Skill Advancement

[Emerikol]

Originally Posted by johndallman

The combination of these things created strong incentives to create characters with most of their points in attributes and advantages, and few points in skills. That's a perfectly valid character concept, but other concepts were disadvantaged. The new pricing made a wider variety of concepts cost-effective.

I agree with your goals but not necessarily your methods.

As I've mentioned above, I would limit attribute increases. I don't see someone getting that better over time. My rule of thumb now is you can only increase your stat as much as you increased it in your initial buy or an additional 2 whichever is greater. So 10,11,12 get +2 and then 13 gets +3, 14 gets +4. This is potential as Shane mentioned.

After that you have to buy skills. I'm not sure I like 3e's exact approach but I do think there should be higher costs to increase a skill. Let's take chess for example. Going up 100 points in chess rating is a lot easier at 1200 than it is at 1500 and that is far far easier than it is at 2200. 100 points of chess rating is pretty darn close to +1 skill improvement though. If anything chess would be easier than real skills on the bell curve.

There are several types of skills
1. A skill where going above 20 is pretty useless. Fast Draw for example. You have up to -4 situational modifier which for me as GM is a pretty big situational modifier.

2. A skill that keeps getting better but may be augmented in other ways more effectively. Sword for example. It's almost always better to be better because of the ability to lower your own skill by 2 and your opponents by 1. This lets you cut down a lot of enemies quickly with a super high skill. It also lets you do called shots highly effectively.

3. Some skills improve and there really are no other better alternatives. Some spells for example. I suppose even they cap out at some really high number (who needs to teleport more than 50 million miles etc...). But they do benefit from a good bit of advancement beyond 20.