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Originally Posted by Pahn
This makes sense to me. Or base attribute costs on standard deviations from the mean. Going from 10 to 11 is cheap, but going from 14 to 15 is a lot more expensive. So basically, faster than linear growth, but not necessarily exponential.
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Exponential is almost certainly overkill, yes. There are other non-linear options.
I do think part of the way forward, for GURPS, is to
formally and explicitly reduce Human variety, so that superHuman is defined to start not at DX/IQ 21 but at something like DX/IQ 16.
And keep in mind, I'm talking about a change to the character creation rules, not a change specifically to the
player character creation rules.
(HT might well benefit from a similar reduction in variety span.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pahn
Another option is to find some other benefit that can be attached to skill growth to make it worth the extra cost. Spitballing here, but bonuses to defense against weapons at which one is highly skilled is one possibility. Maybe modify critical hit/failure table results. At a certain level of skill, for example, you'll never get the worst possible results. Allow for mini-crits that don't automatically succeed, but provide some benefit.
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In Ars Magica, characters are always entitled to a bee so-called Specialization for any skill they've learned, a narrower purpose, a subset of total skill usage, for which the skill functions as 1 higher. I found that to appear to greatly aid characterization and individuality, when I bought and read my first Ars Magica supplement, "Medieval Tapestry", and so I decided to use the same principle in Sagatafl.
GURPS uses a different skill scale, where skills don't start from zero, and furthermore where a +1 bonus is not so meaningful. But if one wanted to encourage the putting CPs into skills, one could say that any character gets a free +2 specialization once he has put 8 CP into a skill. Possibly even a 2nd one at 20 CP although I'd advise caution here, simply for reasons of character sheet space and readability.
A specialization can be anything that isn't the core use of the skill, for instance generic attacking isn't a valid specialization for a weapon skill, but generic parry might be. A particular form of attacking could also be, such as one form of All-Out-Attack or possibly even all forms. Or any attack that requires expenditure of Extra Effort FP.
The downside of that is that it creates a break point that players will want to reach, but then once they've reached it, they don't have much incentive to continue going further.