Quote:
Originally Posted by Yako
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.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Yako
Basically, this would be similar to getting advantages cheap through alternative abilities and it may make the untalented but skilled character much more viable.
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All I can really say is that if you like it, use it. I’m not fond of the idea, in no small part because of the implications it has for Improvement Through Study: if you’re going to provide a bulk purchase discount for skills, you really ought to have an explanation why learning two skills takes considerably less than twice as long as learning one skill does. It also makes Techniques even less cost-efficient than they currently are; and Techniques are
already problematic in that regard. Why buy up a Technique for one point per +1 once you can buy up an
entire skill for one point per +1?
I
do think that such a bulk discount is sometimes warranted; but that’s when you’ve got a set of related skills, such that facts and/or muscle memory learned for one of them carries over to the others. For that sort of solution, you should look at Talents for inspiration; for instance, I’ve used a house rule that re-envisions the concept of Wildcard Skills as “bulk costs for sets of interrelated skills”: determine whether the set of skills is narrow (equivalent in scope to a 5-point Talent), standard (comparable to a 10-point Talent), or broad (comparable t a 15-point Talent), then buy the Wildcard Skill with a cost multiplier of ×2 if narrow, ×3 if standard, or ×4 if broad. From that point on, the usual Wildcard Skills rules apply.
To give Techniques a reasonable price, one option is to say that a single point is enough to raise it from its minimum to its maximum (or by +3 if it doesn’t have a maximum). This makes Techniques much faster to improve than is currently the case; but IMHO, they
should be much easier to learn than they are. If I was willing to engage in fractional point accounting, I’d divide the cost of Techniques by five.