Decoupling Skills from Stats

[TheDS]

When I first read thru G4, I noticed a trend toward simplification and regularizing. For instance, Stats are all now 10 or 20 points apiece, and this means you can now more easily make Racial Templates that have a consistant cost, rather than having to figure them out depending on the character you're making.

Unfortunately, due to the continued use of variable values for Skills, it is still difficult to get a fixed point cost for Templates that have Skills in them (call them Job Templates; frex Rogue, Warrior, Farmer, Politician,...)

My first thought was along the lines of simply making all skills a consistent point cost; for instance, Easy Skills being 1 point apiece, Hard being 3 apiece, etcetera. That solution was unpalettable, and it wasn't even necessary for you geniuses to point out all the problems with it (so I don't think I even made a post for it).

But just today, it occurred to me that maybe Skills should have little to do with Stats at all. Why should my Skill level start at my IQ/DX level?

Instead, Skills would simply start at a particular value, and each Skill point would be worth a consistent number of CPs, probably just 1 apiece. Picking that one particular value, though, is up for consideration; let me outline what I'm proposing:

Easy Skills: CP cost = Skill level - 7 (or Skill = CPs + 7).
Normal Skills: CP cost = Skill level - 6 (or Skill = CPs + 6).
Hard Skills: CP cost = Skill level - 5 (or Skill = CPs + 5).
VHard Skills: CP cost = Skill level - 4 (or Skill = CPs + 4).
Naturally, you have to spend at least 1 CP to have the Skill.

To take this one more step, I believe that skills should base their costs on usefulness to the campaign, and not on rarity, as they currently are. For instance, Gun Skills are not that hard to learn, but they're very useful, and so should be priced accordingly.

Skills for ranged weapons should be most expensive, followed by non-ranged weapons (including HTH), followed by Skills which can earn you money or allow you to repair/maintain/build things, and cheapest of all would be those otherwise useless "flavor" Skills (like underwater basket weaving). Of course, this interpretation is also up for consideration. This changes the above table to something more like:

Useless Skills: CP cost = Skill level - 7 (or Skill = CPs + 7).
Building Skills: CP cost = Skill level - 6 (or Skill = CPs + 6).
Fighting Skills: CP cost = Skill level - 5 (or Skill = CPs + 5).
Shooting Skills: CP cost = Skill level - 4 (or Skill = CPs + 4).
Or something like that.

What I think this would accomplish:
1) IQ and DX are now worth 10 pts apiece. While not used for the basis of Skills, they still have their other purposes. If you think IQ is now overpriced, it could be used to determine a limit to the number of Skills, or number of CPs used to buy Skills, in a similar vein to how it was done in G3.

2) There are plenty of stupid people out there who are nonetheless very skilled in some areas. This will allow you to give your character a lower IQ, but not hae to spend all those points from the lowered IQ to beef up a skill or two that should define the character. I'm sure you know plenty of such people, but if you don't, think idiot savant.

3) Extremely bright or agile characters are not required to have ungodly levels of skills, reducing the number of JOT-types. Just cuz someone's smart or fast doesn't mean they instantly become experts at something with just a couple hours' exposure to it.

4) IQ becomes more synonamous with intelligence; Skills represent experience, while IQ (or DX) covers trying to figure something out you've never seen before.

5) Job Templates become much simpler. An Experienced Swordsman Job Template can now include Sword-12 and Sword Maintenance-12 as Skills (this costing 14 points no matter who you add them to).

An obvious downside is that it may require refiguring the values of all Skills based on their utility, and that this hasn't been playtested to find out if the values I've chosen are the right ones.

But other than that, do you guys think this is viable as an alternate (dare I say it, better) way of doing things? What other pitfalls have I missed (I'm sure there are plenty, since I have no group to play with atm).

[MIB 1473]

I really don't see the advantage to doing this. How would you handle skill defaults?

[Captain-Captain]

I don't see the problem: you assign a point value for the skill in the template and if a specified attribute is not present, record it as Attribute +/-X. Plug in the numbers and you fill in the template. If you expect X to be at least say, 12, note someplace that 12 score is considered the minimum accepted value. Let the players worry about it after that.

[TheDS]

Not sure; didn't really think much about that aspect. Two solutions off the top of my head I tried to give as possibilities just now seem to me to be unworkable, either allowing super-smart characters to get defaults higher than what they'd have if they bought the skill, or making defaults so difficult that you'd rarely be able to succeed if you were unskilled... Then again, that second one might not be so bad if you take into account that defaults have substantial penalties in the rules.

Ok, here's that idea: default = the -1 CP Skill level; that is, figure your default Skill as if you'd paid -1 CP into it making rolls out to be 6 for Easy/Useless, down to 3 for VHard/Shooting.

Considering you shouldn't be attempting unskilled tasks unless they're really easy, this isn't as terrible as I first thought.

Someone with more experience with the game may have a different opinion tho.

