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Old 09-16-2013, 04:46 AM   #11
SCAR
 
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Default Re: Attribute effect on learning

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Originally Posted by otghand View Post
But the attribute being higher does not yield a faster skill improvement, only a higher base when the first Character point is earned. Given the diminishing return on improvement above 11 one could argue that with higher attributes you improve slower. It seems to me that if 200 hours is what it takes for an average character of attribute 10 to earn a CP then less time might be required at higher attribute levels.
You might want to look at Talents (B89) - an advantage representing a 'natural aptitude' for a set of closely related skills. Talents include a reduction in the time required to learn those skills in play.

To my mind, Talents better represent an ability to pickup a skill more quickly than higher base attributes.
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Old 09-16-2013, 03:58 PM   #12
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Default Re: Attribute effect on learning

The roll to see if you can put earned points into a skill that you rolled on default during the adventure is an IQ roll.
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Old 09-16-2013, 04:06 PM   #13
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Default Re: Attribute effect on learning

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The simplest "multiplicative" approach starting from GURPS would be flat cost skills (e.g. treat all skills as if bought up from an attribute of 10), and change the time required to earn a point from 200 hours to say 2000 hours/attribute.
And, depending on how you define skill levels, that can trivially be turned into an additive system by just defining skill level as the logarithm of time spent.
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Old 09-16-2013, 04:22 PM   #14
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Default Re: Attribute effect on learning

I'm sure Mr. Stoddard will be along soon to bring this up, but his Locations: Worminghall has a monthly roll against "IQ + Magery" (IIRC, don't have book in front of me) to determine how effective teaching was. In the 8-month school year, it meant that gifted students could expect to gain around 4 skill points of spells per year. Not-so-gifted would probably gain around 3 (wild-a**ed-guess).
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Old 09-16-2013, 04:52 PM   #15
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Default Re: Attribute effect on learning

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I'm sure Mr. Stoddard will be along soon to bring this up, but his Locations: Worminghall has a monthly roll against "IQ + Magery" (IIRC, don't have book in front of me) to determine how effective teaching was. In the 8-month school year, it meant that gifted students could expect to gain around 4 skill points of spells per year. Not-so-gifted would probably gain around 3 (wild-a**ed-guess).
It should be noted Magery is effectively a talent for spells and thaumatology, without that reaction mod. But it does include the reduction in learning time.
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Old 09-17-2013, 12:13 AM   #16
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Default Re: Attribute effect on learning

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It should be noted Magery is effectively a talent for spells and thaumatology, without that reaction mod. But it does include the reduction in learning time.
The whole "reduced learning time" of Talents is crap, since it doesn't interact with point cost. It means that I cannot know in advance whether I'll get a huge benefit from it, during the campaign, or no benefit at all. So in the final analysis, I think it should have been omitted.



It's also bad game design in general, to have character creation work in one way, but then after game start, character advancement works in a different way.

Having it like that strongly encourages players to metagame think character creation, and making the decision to not buy certain skills during character creation, or only buy them to low levels, because if they postpone development of those skills until the character advancement phase, post-gamestart, then they'll enjoy some kind of attribute-derived discount that wasn't simulatively present during character creation.

Or the reverse (although I imagine it's less common) where you get some kind of attribute-derived discount when buying a skill during character creation, but get no discount (or a notably smaller discount) during character advancement.

The version of BRP that I'm familiar with, "Drager og Daemoner Ekspert", does it like that (the non-reverse case), and it's quite possible that other BRP versions also have this flaw. And I believe I've heard that some or all versions of Storyteller are also like that.



Also, for any kind of multiplicative system, where some kind of attribute or other talent interacts with point cost, you don't want attribute/talent to be trainable, because then you get a huge increase in complexity, in that you need to define, during character creation, whether the character first trained the attribute and then trained the skill, or first the skill and then the attribute. How do you explain that to a spreadsheet? It's actually possible to do, but it's a ginormous increase in complexity, and I'm perfectly happy with non-trainable attributes (except of course Strength - eventually I decided to not have Strength affect any skill Aptitudes, thereby solving that problem).

Using multiplicative with untrainable attributes, or using additive regardless of whether attributes can be trained or not, means that you get a character creation experience where you can just spend your points, without having to worry about the order in which the trainings occured in.

I'm a fan of CV-based character backstories, where the player describes year-by-year what the character did, and where he did it. But I don't think it's good to involve that directly in character creation. Especially since most skills are learned over long stretches of time. In GURPS terms, the character might have trained Axe/Mace to 2 CP in his youth, then over the next half decade accumulated 1 further CP, then he got captured and enslaved, and sent to gladiator school, and gained 5 CP in the span of only half a year, then he won some fights and was freed, and adventured for half a decade earning a further 4 CP during that period of time.

I don't think it's worth the trouble, to explain such a detailed chronology to a character creation spreadsheet.
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Old 09-18-2013, 06:08 AM   #17
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Default Re: Attribute effect on learning

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Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen View Post
The whole "reduced learning time" of Talents is crap, since it doesn't interact with point cost.

It's also bad game design in general, to have character creation work in one way, but then after game start, character advancement works in a different way.
I don't care for it either, but I don't think this is a sensible reason. It's actually quite consistent, stuff costs the same number of character points before and after character creation. What Talent does is modify the rules for determining how long it takes to earn a character point through study for this particular skill. This is a perfectly reasonable thing for a game mechanic to vary (not everybody learns everything at the same speed), and something that varies even more drastically during character creation, unless your rules set enforces all characters with the same number of points start at exactly the same age.
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Old 09-18-2013, 07:29 AM   #18
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Default Re: Attribute effect on learning

Were did you come up with the effective levels of skill (13=Professional, 11=skilled amateur)? Is this in a book I have missed or are these made up?

I tend to make my PC's and NPC's more based off descriptions like these than just points and the like.
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Old 09-18-2013, 08:04 AM   #19
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Default Re: Attribute effect on learning

"Choosing your skill levels" p172 in Basic Set: Characters.
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Old 09-18-2013, 09:12 AM   #20
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Default Re: Attribute effect on learning

Ah. Saw that page, but it seemed like (and was hoping) there was more of a X rank has X descriptor type thing. The page you referenced is more of an inference to levels other than expert, but thank you the same.
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