Point buy skill systems with efficiencies that shift as you grow

[NichG]

I'm currently designing a skill system for my next campaign and there's a sort of weird thing I noticed in the design. The idea I'm currently playing with is that you have skills and specializations under those skills both of which you can buy up, but with specialization capped at your skill rank. However, your rank in a specialization that applies to what you're doing counts as like +3 compared to if you're using the broad skill. This has a sort of weird property that the cost efficiency of buying a specialization vs buying a skill does this high, low, high thing based on your progression in the main skill. So something that is cost effective at character gen becomes inefficient midgame, and then efficient again in lategame. Or alternately, the midgame efficient thing to do ends up being less efficient by lategame (but its not like you can't 'catch up'...)

Lets say specializations and skills cost the same, its quadratic (cost to buy a rank = new rank in xp, lets say), and things cap at 6.

Then, if you have one rank in a skill, the next rank gives you +1 for 2xp, but buying the first rank of a specialization gives you +3 for 1xp. The specialization is extremely efficient if you can reliably have it apply!

Now lets say mid/late game you've raised your skill up to 4 ranks. Buying up skill will cost you 5xp for +1, but the first two ranks of specialization get you nothing, so you would need to go to rank 3 of a new specialization to get +1 - that costs 6xp. So now the specialization (from zero) is slightly less efficient than buying skill if you just now realize 'oh I want to be good at this thing'.

However, if you've been keeping up your specialization, going from 2 to 3 gets you a +1 and would only cost 3xp rather than 5xp for a +1. And in general, continuing to grow specializations you've already invested in and only raising the skill when you've capped the specialization will be the most efficient way, assuming that you don't actually need the broad generality.

So the thing that I find kind of weird here is, if you've gotten your skill off the ground, there's this dead zone before the specialization investment takes off. But if you've been growing specializations along with skill, there's no dead zone like that. I'm not sure if this is particularly bad? Its not like a path-dependent XP cost - in the end, you get to the same place - but it might feel bad if you're building your character organically...

Thoughts?

[Vahnavoi]

So, let's recap, your system allows two ways of getting the same thing, both with the same ultimate cost, but one ends up being slightly less efficient in the interim.

First, it seems like a thing that only becomes relevant for gameplay if a player plays themselves into the dead zone for an extended period. So, how easy is to spot? You spotted it, do you have a reason to think your players won't? If it's a simple thing to notice, this might be a case of "Unwinnable by Insanity", or in this case, "temporarily less efficient due to lapse of thought" - your players probably won't make this error enough for it to be necessary for you to fix it.

[Quertus]

I guess I’d say… don’t do that?

If I’ve never specialized before, have 100 ranks in a skill, and suddenly have an in-character reason to specialize in something? I should probably be able to get better at just that specialty easier than learning a whole new skill to 98.

So maybe have the specialty add to the main skills as a simple fix?

EDIT: to answer your question, Shadowrun has a “skill and specialty” system, and it’s almost equally messed up. I wouldn’t look to it for an example of “doing it right”, but it at least is a different kind of wrong. WoD has “specialty”, that is… buy once, works like… 5e Proficiency? It’s not a horrific model IMO.

[Mastikator]

Specializations shouldn't grant +X to the roll. They should grant a different kind of bonus depending on the skill. Some examples (I don't know what skills you have, so I'm just making them up, I hope you get my point)

You have a skill called Athletics, and a specialization called Runner. Runner doesn't grant bonus to your run skill roll, it adds a +1 speed buff instead.

You have a skill called Athletics, and a specialization called Fortitude. Fortitude doesn't grant bonus to your resist-damage/effect skill roll, it adds a +1 hit point/life point.

You have a skill called One Handed Weapons and a specialization called Long Swords. Long Swords doesn't give a bonus to your skill check/attack roll with long swords, it adds damage.

You have a skill called Conjuration and a specialization called Teleportation. Teleportation doesn't give a bonus to skill/magic checks to when you cast teleporting spells, it costs -1 mana.

You have a skill called Stealth and a specialization called Sneak Attack. Sneak Attack doesn't give a bonus to attack rolls/combat checks when you attack from hidden position, it adds 1d6 damage.

