[Magic] Collegio Januari And Gold In Them Thar Spells

[Darekun]

Originally Posted by Not another shrubbery

Real people usually aren't point-optimized.

Originally Posted by lexington

Real people don't even get to see their character sheets, let alone design them to have optimal stats.

Eh, the reason I've embraced Gold In Them Thar Skills rather than trying to mod the system to handle it well(and there are definitely systems that do) is that that optimization lines up with real-life cross-training. You really get football players putting points into enough DX skills that they can cash out a level of each to raise DX, programmers doing the same with IQ, etc.

(It also looks like real-world skills don't max out at 4/level, so eventually it becomes cheaper to raise the attribute this way than to raise any one skill.)

So real people(except insofar as magic is involved) putting that much study into spells would be construed as cross-training Magery(if it's trainable) and/or IQ.

Also, I suspect that the template was intended as a suggested start for PCs, in which case the pitfall should at least be mentioned. (Although I may be over-sensitive in that regard; I started RPGing with Shadowrun 2ed, and their prebuilt characters were so "abysmized" that in play, they were noticeably inferior to someone completely unfamiliar with the system designing a character.)

Originally Posted by sieurin

Agreed, though I personally lack the "system savy" to come up with any good ideas.

GURPS isn't a great starting point here; I remember someone(Irina Rempt, maybe?) from rec.games.frp.gurps using a system that handled it beautifully, based on White Wolf/Shadowrun. An attribute gives dice, each die that rolls under the skill is a success, number of successes is roughly equivalent to margin of success. I think difficulty modifiers subtracted successes.

So increasing an attribute improves the average and max but increases the absolute deviation, while increasing a skill improves the average and tightens up the absolute deviation but leaves the max alone. Someone with high attribute but low skill can achieve spectacular things, but not on command; someone with low attribute but high skill will reliably do well, but their few peaks won't be impressive.