Player Paranoia and Character Surprise: How to GM

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by mcv

I think it might actually be best to base skills not on a stat - X, but on stat/2. So increasing your stat won't always increase your skills.

I've done this. It creates obvious breakpoints, which is bad. But it also means that defaulting from a very high Stat becomes much more sensible.

The way I did this was that the first point gets you from DEFAULT to DEFAULT+4, and then increases from there.

Default: 0pts
Default+4: 1pt
Default+5: 2pts
Default+6: 4pts
Default+7: 8pts

For average skills at IQ/DX of 10, this has zero impact. For low IQ/DX, the points in skills have even more impact than ususal. For high IQ/DX, it's lower.

Frex: At IQ8, 8pts in an average skill by RAW gets you Skill-10. Using STAT/2, you get Skill-11. For IQ18, RAW gets you Skill-20. STAT/2 default is 9, 8pts gets you Skill-17.