[NichG]

So, let's recap, your system allows two ways of getting the same thing, both with the same ultimate cost, but one ends up being slightly less efficient in the interim.

First, it seems like a thing that only becomes relevant for gameplay if a player plays themselves into the dead zone for an extended period. So, how easy is to spot? You spotted it, do you have a reason to think your players won't? If it's a simple thing to notice, this might be a case of "Unwinnable by Insanity", or in this case, "temporarily less efficient due to lapse of thought" - your players probably won't make this error enough for it to be necessary for you to fix it.

Its more of an aesthetics question than a 'players will shoot themselves in the foot' kind of issue I think. Call it an issue of potential inelegance of design I suppose.

In practice, the reason I'm splitting into specializations and broad skills is because on the one hand on talking with my players and taking into account the degree of exploration-based gameplay my campaigns tend to involve, its important to be able to approach some totally new thing and try to wing a solution - so there have to be skills broad enough to take into account new things. On the other hand, for this particular setting, I want an age-of-discovery world where there are lots of local crafts and ways and so on that people just will not have even heard of to do in other places, and as the players explore the world one of the meta-rewards is to open up access to new mechanics for character advancement - the specializations.

The specializations will function separately from being a pure numerical boost by also acting as prerequisites for 'trained-only' types of actions and for purchasing particular 'Advantages' which are the passive boost type things Mastikator is suggesting. So investing in specialization vs in skill isn't exactly two identical paths and this is even less of a worry in the case where the dead specialization levels still unlock other stuff the player wants to buy.

But in a point buy game, part of the nice thing is being able to creep towards a competency you want one bit at a time rather than having big level-like chunks of advancement, so the 'dead levels' of specialization in the cold start gap work a bit against the intended aesthetic. Especially as new specializations will be unlocked during play, meaning that the 'cold start' gap is more likely to happen as game goes on (though in that case, it will be involuntary, since the player wouldn't have had the option to invest in the spec before anyhow).

I guess I’d say… don’t do that?

If I’ve never specialized before, have 100 ranks in a skill, and suddenly have an in-character reason to specialize in something? I should probably be able to get better at just that specialty easier than learning a whole new skill to 98.

So maybe have the specialty add to the main skills as a simple fix?

Adding directly is a possible design. I have some concern about the dynamic ranges especially at the high ends - specializing now lets you double your ability in something rather than being a 50% boost at the cap of 6. Perhaps if specializations are capped at skill-2, but they do just add? So you actually need to have some general skill before you can even think of specializing. That may actually be a bit nicer with the side-effect of specializations being the way characters can pick up local supernatural stuff - they can't just jump into practicing some new sorcery if they're a complete novice at the controlling skill.

One of the things I wanted this 'skill shadow' aspect for is, if you're doing actions that really are just about the specialization, a player might not be able to use their broad skill even if its higher. But that goes against the improvisation/experimentation goal. I hate to ever use division in TTRPG rules, but maybe 'for those actions, your skill only counts half' is the way to go.

Goes on the list of possible alternate maths.

Specializations shouldn't grant +X to the roll. They should grant a different kind of bonus depending on the skill. Some examples (I don't know what skills you have, so I'm just making them up, I hope you get my point)

This gets to a broader discussion of the system design intents, but effectively Specializations can act as prerequisites for Advantages - feat-like one-off passive abilities that characters can buy, and some actions would only be possible using the Specialization and wouldn't be viable purely under the broad skill (e.g. you might be good at Mentalism as the controlling skill of a lot of psionics stuff, but you can't just be so good at Mentalism that you can use psionic teleportation without first specializing in Psionics(Spatial) whatsoever).

Raw numerical scaling is the domain of Attributes in this system. I've done a system with my group before where narrow skill ranks give numerical buffs here and there (like, 3rd rank of the Blood skill increases your hp regen, 5th rank of Breath improves your Qi pool efficiency, etc) and the book-keeping demand was pretty bad. Lots of 'wait, did we remember this bonus from this place?'. So I'm keeping those raw number scalings more centralized and out of the place in the system I want for having an open-ended set of things that could be created as the campaign proceeds. Advantages could also modify numbers or how numbers work, but they're going to be much more granular chunkier purchases so hopefully easier to make a shopping list of and track than 50 things that each give different, potentially conditional, small numerical shifts.

