[The Benj]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

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.)



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.

The real downside is that it would impose even more detail where it isn't necessarily needed. GURPS already has hundreds of Skills, so insisting on specialisations just further bloats that effective number.