Techniques and Skill Defaults

[Emerikol]

So I've been studying techniques for skills and talents for advantages as I devise my various magic systems.

For now I will discuss techniques etc...

So from what I see, techniques are just a specialized less costly way of doing skill defaults. They pretty much work the same way.

Suppose I have a very hard skill for each college. Then I have either a technique or a skill for each spell. Techniques would be a lot cheaper but only allow for average and hard. Whereas, just using skills would allow for the normal gamut of skill difficulties. Yet in some cases this might make a skill really expensive to get.

So let's suppose I have a really awesome spell like wish that I want to really make hard to advance. So I make it use Enchantment as it's primary college skill and then the Wish spell. I'd make both very hard. You'd never be allowed to have wish skill exceed enchantment skill. Also wish would default to enchantment minus 20. I'm making these numbers up because I haven't thought that part through so just take them as place holders. Perhaps this would limit the most powerful spells from being acquired at decent skill too quickly without having a zillion prerequisites.

On the flip side what about easy magic. Even if Enchantment is hard and detect magic is easy that is still a good bit of cost to pay to get it pretty high. Maybe thats not the ideal spell example but you get the idea. Should I mix techniques and skills you think or just go with easy for the easy stuff. Of course where you set the default matters too. Maybe the default is pretty small of a penalty for the easy magic. Like -2.

Thoughts?

[Emerikol]

And I realize that one advantage of going with skills alone is that this would mirror pretty close the approach in the official system.

Instead of long prerequisite counts I'd just have a high default minus. Perhaps -1 per prerequisite.

[whswhs]

The general assumption is that ANY skill can be learned, if you can find a teacher or a textbook, without having to buy it up from default like a technique.

Indeed, buying techniques up from default starts out harder. If a skill defaults to IQ-4, putting one point into it raises it to IQ; if a technique defaults to Skill-4, putting one or two points into it (for Average and Hard skills, respectively) only raises it to Skill-3. It will cost you four or five points to raise it to Skill. If you're going to keep the two different pricing schemes, then you haven't really unified skills with techniques.

[Emerald Cat]

Originally Posted by Emerikol

So I've been studying techniques for skills and talents for advantages as I devise my various magic systems.

[...]

So from what I see, techniques are just a specialized less costly way of doing skill defaults. They pretty much work the same way.

A Technique is a specific application of a skill. Usually, anyone can attempt the Technique. Persons who have not trained in the technique get to perform it at default, i.e. at a penalty. Indeed, you could read the default as the task difficulty modifier of the technique. In theory, you can default a Technique to a skill that you're using at difficulty. But the accumulated penalties can be prohibitive.

Unfortunately, buying a lot of techniques is not very point efficient. Raising skills costs 4 points per level at the high end. Raising an Average technique costs 1 point per level. Buying the underlying skill is more efficient if you want more than 3 techniques for that skill.

Originally Posted by Emerikol

Suppose I have a very hard skill for each college. Then I have either a technique or a skill for each spell. Techniques would be a lot cheaper but only allow for average and hard. Whereas, just using skills would allow for the normal gamut of skill difficulties. Yet in some cases this might make a skill really expensive to get.

So let's suppose I have a really awesome spell like wish that I want to really make hard to advance. So I make it use Enchantment as it's primary college skill and then the Wish spell. I'd make both very hard. You'd never be allowed to have wish skill exceed enchantment skill. Also wish would default to enchantment minus 20. I'm making these numbers up because I haven't thought that part through so just take them as place holders. Perhaps this would limit the most powerful spells from being acquired at decent skill too quickly without having a zillion prerequisites.

On the flip side what about easy magic. Even if Enchantment is hard and detect magic is easy that is still a good bit of cost to pay to get it pretty high. Maybe thats not the ideal spell example but you get the idea. Should I mix techniques and skills you think or just go with easy for the easy stuff. Of course where you set the default matters too. Maybe the default is pretty small of a penalty for the easy magic. Like -2.

If you want to keep players from advancing in powerful spells too quickly you could make them secret spells. In other words, mages need to go on a quest or have a high level of Hidden Lore to learn these spells. Improving such a spell may take extensive further research and cost.

You are probably going to end up with more than 4 spells per college. Expect your players to take the point efficient route of focusing on improving the College Skill if you go with spells as techniques. With possible investment in a mage's signature spells, of course.

