[House Rules] Technique System Overhaul

[Bruno]

The last few campaigns I've played in, all Techniques were at half price (ie 1 point for +2 in the technique. If you needed a half point to finish buying off the last -1 of a technique, that got waived.

IE if the average technique is -5, it costs 1 point to take it to -3, and 2 points takes it to +0; it would go to -1, but since it would take a half-point to get it from -1 to 0, it gets "rounded up" to 0.

BTW: Even under vanilla rules, taking multiple techniques is not necessarily sub optimal, even if you take e.g. 3. The thing is if multiple techniques can remove penalties on the same roll. So using your Flail to entangle in close combat while lying prone - that's three different techniques. I can actually get simultaneously useful techniques for Flail up to at least five (although that would be some pretty terrible circumstances to be in) but under vanilla costs that would be a bit much.

Except. Except when e.g. training cost rules, limits on rate of skill advancement, and such are being used in a campaign. If it costs less money to learn a technique, or less time, that's attractive. If you simply are not allowed to raise your skill right now (can't find a teacher good enough, can't put more than 1 point per session in it, GM puts a hard cap of 20 points, or skill 20, or whatever in skills) then exploring techniques might be a serious consideration. Particularly if you've hit a hard ceiling like that points spent or absolute skill level cap - it's not inefficient if the "efficient" alternative is impossible.

All of these are certainly a big thing in some kinds of campaign, where the GM wants to encourage breadth over depth. There's often a hard cap to attributes in these games too.