Steve Jackson Games Forums - Another idea for the old skill VS Attribute conundrum

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Re: Another idea for the old skill VS Attribute conundrum

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pahn (Post 1765577)

This makes sense to me. Or base attribute costs on standard deviations from the mean. Going from 10 to 11 is cheap, but going from 14 to 15 is a lot more expensive. So basically, faster than linear growth, but not necessarily exponential.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pahn (Post 1765577)

Another option is to find some other benefit that can be attached to skill growth to make it worth the extra cost. Spitballing here, but bonuses to defense against weapons at which one is highly skilled is one possibility. Maybe modify critical hit/failure table results. At a certain level of skill, for example, you'll never get the worst possible results. Allow for mini-crits that don't automatically succeed, but provide some benefit.

In Ars Magica, characters are always entitled to a bee so-called Specialization for any skill they've learned, a narrower purpose, a subset of total skill usage, for which the skill functions as 1 higher. I found that to appear to greatly aid characterization and individuality, when I bought and read my first Ars Magica supplement, "Medieval Tapestry", and so I decided to use the same principle in Sagatafl.

GURPS uses a different skill scale, where skills don't start from zero, and furthermore where a +1 bonus is not so meaningful. But if one wanted to encourage the putting CPs into skills, one could say that any character gets a free +2 specialization once he has put 8 CP into a skill. Possibly even a 2nd one at 20 CP although I'd advise caution here, simply for reasons of character sheet space and readability.

A specialization can be anything that isn't the core use of the skill, for instance generic attacking isn't a valid specialization for a weapon skill, but generic parry might be. A particular form of attacking could also be, such as one form of All-Out-Attack or possibly even all forms. Or any attack that requires expenditure of Extra Effort FP.

The downside of that is that it creates a break point that players will want to reach, but then once they've reached it, they don't have much incentive to continue going further.

Re: Another idea for the old skill VS Attribute conundrum

Quote:

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen (Post 1765621)

Exponential is almost certainly overkill, yes. There are other non-linear options.

I do think part of the way forward, for GURPS, is to formally and explicitly reduce Human variety, so that superHuman is defined to start not at DX/IQ 21 but at something like DX/IQ 16.

And keep in mind, I'm talking about a change to the character creation rules, not a change specifically to the player character creation rules.

(HT might well benefit from a similar reduction in variety span.)

In Ars Magica, characters are always entitled to a bee so-called Specialization for any skill they've learned, a narrower purpose, a subset of total skill usage, for which the skill functions as 1 higher. I found that to appear to greatly aid characterization and individuality, when I bought and read my first Ars Magica supplement, "Medieval Tapestry", and so I decided to use the same principle in Sagatafl.

GURPS uses a different skill scale, where skills don't start from zero, and furthermore where a +1 bonus is not so meaningful. But if one wanted to encourage the putting CPs into skills, one could say that any character gets a free +2 specialization once he has put 8 CP into a skill. Possibly even a 2nd one at 20 CP although I'd advise caution here, simply for reasons of character sheet space and readability.

A specialization can be anything that isn't the core use of the skill, for instance generic attacking isn't a valid specialization for a weapon skill, but generic parry might be. A particular form of attacking could also be, such as one form of All-Out-Attack or possibly even all forms. Or any attack that requires expenditure of Extra Effort FP.

The downside of that is that it creates a break point that players will want to reach, but then once they've reached it, they don't have much incentive to continue going further.

The real downside is that it would impose even more detail where it isn't necessarily needed. GURPS already has hundreds of Skills, so insisting on specialisations just further bloats that effective number.

Re: Another idea for the old skill VS Attribute conundrum

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yako (Post 1762266)

My idea is, for every skill that is based on a certain attribute, if you have a skill you invested more points into, half the cost of buying that skill.

-snip-

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yako (Post 1762266)

Basically, this would be similar to getting advantages cheap through alternative abilities and it may make the untalented but skilled character much more viable.

All I can really say is that if you like it, use it. I’m not fond of the idea, in no small part because of the implications it has for Improvement Through Study: if you’re going to provide a bulk purchase discount for skills, you really ought to have an explanation why learning two skills takes considerably less than twice as long as learning one skill does. It also makes Techniques even less cost-efficient than they currently are; and Techniques are already problematic in that regard. Why buy up a Technique for one point per +1 once you can buy up an entire skill for one point per +1?

I do think that such a bulk discount is sometimes warranted; but that’s when you’ve got a set of related skills, such that facts and/or muscle memory learned for one of them carries over to the others. For that sort of solution, you should look at Talents for inspiration; for instance, I’ve used a house rule that re-envisions the concept of Wildcard Skills as “bulk costs for sets of interrelated skills”: determine whether the set of skills is narrow (equivalent in scope to a 5-point Talent), standard (comparable to a 10-point Talent), or broad (comparable t a 15-point Talent), then buy the Wildcard Skill with a cost multiplier of ×2 if narrow, ×3 if standard, or ×4 if broad. From that point on, the usual Wildcard Skills rules apply.

To give Techniques a reasonable price, one option is to say that a single point is enough to raise it from its minimum to its maximum (or by +3 if it doesn’t have a maximum). This makes Techniques much faster to improve than is currently the case; but IMHO, they should be much easier to learn than they are. If I was willing to engage in fractional point accounting, I’d divide the cost of Techniques by five.