Improving Existing Skills

[Desthro]

I've always handled this by just letting players buy up skills they've used in play when they had the points available. Techniques were rarely, if ever, used to sink a few extra CP into, and I was wondering if anyone had tried using techniques as prerequisite for the buying of skill? If you had CP to put into a skill, you could buy up a technique, and when you had enough points strewn across various techniques, you could deduct the points from the techniques and buy up the underlying skill. I'd like to require the improvement of four different techniques before being able to improve a skill (taking 1 point from each technique), and maybe even require cycling across different techniques to let them improve.

Interesting? Waste of time? Good way to get players to see they depth of a skill? Interesting campaign seed perhaps - Learn from many masters? Could also be extra paperwork... >.> Nobody likes that.

[johndallman]

Having more skill is generally more useful than buying up one or two techniques. The exception is when you want to do something regularly that has a large penalty, but you have enough skill for other tasks. This has led one of the players in Infinite Cabal to max out Targeted Attack (Greatsword swing/neck).

The advance-via-techniques approach has the problem that many skills don't have four techniques, so you'd have to invent a lot of them. And how would you handle Hard techniques? They take 2 points to buy the first level.

[Captain Joy]

Originally Posted by Desthro

I've always handled this by just letting players buy up skills they've used in play when they had the points available…

Maybe a simpler way to go would be to say no more than 1 character point may be spent on a skill each session/adventure/in-game-month/whatever-you-want-to-use. This would force them to put a point into techniques between skill level ups. It would be too much book keeping, in my opinion, to insist that they keep track of how many points and when they put points into techniques such that they have to go technique, technique, technique, skill bump, technique, technique, technique, skill bump, etc.

[Desthro]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Having more skill is generally more useful than buying up one or two techniques. The exception is when you want to do something regularly that has a large penalty, but you have enough skill for other tasks.

I am very familiar with min-maxing, I was more interested in if you have used this process before, and if it was well received or fun. I liked the idea because it lowers the amount of unspent CP and puts them to use.

The advance-via-techniques approach has the problem that many skills don't have four techniques, so you'd have to invent a lot of them. And how would you handle Hard techniques? They take 2 points to buy the first level.

If there is a hard technique I'd be willing to let them take 2 points out of it, even take the points for a skill up from two hard skills, or one hard skill and two avg/easy ones. Thanks for pointing that out, I've been off the GURPS scene for a bit and my knowledge has shrunk significantly. =) And I'm all for adding or creating techniques, like removing penalties for cultural differences when using diplomacy, or lowering penalties for swimming in rivers vs open lakes, etc.

Maybe a simpler way to go would be to say no more than 1 character point may be spent on a skill each session/adventure/in-game-month/whatever-you-want-to-use. This would force them to put a point into techniques between skill level ups. It would be too much book keeping, in my opinion, to insist that they keep track of how many points and when they put points into techniques such that they have to go technique, technique, technique, skill bump, technique, technique, technique, skill bump, etc.

I'd probably be the one handling most of the paperwork and am aware of the potential pitfalls and difficulties. I just want to know if this could be a useful or fun way of handling skill ups. Seems more intriguing than the typical method.

[weby]

No idea how it would work in practice.

I have used the same basic idea for attribute raises in games at times, that is to raise an attribute you must reduce skills based on that attribute by that many points so that no skill will go down as result. It seemed to work well enough.

So to raise DX you would need to reduce DX based skills by a total of 20 points so that a skill with 2 points could give up one point each, skill with 4 points could give up 2 points each and higher could up 4 points each.

[Desthro]

Originally Posted by weby

No idea how it would work in practice.

I have used the same basic idea for attribute raises in games at times, that is to raise an attribute you must reduce skills based on that attribute by that many points so that no skill will go down as result. It seemed to work well enough.

Well enough as in, it worked, but I don't feel like it's generally a good way to go, or well enough as in, it was fun and the players didn't seem to mind it at all?

[weby]

Originally Posted by Desthro

Well enough as in, it worked, but I don't feel like it's generally a good way to go, or well enough as in, it was fun and the players didn't seem to mind it at all?

Basically it allowed them to buy attributes as partial payments, that is they would have several skills already at the level they would have at the new attribute while saving the points for it. But on other hand it did force having enough skills to be able to raise the attribute and specially for DX it was a bit difficult for some people.

I think the feel was a slight positive one, but not a big deal overall.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by weby

But on other hand it did force having enough skills to be able to raise the attribute and specially for DX it was a bit difficult for some people.

So... you've actually had Players wanting to raise stats* without having enough skills that it was cheaper to raise the stat?

I am flummoxed.






* DX and IQ. I never have the issue with ST or HT, players always want to raise those independent of skills.

[trooper6]

I think there are two different questions being asked.

One is, what process do you use for advancement?
The other is, how do you encourage the players to use techniques?

For advancement, I say you can only spend points on what you used during that session. This has the result of having characters advance in an organic way. Also, note, I don't allow people to buy down skills to up attributes. That goes against my idea of character believability. Also, it prioritizes optimization over in character choices. Also, I want choices to mean something. You make a choice. Is my character consciously working to increase her dexterity, or is she just getting better at rapier fighting? What is the in character justification?

I like that by not allowing willy-nilly point trading, you get more diversity of characters...some characters end up with higher attributes and lower points in skills, some end up with lower attributes and higher points in skills. Then you can use those differences to have interesting situations in play...you can float skills to other attributes, or based off of 10. You can do straight attribute tests. I think it is good not to make people go through strange hoops that don't make much sense in character.

So this brings up the question...how do you get the players to spend points in techniques? The answer to that is the same answer on how I encourage the players to do anything. The first is to encourage the thing you are interested in during character creation...but the more important thing is to lead by example. If you want the players to think techniques are cool, have NPCs use techniques and show that they are cool. When you show them how awesome stacking techniques can be, they'll get interested.

[weby]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

So... you've actually had Players wanting to raise stats* without having enough skills that it was cheaper to raise the stat?

I am flummoxed.

* DX and IQ. I never have the issue with ST or HT, players always want to raise those independent of skills.

Yes, in the case of DX. Basically in our games it seems that most people have only 1-2 DX skills that they want really high and some number at fair level(usually one point only), so the total number might still be low.

I have also generally limited how much skills can be above the attribute or how many points you can have in a single skill. The limit might be the maintaining skills rule B294 or a direct limit like in current campaign where the limit started at 16 points and raised slowly so that it is now 48 points. So to raise things like their primary weapon skill once at the limit they needed to raise DX.

Further in that system you could not give up the only point in a skill, only higher than that, thus they might have had 12 points in their main weapon skill, 4 in some other weapon skill and 1 point each in X skills where X could be fairly high, but they could still only get 6 points from those so they would need to put points in other skills.