I am working on the Schema for an Online video game.

Among all the DB tables are two specific tables called: heroes and skills.

The Heroes table will contain the general make of a user's playable character.

Heroes will be something like:
hero_id
hero_name
hero_level
hero_type
...

The Skills table will contain the definitions for all possible skills in the game.

The Skills table will be something like:
skill_id
skill_name
skill_type
...

Every character will have a max of 10 unqiue skill, and then a possible 10 common skills for a constant max of 20 skills per hero.

Would it be better to Store the hero skill information on the hero table like:
hero_skill_0, hero_skill_1, hero_skill_2, ..., hero_skill_9
hero_common_skill_0, hero_common_skill_1, hero_common_skill_2, ..., hero_common_skill_9

OR

Have a third table called: HeroSkills which is simply something like:
hero_skills_id
hero_id
skill_id
skill_level

I believe that having a 3rd table would be best practice... but my concern is in the 0.000001% chance the game gets big. With a lot of players the HeroSkills table will be 20 times larger then the heroes table, but will also be getting alot more transactions.

So what do you think.

Thanks in advance for the help,
Rich

separate table

here's a simple test: using the 20 numbered columns model, write the sql query that finds all players that have both skills 9 and 37

Point taken,

Thanks for the fast reply!

-Rich