11-08-2018, 09:16 AM | #11 |
Join Date: Feb 2011
Location: Cambridge, MA
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Re: Skills and Techniques are too expensive
Not all skills are created equal. If you’re a DF fighter, you basically want one weapon skill as high as possible. It’s arguably too cheap at 4/level, as skill levels can easily skyrocket into the 30s and 40s (I charge a UB for absurd skill levels to slow this tendency a bit). If you’re a DF mage (and you want to be the typical “generalist” caster), you will want to learn 50+ spells and pump IQ/Magery as high as you’re allowed to. A good house rule might be to use relative rather than absolute skill levels when assessing energy and time reductions. So I think that there is no good “generic” answer here. It depends on the skill, the attribute, and the game in question.
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11-08-2018, 09:27 AM | #12 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Skills and Techniques are too expensive
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The GURPS ratio seems to be that you have one broad talent or two narrow talents per stat; two or three high skills per broad talent, or one per narrow talent; one hard technique and two or three average techniques per high skill; and more or less as many low skills as you like. Or you can cut out talents and have four or five high skills per stat. That gives you a fairly focused character, who can be summed up quickly in terms of what their best abilities are, at every level of resolution. Which of those ratios would you want to boost, and why? Say, for example, we double each ratio: A stat costs 200 points, a talent costs some multiple of 25, a skill costs a maximum of 8/level, and a Hard technique still costs 2. So you could built a character with one high stat, three medium width talents, half a dozen high skills per talent, and three hard techniques per skill, or a total of eighteen really high skills and around fifty hard techniques. Would that be better? Or would the character start to lack focus and look like Doc Savage, Batman, or Corwin of Amber? Addendum: It would be possible to do a less drastic bandwidth decompression. Say that a stat costs 40 points, a talent costs 8/16/24, a skill costs 1/2/5, and a Hard technique still costs 2. Then you could have one high stat, two medium width talents, three high skills per talent or a total of six or seven per stat, and two Hard techniques per high skill or a total of maybe a dozen. That still seems a bit too many things to be "especially good at," but it's not as huge as the really heroic version above.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. Last edited by whswhs; 11-08-2018 at 09:50 AM. |
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11-08-2018, 09:28 AM | #13 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ronkonkoma, NY
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Re: Skills and Techniques are too expensive
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If a GM wants a more realistic campaign, then he or she should set an arbitrary limit on skill levels — also recommended in the Basic Set. |
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11-08-2018, 09:56 AM | #14 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Nashville, TN
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Re: Skills and Techniques are too expensive
Back in the early days of 4e I remember a few suggestions for improving technique costs not by lowering them to fractional points, but to have 1 point in a technique increase the technique by +2.
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I didn't realize who I was until I stopped being who I wasn't. Formerly known as Bookman- forum name changed 1/3/2018. |
11-08-2018, 10:29 AM | #15 |
Join Date: Feb 2014
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Re: Skills and Techniques are too expensive
linear skill cost? If all skill levels cost 1CP each, you still end up with an attribute disparity versus 21 skills based on that attribute, but that’s better than just a few. The other possibility to consider is forcing alternate attributes more often. guns:IQ for gun knowledge, Applied Mathematics:Dex to default at billiards, etc. That way, a high skill level helps with what would normally be a bad roll for a “dump” attribute.
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11-08-2018, 10:33 AM | #16 |
Join Date: Jun 2017
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Re: Skills and Techniques are too expensive
Maybe implement a "trained only" rule, where you can't use some skills without putting points in them no matter how high the attribute.
Maybe even extend that to saying that you can't have a default from the attribute higher than the level in the skill. |
11-08-2018, 10:39 AM | #17 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Skills and Techniques are too expensive
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If I were revising GURPS, I would be tempted to have skills go 1/2/4/8/16/32 and so on, or maybe 1/2/5/10/20/50 and so on. That is, make stats a harder limit on maximum skill. Really, it doesn't make sense to me that a character with IQ 8 could dump 20 points into Chemistry and have Chemistry-12.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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11-08-2018, 10:40 AM | #18 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Skills and Techniques are too expensive
You mean like for Body Language and Surgery now?
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
11-08-2018, 11:22 AM | #19 | |
Join Date: Feb 2014
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Re: Skills and Techniques are too expensive
It’s rarely used at my table, which is why I suggested “more often”
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11-08-2018, 11:25 AM | #20 |
Join Date: Jun 2017
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Re: Skills and Techniques are too expensive
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