To give a bit of detail, though this is all very fluid still (this is already v3 of the idea), the system works as follows:

- Attributes determine 'how much?' numerical questions about the character and provide a pool of Stamina and Focus points - two regenerating pools that can be spent to power things. Cubic cost to increase these, but numerically vary a lot from thing to thing in the world - in this setting, as a human, you can say improve your Body through training, but you can't realistically 'train so much you have the Body of an elephant'.

- When a character wants to do something, there's a threshold of success - if their modifier is already equal or higher than this, they just do it, no roll needed. They can spend from Stamina or Focus (based on the associated attribute for the task) 1 point for +1, up to a number of points equal to the attribute - again no roll needed. Or they can spend 1 point for +2 and a consequence die - which is a d10, rolls of 1,2, or 3 give some kind of complication or consequence to doing the task, rolls of 10 either cancel out a complication or give a 'better than normal' success where applicable. Note that basically you can never 'roll and fail', its either possible to do (at some cost and risk of side-effect) or just not possible for the character to do with their current numbers and contextual factors.

- The setting is intended to have lots of hyper-local 'stuff people know how to do only here' in it - the world is getting smaller but still has lots of corners that the dominant civilization hasn't explored, and the dominant civilization has a particular technology that they're currently in the 'everything can be explained in the lens of this one idea' honeymoon phase with. Also the general structure of the setting metaphysics encourages lots of second-order power where you're taking advantage of some local geological phenomenon, or a local spirit, or things like that and your 'magic' stops working when you move away from those sources. There are a few principles that work everywhere, but the setting is at the stage of just having recently figured out that those principles are there and started to formalize them.

- The system and setting are intended to have a much smaller dynamic range than D&D when it comes to the raw numerical power of characters, but much more horizontal growth and much less niche protection. So e.g. you might learn a qi manipulation technique that lets you harden your skin locally to deflect a knife, or a martial arts ability that lets you dodge the first three attacks against you in a fight without fail, but if you don't use those techniques and get stabbed by a random mugger there's going to be a good chance of serious injury with months-long recuperation at best (intentional coup de gras or chunky salsa is required for actual immediate lethality - its not trying to be gritty, but it is trying to be swashbuckling). A lot of genre and system stuff is inspired by 7th Sea if that helps ground the ideas.

[Mordar]

Can you describe the engine running in the background? Is this a D20 system? Percentile? How narrow are the specializations?

- M

[Vogie]

Going off of what Quertus said, you can make it more nuanced by making it less available.

In World/Chronicles of Darkness, you have a "Chinese Menu" (Column A + Column B) d10 Dice Pool System - The number of dice is determined by two attributes and abilities. I want to throw a punch, Storyteller says "Strength plus Brawl", and I have 3 dots in Brawl and 2 in Strength - that's 5d10. In most cases, anything 6-10 is a success.

However, in that system, whenever you have 3 or more dots in a skill, you can gain a specialization in that attribute or skill. So my 3 dots in Brawl means I get a specialization for that - what this means is that for those specializations, 10s count as two successes. If our specialization is in "Submission Holds", it won't help my punching. However, if I decide to instead put the target in a full Nelson, AND then roll one or more 10s on the d10 pools, then I count those 10s as 2 successes. If I get my Strength to 3 dots, then I can gain a specialization there - If I chose "Powerful Arms" or "Never Lets Go", it would help with the submission hold roll, but "Reserves of Strength", "Powerful Legs", or "Vicious" won't.

If you set up your situation like that, you'll likely find yourself in a slightly better situation. Yes, they can put points in "blades" then specialize in "daggers", but they can't start specializing right off the bat.

[Telok]

There's a number of options. Will work off the "cap at 6", spec = +3, and 1+2+3+4+5xp cost model.

You can have lesser specializations add a minimum of +1 (or +2 or + 1/2 base skill). Skill 5 & spec 1 = +6, skill 2 & spec 2 = +5. Simply accept that some min/max occurs when someone wants an effective +5 in shoot(pistols) and cares less about other shooting.