As for the potential advantages of doing things this way, I've already outlined them. Do you feel they aren't advantageous enough, or that there needs to be more, or something else?

[Captain-Captain]

Originally Posted by TheDS

Not sure; didn't really think much about that aspect. Two solutions off the top of my head I tried to give as possibilities just now seem to me to be unworkable, either allowing super-smart characters to get defaults higher than what they'd have if they bought the skill, or making defaults so difficult that you'd rarely be able to succeed if you were unskilled... Then again, that second one might not be so bad if you take into account that defaults have substantial penalties in the rules.

Ok, here's that idea: default = the -1 CP Skill level; that is, figure your default Skill as if you'd paid -1 CP into it making rolls out to be 6 for Easy/Useless, down to 3 for VHard/Shooting.

Considering you shouldn't be attempting unskilled tasks unless they're really easy, this isn't as terrible as I first thought.

Someone with more experience with the game may have a different opinion tho.

As for the potential advantages of doing things this way, I've already outlined them. Do you feel they aren't advantageous enough, or that there needs to be more, or something else?

So, you'd drop the benefits you get paying 20 points per level for IQ and DX provides? The ability to have very good skills if you're exceptionally smart or agile is a pretty basic premise of the game.

[Hai-Etlik]

Racial Templates normaly keep number of skills fairly small. and My interpretation is that racialy learned skills just give you points in a skill and hence a fixed relative skill level, not a fixed absolute skill level.

That is, in an IQ 11 race with racialy learned fast talk the advantage is RLS: Fast Talk IQ+2, not RLS: Fast Talk 13. If an individual has a higher IQ of 12, he still gets IQ+2 (Now 14) for the same cost from the templete.

If it realy bothers you, just use Racial Skill Bonus and Racial Talent which both give a fixed bonus to skill with a fixed cost per level.

[Exxar]

I decoupled skills from attributes with my gaming group a long time ago.

We didn't make such drastic modifications as you are proposing, and we didn't decouple them completely. We still wanted the attributes to affect skills, but to a lesser degree. Instead of starting at the appropriate attribute level, the starting skill level was 0 for 1 pt in an easy skill, -1 for 1 point in an average skill and so on. Attributes increased skills by (attribute-10)/2, rounded down (like in D&D 3.5), but only if you had a sufficient quantity of points on that skill. To get +1 from an attribute, one point was sufficient, for +2 you would need two points, four points for +3 and so on.

We also introduced a concept of "general skill bonus", which is a bonus to all skills from a certain category (corresponding to skill categories in 3e) if you have a certain quantity of points in skills from that category. Something like synergy from D&D 3.5, but more generalized.

Of course, since skills levels are now effectively reduced by 10, we do not roll less or equal to skill on 3d6 to succeed, but 3d6 + skill level which must be equal to or greater than 10.

[Mehmet]

See Robin's Laws of Game Mastering, last page; If it ain2T broken don't fix it. So I will ask; why?

Cheers...

[moonsquares]

There are some problems with skills when using a stat-derived skill score such as GURPS uses--mostly ones of feel. For example, a cinematic ninja needs a high Intellegence to have a decent default with Flying Leap, a thief needs high Int to have decent skill with lockpicking, etc. However, it seems not only a bit drastic to make skills seperately bought, but also point unbalancing.

Consider: You want a character with IQ 10 and lockpicking at 15. This is 9 CP under your system. Assuming a character does not buy up his Int., under GURPS it is Int + 5, which is 20 points. Wow! 11 CP less! If we made a character with 13 Int and a 15 in lockpick, under your system that is 30 CP for Int and 9 for skill. Under GURPS it's 60 points for the INT and 8 CP for the skill. That's a savings of 29 CP!

Dude, just give your players more CPs.

The default rules for GURPS are based on the idea that an agile person has a better chance to use an unfamiliar weapon that a klutz, which is logical to me. If everyone has the same default, what's the point of buying up DX? What's the point of having a DX score, for that matter?

Again, I've run into problems with a seemingly essential skill for a character being based on a seemingly unessential stat for that character concept, IE, "Of course all ninjas have PhDs--how else could they do flying leaps?" In such a case, I just change the stat for the skill to something appropriate, such as making Flying Leap a Dex based skill. Or I shrug and say "Sorry, if you want flying leap at level 16, pay the CP--it's obviously a hard skill to learn!" The iconic characters are full of examples of this--characters who have 20+ points invested in a vital skill to make up for their low score in the related stat (or because they'd rather spend 20 points on lockpicking and be good at it than spend 20 points on IQ and be marginally better at everything).

[Captain-Captain]

Originally Posted by moonsquares

There are some problems with skills when using a stat-derived skill score such as GURPS uses--mostly ones of feel. For example, a cinematic ninja needs a high Intellegence to have a decent default with Flying Leap, a thief needs high Int to have decent skill with lockpicking, etc. However, it seems not only a bit drastic to make skills seperately bought, but also point unbalancing.

Flying Leap has a default?