Quote:
Originally Posted by SRoach
This is out of left field, but.
How about letting a person trade in points spent on techniques for higher levels of the skill. Saying they mastered that part first, but then went on to broaden their skill. No reason they'd have to do so with the next skill improvement, but letting them keep it as an option, means the points are never "wasted", but also less often banked.
Karate is a DX/Hard skill. So raising it from DX+1 to DX+2 costs 4 points. If you have 3 points, you might spend 2 on Jump Kick, and 1 on Elbow Strike, with the intention of rolling both over into the base Karate skill once you get 1 more point to spend. Sort of how reorganizing Short Sword and Broad Sword points, and which is a default of which, is described.
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I already do it this way and it works fine. I'm a big fan of buying expensive powers piecemeal, so that you get benefits for every point you spent and aren't bank points away unnecessarily.
The thing is, I like the way ability --> talent --> skill --> technique balances right now. It encourages simple character sheets and no unnecessary specialization. What you don't want are specialization rules where you feel like you have to specialize, or worse where it makes the most sense to "specialize in everything".
With that said, Kromm was talking a week or two ago about the GURPS community applying itself to simplification and elegance, rather than coming up with five page rules systems to handle edge cases in maddening detail. And I've been pleased to see people stepping up to the plate with ideas like this.
Do we need techniques to have a difficulty? Is that extra point for hard techniques really giving us anything? It's not just about word count, it's about complexity of rules interactions, ease of learning the system, and player attention span to learn all this.
Before this thread, I'd have felt it was worth it, but now I'm thinking that having a mechanic that won't move a character's point total by more than +/-5 isn't worth the cost.