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Old 12-15-2018, 02:36 PM   #11
Brandy
 
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Default Re: Making Skills Matter Again

This isn't really on track with the suggestion, but one way to help skills be a better buy is to let fewer skills do more things. Things like Professional Skills, Expert Skills, and skills like Soldier. If characters can buy 10 skills and be competent in a broad set of adventuring tasks rather than having to buy 30+ distinct skills, then the balance of points for skills versus attributes works a little better.

(It goes without saying that floating skills to other attributes helps here as well, but I know that not everyone loves doing that as much as I do.)
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Old 12-15-2018, 03:06 PM   #12
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Default Re: Making Skills Matter Again

Hi

What I do is actually use the wild card point rule but without wild cards. Basically for every 12 points you spend you get one wildcard point but only for the skill itself. I usually limit other meta currencies to make this attractive.

therefore a person with a high skill would be able auto succeed on a roll and even buy criticals.
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Old 12-15-2018, 03:27 PM   #13
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Default Re: Making Skills Matter Again

I think you are breaking way too many things with that proposed "fix". High skill exists specifically so that you can soak up higher penalties and still likely succeed.

Skills matter a lot if you low enough attribute limits and high enough difficulties.

So the way to make skill relevant is to make the effects you get for skills is by making the skill you get for 1 point with maximum attribute too low for many harder tasks.

In my current high power fantasy campaign the players have a lot of non wildcard skills where they have spent 20-40 points and wild card skills with 200+ points.

I also have two house rules that further increase the effectiveness of high points in skills. Both are based on "ranks" in skill, 1 pt=1rank 2, 2pt=2rank, 4pt=3rank, 8pt=4rank, 12pt=5rank, 16pt=6rank and so on)
1) Taking extra time is limited to +rank, not +5.
2) I allow extra effort in any task, the bonus of such is also limited to +rank. (I also use a longer FP recovery for long term tasks, as minimum recovery time for FP is 10 time the use time, with the minimum still being 5/10minutes).
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Old 12-15-2018, 03:59 PM   #14
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Default Re: Making Skills Matter Again

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brandy View Post
This isn't really on track with the suggestion, but one way to help skills be a better buy is to let fewer skills do more things. Things like Professional Skills, Expert Skills, and skills like Soldier. If characters can buy 10 skills and be competent in a broad set of adventuring tasks rather than having to buy 30+ distinct skills, then the balance of points for skills versus attributes works a little better.

(It goes without saying that floating skills to other attributes helps here as well, but I know that not everyone loves doing that as much as I do.)
Oddly enough, that's largely what I'm doing now. My Professional Skill: Law Enforcement Officer handles things like cuffing, Administrative Paperwork, Technical Arrest (ie, whether the arrest is sound, but violations of process allows the Perp to go free) etc.

Because Cyberpunk 2020's skills aren't 100% compatible with GURPS skills, sometimes I will roll that into a professional skill as well (such as Professional Skill: Stylist). That skill allows a person to keep up with current clothing trends acting as a sort of Current Events: Styles, along with knowing how to increase the person's apparent attraction level by +1 (which includes makeup etc). I'm doing the same with the Professional Skill: Private Detective, which permits a Private Detective to know when he's going outside the acceptable boundaries of the law, certain fast talk skill rolls when dealing with police officers to get them off the hock etc.

Since Soldier sets the tone by allowing skill rolls for subset skills such as explosive ordinance disposal and the like, it makes sense to have professional skills do similar things.
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Old 12-15-2018, 05:17 PM   #15
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Default Re: Making Skills Matter Again

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Originally Posted by Donny Brook View Post
I once played in a game where the GM had us buy all skills off a base of 10, and then had Attributes give a modifier to the roll calculated at half the Attribute's value over or under 10. When we converted existing characters we ended up with blundering buffoons.
So basically, he made skills base of stat/2+5, which has no effect on normal people, but makes multi-hundred point characters with many points in DX and IQ suddenly become much less competent.

If you did this to the guys in my current campaign, their primary skills would go from stupidly high to only slightly stupidly high, but it would seriously ding their general competence. I don't know that this would help my game any.

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So, without messing with main costs... Hm, there's an idea discussed very occasionally, that plays with costs but in a very minor area: buy up defaults from other skills at only 1 pt per level (i.e., get both Broadsword and Shortsword at the same level for only 2 pts). That makes lots of skills much cheaper, when defaults exist.
I see most people wanting to make defaults from skills less effective, not more. That the best way to raise your Guns (Pistol) if you already have a high Guns (Rifle) is to put no more than four points into Pistol and then just keep raising Rifle bothers a lot of people.
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Old 12-15-2018, 05:29 PM   #16
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One of my "peeves" if you will, is the idea that someone who has NO actual experience with a skill (ie by default) can start off with "professional level" skill at all.

