[Emerikol]

So I think the game can be broken if you have players intent on breaking it. This is why I asked the question. I've dealt with some expert rules lawyers over the years so I understand how they think.

So there are a variety of approaches to "fix" the problem.
1. Just get player buyin not to do this... For me this works but is unsatisfying.

2. Make the cost increase for advancement of the same effectiveness. This is absolutely realistic in my opinion. There is a diminishing returns for improving a skill with training. Then the question becomes what is the best approach.

3. Another approach is enforced breadth. You do this by requiring something like a pyramid. So you always must have more skills at cp 1 than you do at cp 2 and so forth all the way up. I'd probably just use a term like rank to represent movement up the skill table. So an IQ-3 very hard skill or an IQ easy skill are both rank 1 when you spend that first point. The downsides of this approach are that PCs will start taking skills just to grow their pyramid and they'd become jack of all trades in some pretty weird stuff.


So my sympathies likely lay with #2 above but I'm still not sure the exact right way to do this. I've mentioned that everything over 20 costs it level-20 in addition to the base +4. You could also just keep doubling the cost so it's +4 then +8 then +16 then +32 and at some point PCs will stop improving that skill.