[Yako]

Since I had been rereading the recent ALternate GURPS pyramid articles, I had been looking at the defaults based on halved attributes and such quite a bit and also at the buckets of points.

The bottom line seems to be: Even the GURPS staff does not really like the high attributes VS high skill thing.

WIth GURPS having really a lot of skills, by definition, there always WILL be point where one point of attribute X gets you more than one points in Y skills each.
Other mostly linear cost systems do have similar issues admittedly though.
For example, the newest World of Darkness iteration has skill cost only half as much as attributes (But both are limited for most character to 5 dots and there are 9 attributes VS 24 skills with no universal corellation between skill and attribute).

I did not like the buckets of points approach to skill VS attribute balance much (it basically just restricts player show to spend points with unfavourable exchange rates for some extra flexibility) and the half attribute concept, while being nice, does change a lot overall (It basically makes the "skill portion" of attributes cost double) and creates a quite different approach to Attibute roll VS skill roll which I worry about a bit.

So, I wanted to present one little idea that tries to address the issue but tries to stay more in the current frame of cost and balance.

My idea is, for every skill that is based on a certain attribute, if you have a skill you invested more points into, half the cost of buying that skill.
As an example, if you have Acrobatics at DX +2 [12] then buying Boadsword DX+2 would only be 4 instead of 8 points.

If usually buying more than four DX or IQ skills past the point where it is 4 points per level is inefficient, this would shift that point to eight skills (4+2+2+2+2+2+2+2=18).
If further levels of broad competence are needed, one could divide costs by four when having 3 higher skills.
This would give (4+2+2+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1=19) for 14 skills.

Basically, this would be similar to getting advantages cheap through alternative abilities and it may make the untalented but skilled character much more viable.

It is some extra book keeping, but a simple asterisk or such in the skill cost box could be enough to indicate if it is a "half price skill" (with two for a quarter price skill) which would then render it quite more manageable.

The only caveat I might include include is that ritual path magic and similar skill based systems should either use their own category (DX, IQ, HT, magic system a, psionic skills, etc.) or not benefit from it at all.

What are your takes on this idea?