A stat 16 individual with a -4 default penalty, is functionally the same as a professional, and that just bothers me. Since I don't allow enough starting character points to permit easy attainable purchases of Stat 16, this rarely rears its ugly head in my campaigns. But it does rear its ugly head with talents of level 4 plus IQ 14 (for instance). Zero points into Tactics for such a character results in Tactics skill 12.
I like the solution proposed by Douglas Cole somewhere in Pyramid of using stat/2 as the default for skills that currently have stat-5 as their default, and adjusting from there for easier and harder defaults. If talents raising defaults too high (and with this scheme Stat-14 + Talent-4 gives a default of Skill-11 to a skill that normally defaults to Stat-5 - better than the RAW's Skill-13, but still fairly good), add the talent to the stat before dividing by two (though that does mess with some of the other rules from that article, I think).
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Old 12-15-2018, 09:55 PM   #17
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Default Re: Making Skills Matter Again

Quote:
Originally Posted by Rupert View Post
I see most people wanting to make defaults from skills less effective, not more. That the best way to raise your Guns (Pistol) if you already have a high Guns (Rifle) is to put no more than four points into Pistol and then just keep raising Rifle bothers a lot of people.
I see most people having a beef with high default from attributes, not other skills. The eternal problem is the one the OP revisits: Why spend a lot on skills when attributes are almost always the better purchase?

Then there's another problem (less-discussed, but still a problem), the one you mention: When Skill B defaults from Skill A, why spend anything on Skill B? Just crank up A and get B for free. There's no tradeoff, no decision to be made.

The idea of spending 1 pt/level to raise Skill B addresses this. When you have Skill A at DX +5, you can get raise both skills a level by dropping another 4 point into Skill A – or you can get another level of just Skill B by dropping 1 point into that. There's now an interesting decision to be made.

Maybe there's some big flaw in the idea. But if nothing else, it tackles a pretty obvious issue: that, compared to attributes, GURPS skills are truly expensive (after the first 2 or 3 levels). An example (of the sort that everyone here is long familiar with): Once a knight has sunk the initial 4 pts each into Shield, Broadsword, Axe/Mace, and Polearm, he can spend 16 points to raise them all another level. Or he can spend 15 points for DX (without the Basic Speed portion) to get the same boost to those four skills – and dozens more, plus a boost to general DX rolls... Again, there's no interesting tradeoff, just one obviously better choice.

The issue itself is inevitable; without some unpleasantly complex hacking of skill costs, it's inevitable that there'll be some number of skills, n, where boosting the attribute becomes a better deal than boosting the skills. What I think dissatisfies some players is simply that n is so small.

A super-cheap cost of raising Skill B from its Skill A default wouldn't eliminate the problem, but would alleviate it somewhat. At least where inter-skill defaults exist, as in (some) melee weapons.

Notes:

1) Standard disclaimer: None of the above suggests "OMG things are broken and must be fixed ASAP". The game works, it's fun, life goes on. Just pondering picky points for possible improvement.

2) On that reduced cost to raise Skill B from Skill A: I think long ago I suggested 2 pts/level as an appropriate discount cost (so it'd still cost more than a technique), but I recall being shot down with "no, it should be 1 pt/level". So that's what I play with above.
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Old 12-15-2018, 10:15 PM   #18
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Default Re: Making Skills Matter Again

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I think you are breaking way too many things with that proposed "fix". High skill exists specifically so that you can soak up higher penalties and still likely succeed.

.
Not sure if you are responding to my post or the original one, but I don't think my fix is breaking anything. you get Wildcard points for spending 12 points on a skill as written in the official rules and that is a better deal than what I am offering, since I am only giving it to you for regular skills. If anything I am giving my players a worse deal than what you can get under the existing rules, so I can't see how it would do any damage to the system. What it does do is make experts shine because they are the only ones able to cheat rolls with met currency which I think helps balance out the attribute problem outlined by the OP.
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Old 12-15-2018, 10:34 PM   #19
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Originally Posted by cupbearer View Post
Not sure if you are responding to my post or the original one, but I don't think my fix is breaking anything.
I was talking about the original post.
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Old 12-15-2018, 10:52 PM   #20
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I was talking about the original post.
Oh okay gotcha.
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