Power ups 11 : roll your own skills speculation

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by nudj

Why not also do it for Beam Weapons or skills with only a few specialties?

Part of it is that I intended it to cut down on having a lot of specialized skills. Another part is that for skills with four or fewer specialties, it may be more expensive to get the higher skill; I'd have to run the numbers for skills with only a handful of specialties to be sure.

Originally Posted by Shimmin Beg

You could see whether The Path of Cunning is interested in a short piece? Not canonical I know, but worthwhile.

The problem is that I have the sidebox with the paragraph describing it, but no articles to drop the sidebox into. At most, I could probably expand it to half a page, tops, but that's being generous.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

Part of it is that I intended it to cut down on having a lot of specialized skills. Another part is that for skills with four or fewer specialties, it may be more expensive to get the higher skill; I'd have to run the numbers for skills with only a handful of specialties to be sure.

I'll save you some time there - at most, having two equal-difficulty skills at a given level costs the same as having a single one-difficulty-higher skill at that same level, and once you get high enough in skill, it actually costs more to have two skills than to have a single one at a higher difficulty. My Dabbler Approach just serves to allow that pattern to continue indefinitely, rather than stop once the price for each +1 stops doubling. At best with the default rules (or always with the Dabbler Approach), for a given skill level (relative to the base attribute), 8 Easy skills cost the same as 4 Average skills which cost the same as 2 Hard skills which cost the same as 1 Very Hard skill. So in any case where you are combining two or more required specializations into a single skill of one difficulty level higher, you are at worst breaking even and are likely saving points compared to buying them separately.

[Shimmin Beg]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

At most, I could probably expand it to half a page, tops, but that's being generous.

I'd think half a dozen examples that you think make sense (and importantly, times where you think it isn't appropriate) would be useful, but I don't want to harass you over this!

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Shimmin Beg

You could see whether The Path of Cunning is interested in a short piece? Not canonical I know, but worthwhile.

Yes, we'd be potentially interested. I've done something similar with reversed optional specialisation: Mechanic as a Hard skill covering a coherent group of specialisations, at a single TL.