If you stick to the idea that each spell is a skill, the Easy, Average, Hard, Very Hard scale should represent the varying difficulties of each spell. Using your example, 1 point would allow you to learn Detect Magic (E) at IQ level but only IQ -2 level for Enchantment (H).

[Emerikol]

Originally Posted by whswhs

The general assumption is that ANY skill can be learned, if you can find a teacher or a textbook, without having to buy it up from default like a technique.

Indeed, buying techniques up from default starts out harder. If a skill defaults to IQ-4, putting one point into it raises it to IQ; if a technique defaults to Skill-4, putting one or two points into it (for Average and Hard skills, respectively) only raises it to Skill-3. It will cost you four or five points to raise it to Skill. If you're going to keep the two different pricing schemes, then you haven't really unified skills with techniques.

I knew there was something I was missing. That is the beauty of techniques is they come up from the default.

[Emerikol]

Originally Posted by Emerald Cat

If you stick to the idea that each spell is a skill, the Easy, Average, Hard, Very Hard scale should represent the varying difficulties of each spell. Using your example, 1 point would allow you to learn Detect Magic (E) at IQ level but only IQ -2 level for Enchantment (H).

So go with one hard or very hard skill for each college and then have the whole gamut of difficulties for the skill level of each spell. For any roll, take the lower of the college skill and the spell skill.

I only have 12 colleges in my world. I think some colleges might be easier overall than others. So the college skill could vary. Then within the college the spell skill difficulty would vary as well. So even in an easier college, there might be one spell that is very hard.

I'll have to keep thinking about it. This is why I post these ideas to get feedback. Look before you leap and all of that.

[Emerald Cat]

Originally Posted by Emerikol

So go with one hard or very hard skill for each college and then have the whole gamut of difficulties for the skill level of each spell. For any roll, take the lower of the college skill and the spell skill.

I only have 12 colleges in my world. I think some colleges might be easier overall than others. So the college skill could vary. Then within the college the spell skill difficulty would vary as well. So even in an easier college, there might be one spell that is very hard.

I'll have to keep thinking about it. This is why I post these ideas to get feedback. Look before you leap and all of that.

You could have a Hard or Very Hard capping skill for each college. Or you could have each college capped by a mundane skill. I'd recommend taking a look at Multiple Bases and Other Requirements from Thaumatology (p. 40). That definitely lends a scholarly flavor to mages.

[Stormcrow]

Is there some reason we're not talking about ritual magic, which is already set up with a VH core skill, a VH college skill defaulting at -6 to the core skill, and a H spell technique defaulting to the college skill at negative the prerequisite count?

See Characters, p. 242 for a basic (but fully functional) explanation, Magic p. 200 for a slightly longer reiteration, and Thaumatology pp. 72–76 for a full description and discussion of variations.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

Is there some reason we're not talking about ritual magic, which is already set up with a VH core skill, a VH college skill defaulting at -6 to the core skill, and a H spell technique defaulting to the college skill at negative the prerequisite count?

One problem is that once you do the math, you see that for many magicians there's very little reason to actually put any points in anything but the core skill.

[Polkageist]

Originally Posted by Emerikol

So I've been studying techniques for skills and talents for advantages as I devise my various magic systems.

For now I will discuss techniques etc...

So from what I see, techniques are just a specialized less costly way of doing skill defaults. They pretty much work the same way.

Suppose I have a very hard skill for each college. Then I have either a technique or a skill for each spell. Techniques would be a lot cheaper but only allow for average and hard. Whereas, just using skills would allow for the normal gamut of skill difficulties. Yet in some cases this might make a skill really expensive to get.

Thoughts?

Just an aside, this is really close to if not the same as Ritual Path magic that's roughly laid out in Campaigns and really fleshed out in Thaumatology.

Paraphrased, a wizard learns some skill such as Thaumatology or Ritual Magic as a very hard skill. From there, each spell college is a very hard technique that defaults at -6 from the core Ritual Magic skill and can't exceed it. THEN, each spell is a technique off of the college skill whose default penalty is equal to the number of prerequisites for that particular spell. So a one-prereq spell is -1, a spell with 6 prereqs is -6 and so on.