Players intentionally encumber themselves to train melee skills.

[Mecares]

Players intentionally encumber themselves or use weapons with terrible to hit modifiers to train melee skills, by exploiting that skill gain is based on hit chance. This does seem to be neither realistic nor working like intended. Maybe it should be based on the enemies ability to dodge attacks only and not the actual hit-chance, so that players that want to train their fighting skills seek out worthy opponents instead of impairing their own abilities and fight harmless enemies.

Discussion about it can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/cataclysmdda/comments/6vj62a/training_by_encumbrance/

[Rivet-the-Zombie]

I see no issue here; it's the same reason why martial artists like to train while wearing body weights, and why boxers wear heavier gloves when they're sparring or working the bag.

[Mecares]

But i doubt they do it facing someone trying to kill them, and beating someone up with a cumbersome non-weapon item should certainly not improve your ability to use weapons precisely.

[Coolthulhu]

Melee skills can't be raised by encumbrance. They have only two triggers: miss and hit. You can only miss more and hit more weakly, but you don't gain any benefit from lower hit percentage.

As for dodges: dodge skill is trained when you dodge an attack, based on attack's accuracy. Necropolis has a lot of very weak attackers with very good accuracy, so it trains it very fast. This is a problem, but it's not related to encumbrance in any way.

[AlecWhite]

beating someone up with a cumbersome non-weapon

The use of a heavier weapons has historically been used in the west and in the east. You even have things like the suburitou that were training weapons specially design for its weight.

Besides the "realism" or not. There's currently no sensible way to train combat skills, nerfing the current options even more, will only increase the grind and tedium to levels that not even Elona+ does.

[kevingranade]

What seems to be happening is that players want to miss a lot, this does in fact nonsensically train melee, since melee skill gain is roughly 2x as high when you miss, ever since the "cleanup" here ff6eed3453303870e3df9823b981eb9b50cb9b33, which swapped the skill gain of hits vs misses.

[kevingranade]

Whoops, well I accidentally hit enter when creating the commit, which pushed it: fa441014cde2ca10a494d56d7f0c9111754505b2 I was going to open a PR and discuss the adjustment, but considering it was a pretty clear mistake in the first place, we can take reversing it as the new normal, and discus whether that's sufficient or not in a new issue if anyone is interested.

I'm closing this issue as the scenario presented in the OP should no longer occur.