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Old 11-08-2018, 09:16 AM   #11
Gnome
 
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Default 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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Old 11-08-2018, 09:27 AM   #12
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Default Re: Skills and Techniques are too expensive

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The inverse of this is to perceive attributes as too cheap. You can't really make techniques cheaper than 1 per point unless you want to deal with decimals, but if you wanted to do something like "multiply all standard point costs by 10" (200 per IQ/DX, 100 per HT/ST) as well as other advantages/disadvantages, everything would remain balanced in relation to each other but then you could opt to multiply skill costs by a smaller amount, like say 5, so that it is 20/skill or 5/technique, basically halving their costs.

That or just keep usual prices and lower costs of skills/techs to where you think appropriate and deal with a single decimal place. I think +1 to a technique should be worth at least 0.1, no need to go to two places.
But that starts to look like GURPS Vehicles, where you might be designing a tank that weighs, say, 30 tons, and then you fit in electronic devices that weigh a pound or thereabouts—and keep track of what they weigh, and add it up. It's just too fussy and too annoying. Spending a couple of hundred character points is a manageable task; spending ten times that many is going to get tedious and annoying. A lot of games, not just GURPS, seem to compress the bandwidth ratio between broad general traits and narrow specific ones, probably partly to avoid having long lists of detailed traits.

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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Last edited by whswhs; 11-08-2018 at 09:50 AM.
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Old 11-08-2018, 09:28 AM   #13
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Default Re: Skills and Techniques are too expensive

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Originally Posted by Gnome View Post
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).
For Dungeon Fantasy, I'm not sure why this is a problem. The Basic Set calls anything over 25 an "extreme" level that is "excessive and unbelievable," which pretty much describes GURPS's idea of Dungeon Fantasy characters. It also warns that having that many levels is counterproductive: you're probably not going to need all those levels, and the points you spent getting there would be better spent on other skills related to the excessive one. I would imagine this "problem" would limit itself, or else your players don't actually mind having inefficient characters (in which case the question of spending too many points on skills and techniques isn't relevant anyway).

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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Old 11-08-2018, 09:56 AM   #14
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Default Re: Skills and Techniques are too expensive

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You can't really make techniques cheaper than 1 per point unless you want to deal with decimals...
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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Old 11-08-2018, 10:29 AM   #15
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Default 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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Old 11-08-2018, 10:33 AM   #16
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Default 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.
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Old 11-08-2018, 10:39 AM   #17
whswhs
 
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Default Re: Skills and Techniques are too expensive

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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.
Doesn't everyone do that already? It's right there in the RAW.

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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Old 11-08-2018, 10:40 AM   #18
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Default Re: Skills and Techniques are too expensive

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Maybe implement a "trained only" rule, where you can't use some skills without putting points in them no matter how high the attribute.
You mean like for Body Language and Surgery now?
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Old 11-08-2018, 11:22 AM   #19
Culture20
 
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Default Re: Skills and Techniques are too expensive

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Doesn't everyone do that already? It's right there in the RAW.
It’s rarely used at my table, which is why I suggested “more often”

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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.
which is what is happening with the linear attribute cost, but just hidden...
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Old 11-08-2018, 11:25 AM   #20
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Default Re: Skills and Techniques are too expensive

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You mean like for Body Language and Surgery now?
Ah, please forgive my lack of GURPS knowledge.

Although, yes, only possibly more so.
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