You can have specialization enable something like rerolling 1s or rerolling the lowest die. Do your math right and you might get that same +3 effect. Specialization can be a one time buy or increasing and does not have to be cheaper than the base skill.

You can have specializations always count as using at least half the base skill. It still has your same concern but mitigated a bit.

You can have specialties cost based on a sliding scale relative to the base skill, where the low levels of specialty are much cheaper at higher base skill since they're not as useful.

You can have specialties be the straight add to the base skill and cap at 3. Here skill 1 & spec 3 is +4 same as skill 3 & spec 1.

[Satinavian]

So the thing that I find kind of weird here is, if you've gotten your skill off the ground, there's this dead zone before the specialization investment takes off. But if you've been growing specializations along with skill, there's no dead zone like that. I'm not sure if this is particularly bad? Its not like a path-dependent XP cost - in the end, you get to the same place - but it might feel bad if you're building your character organically...

Thoughts?

That is why i specialisations as fixed cost for fixed bonus. Sure, that leads to specialisations not worth it at low skill level and getting more and more attractive later (to the point of buying several ones), but i see that as feature, not bug : Everyone has to learn the fundamentals but the real experts specialize

[NichG]

Specializations will be pretty narrow. Not 'swords' but like 'disarming' or 'parrying'. Roughly speaking if you want to be a 'magic user' or 'mad scientist' or the like as a character archetype, expect to invest in 2 skills and 5-10 specializations depending on the versatility desired. I guess I do want the average character to have things where they get by on skill alone - if you can expect to have some specialization apply on every task or you might as well not try, thats too broad/too essential. Specializations should be more like unlocking extra stuff you can do than 'debate with the GM until you find one they let you use here'.

The system is somewhat unusual in that it works explicitly on 'yes, but' - you don't ever have to roll, and when you roll it doesn't determine success vs failure it just determines the 'but' part. A lot of mechanics will be based on scaling difficulties to keep doing something over and over or for extended intervals without a break - the first Dodge in a fight is threshold 4, then 8, then 12... But, if you can afford to dodge it's 100% successful.

It is 'Chinese menu' a bit between attributes and skills, but with one contribution determining how much you can stretch and the other determining your 'free' baseline you can do effortlessly.

[Quertus]

Adding directly is a possible design. I have some concern about the dynamic ranges especially at the high ends - specializing now lets you double your ability in something rather than being a 50% boost at the cap of 6. Perhaps if specializations are capped at skill-2, but they do just add? So you actually need to have some general skill before you can even think of specializing. That may actually be a bit nicer with the side-effect of specializations being the way characters can pick up local supernatural stuff - they can't just jump into practicing some new sorcery if they're a complete novice at the controlling skill.

One of the things I wanted this 'skill shadow' aspect for is, if you're doing actions that really are just about the specialization, a player might not be able to use their broad skill even if its higher. But that goes against the improvisation/experimentation goal. I hate to ever use division in TTRPG rules, but maybe 'for those actions, your skill only counts half' is the way to go.

Goes on the list of possible alternate maths.

So, what's the down sides of this method?

Hmmm... previously, you could have a First Responder who had Medicine 1, with a specialization of First Aid 1, or some such, to allow you to Express that concept "mathematically" in the system? But, under this new theory, you can't? OK, what if... specializations are capped at Base Skill, max 4, while Base Skill is capped at 6? Is that a better or worse Simulation of how the world works?

I'm trying to grok the "specialization only" concept / the concept that necessitates "half base skill only". See, I can understand Gatekeeping - say, "you cannot perform Brain Surgery without the Brain Surgery specialization" or "you cannot perform Brain Surgery without the Surgery Specialization at 3+" or some such. Or even "you automatically take X complications / Y complication dice when attempting Brain Surgery without..." etc. Whatever.

But why would you ever want your Brain Surgery roll to not include the (full) base Medicine skill? I'd need to understand why you believe in this in order to propose acceptable alternatives to your half-skill idea.

[NichG]

So, what's the down sides of this method?

Hmmm... previously, you could have a First Responder who had Medicine 1, with a specialization of First Aid 1, or some such, to allow you to Express that concept "mathematically" in the system? But, under this new theory, you can't? OK, what if... specializations are capped at Base Skill, max 4, while Base Skill is capped at 6? Is that a better or worse Simulation of how the world works?

