainer for maximum experience gain at the end of the spar, otherwise you only gain a smaller portion.

For ranged weapons, timed target challenges for exp gain sound good to me.

2. Books
M&B1 has books to add something for your character to gain during downtime, and I think an updated version would work great for Bannerlord. Here is what I propose:
- Books are consumables that give a certain amount of experience points in a certain skill. You choose one book to read and when you rest, you would gain experience in that skill from the book until it runs out.
- Books are mostly meant to give you an early boost to certain skill, to get from uselessly low-level to passable, so the experience gain and cost would be adjusted accordingly.
- You can add rare, expensive advanced books for higher level, so each skill would have 1 basic book and 1 advanced book that required a certain skill level before you can even read it.

3. Teachers for non-combat skills
- You pay a teacher NPCs money and spend a certain amount of time in town for the lesson, after that you gain experience in that skill.
- Again, this is mostly for boosting up skills that you are lacking in, so the experience gain might give you lots of skill points when you are a noob, but at higher level, it wouldn't even make a dent.
- Can be balanced by cost, skill cap, etc..
- For interaction with Health recovery and Smithing Stamina, I think it's fair that taking lesson should slow Stamina and Health recovery since you are not getting full bed rest bonus, but you are also not doing anything physical so recovery should still be higher than when you are moving outside.
- Can also have Master-level teachers that is super expensive.
- Maybe high-skill companions can be your teacher too?

** One last note is that it's might even be better if all these also apply to your companions! So you can customise their skills a bit more, but prepare to pay some pretty penny.

Of course, this is just my personal opinion and suggestions. Cheers!
 
Random thought: Before the printing press, another thing that made books more expensive was the labor required to make paper, whether it was actual plant fiber or vellum. Advancements in loom technology eventually made cloth cheaper, which increased the availability of rags for paper making.
So, it might make a certain amount of sense to have rag collectors who are willing to pay extra for low-level cloth gear, as part of the supply chain for making books.
 
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