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Old 11-08-2020, 02:23 PM   #2
Anaraxes
 
Join Date: Sep 2007
Default Re: What if all skills were average difficulty?

Did you consider Wildcard Skills? Seems like the easier way to go if you don't want to deal with detailed skill lists.

Keeping track of many skills seems like a lot more work than the difficulty -- especially since the difficulty is pretty much irrelevant except at build time, and your character design tool (GCA / GCS), if you use one, takes care of that anyway.

I don't think anything would break terribly if you just made everything Average. There's a few traits that call for a H or VH skill as a prereq, but you could just ignore that. The characters will all have extra character points to play with, but that's not really any different than just picking a higher initial build total.

If you reduce the defaults much, and especially if you add a lot more defaults, you'll probably find players that just crank a few skills to max and just let everything else default from their one skill as "the most efficient". (Increasing one skill for 2 points increases them all.) You'll probably need to put in skill caps to force some breadth, and do some early GM tricks to get them to appreciate that breadth (forcing them to fight without their favorite weapon, putting in some NPCs that can show the benefit of unarmed skills even for armed fighters, social encounters with NPCs with predetermined reactions and varying modifiers for different Influence skills so it's not all Charisma diplomancer all the time, and so on).
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