Special benefits to high skills?

[agentdenton]

The obvious and automatic benefit to having a high skill is a better chance of success.

But how about other benefits to higher skills?

In my current fave, battlelords of the 23fd century 7e, if your weapon skill is high enough you get 'bumps', which basically let you shift a hit location roll. So a head hit could be bumped to a body hit. For reasons relevant to BL23C you may indeed want to bump a head hit to a body hit, trust me.

What about other games and benefits to higher skills beyond simply increasing your success rate?

[johndallman]

GURPS has a number of skills that give special benefits at high levels. For example, Diplomacy-20 gives +2 to all reaction rolls NPCs make to you. Animal Handling, Fast-Talk, Merchant, and several of the cinematic martial-arts skills have similar bonuses.

[agentdenton]

Originally Posted by johndallman

GURPS has a number of skills that give special benefits at high levels. For example, Diplomacy-20 gives +2 to all reaction rolls NPCs make to you. Animal Handling, Fast-Talk, Merchant, and several of the cinematic martial-arts skills have similar bonuses.

I never used the diplomacy skill, so hadn't caught that.

[KarlKost]

Originally Posted by johndallman

GURPS has a number of skills that give special benefits at high levels. For example, Diplomacy-20 gives +2 to all reaction rolls NPCs make to you. Animal Handling, Fast-Talk, Merchant, and several of the cinematic martial-arts skills have similar bonuses.

If you have 20+ in something useful for Inventing (Engineering, Alchemy, Thaumatology etc) you can also give a +1 bonus to a higher (!) skilled inventor.

There are endless examples of those cases. Even for spells - starting from 20, every 5 points on skill you have reduces energy costs by 1. And many many others

[agentdenton]

How about systems besides gurps? I have a lot of gurps stuff, but can't find players so I haven't read thru it in a while.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by agentdenton

How about systems besides gurps? I have a lot of gurps stuff, but can't find players so I haven't read thru it in a while.

Lots of games increase your odds of critical successes, which are usually only loosely defined, and hence may or may not be amazing depending on how your GM manages them. One that comes to mind as a full on system is Runequest Land of Ninja's "ki" skills that allowed you to learn to do superhuman stuff with a skill over 100%.

That last system is also somewhat related to the common option of requiring an incredible level of a skill as a prerequisite to learning an "impossible" skill or superhuman power.

Negating critical failures is fairly common too - often takes the form of a saving throw based on how much the skill exceeds the "maximum" - e.g. if you have a 125% skill, you get a 25% chance of a save vs. critical failure

Some games award you periodic allotments of some a storytelling currency - fate or force points, gold stars, inventing points, whatever - that you can spend to produce superhuman results somehow related to the skill.

There are probably others, but those are the common ones I think.

[ravenfish]

3rd edition DnD had "synergy bonuses" where, after putting the first five points in a given skill, you gained a small bonus to your rolls with related skills- being trained at Bluff made you better at Diplomacy, being trained at Handle Animal made you better at Ride, and so on.