I'm trying to grok the "specialization only" concept / the concept that necessitates "half base skill only". See, I can understand Gatekeeping - say, "you cannot perform Brain Surgery without the Brain Surgery specialization" or "you cannot perform Brain Surgery without the Surgery Specialization at 3+" or some such. Or even "you automatically take X complications / Y complication dice when attempting Brain Surgery without..." etc. Whatever.

But why would you ever want your Brain Surgery roll to not include the (full) base Medicine skill? I'd need to understand why you believe in this in order to propose acceptable alternatives to your half-skill idea.

Because specializations are the intro points to various different magic systems.

I wouldn't want a character to have like, Mentalism (base skill) 6 -> Telekinesis (1), Thermokinesis (1), Clairvoyant (1), Nomad (1), Telepath (1), Metabolist (1) and basically do all psionic disciplines at effective rank 7. Especially because costs are quadratic, so if you want a lot of wide magic, it strongly encourages just paying the price once for the controlling skill and then buying tons of specializations at rank 1. The above for example costs 21xp for Mentalism 6, then 6xp more for all the psionics to be at rank 7 effective. If instead you had Mentalism 4 and all specializations at 3, that would be 10xp for Mentalism and 36xp for the specializations - much more expensive. So I want to discourage that.

If there's a skill shadow, you just can't do that - your Mentalism 6 only acts to unlock the right to buy up your Telekinesis to 6, but you aren't automatically an awesome telekinetic because you're a good all-round mentalist - its a separate thing, and the base skill acts as a gatekeeper to how good you can be rather than making you better directly.

Only adding half-skill is a partial solution, it still allows you to 'jump' to rank 4 in all of the psionic disciplines this way for that 27xp. But now you're comparing to, say, Mentalism 4 and all specializations at 2 to get a similar result in a 'balanced' way, costing 10xp + 18xp = 28xp, so its about the same cost. More balanced - you could still be the generalist who uses their general expertise to dabble in all the psionics, but its no longer a dominant strategy, at least not if there are only six disciplines you want to nab. If there's like 20 disciplines you want to nab, being the generalist is an obscenely good discount still! But also the half-skill thing means that if you want to hit the really high-point powers, you just won't be able to get there via raw skill at all.

The stuff under the specializations is going to sometimes just be better than what you can do with the general skills, so it makes sense to me to make it more expensive (effectively) to buy. And its nicer for that extra expense to also get you other stuff rather than just being extra cost outright - its expensive because you need a lot of infrastructure in your character to support the cool thing, not just because the cool thing was priced higher.

[Quertus]

Because specializations are the intro points to various different magic systems.

I wouldn't want a character to have like, Mentalism (base skill) 6 -> Telekinesis (1), Thermokinesis (1), Clairvoyant (1), Nomad (1), Telepath (1), Metabolist (1) and basically do all psionic disciplines at effective rank 7. Especially because costs are quadratic, so if you want a lot of wide magic, it strongly encourages just paying the price once for the controlling skill and then buying tons of specializations at rank 1. The above for example costs 21xp for Mentalism 6, then 6xp more for all the psionics to be at rank 7 effective. If instead you had Mentalism 4 and all specializations at 3, that would be 10xp for Mentalism and 36xp for the specializations - much more expensive. So I want to discourage that.

If there's a skill shadow, you just can't do that - your Mentalism 6 only acts to unlock the right to buy up your Telekinesis to 6, but you aren't automatically an awesome telekinetic because you're a good all-round mentalist - its a separate thing, and the base skill acts as a gatekeeper to how good you can be rather than making you better directly.

Only adding half-skill is a partial solution, it still allows you to 'jump' to rank 4 in all of the psionic disciplines this way for that 27xp. But now you're comparing to, say, Mentalism 4 and all specializations at 2 to get a similar result in a 'balanced' way, costing 10xp + 18xp = 28xp, so its about the same cost. More balanced - you could still be the generalist who uses their general expertise to dabble in all the psionics, but its no longer a dominant strategy, at least not if there are only six disciplines you want to nab. If there's like 20 disciplines you want to nab, being the generalist is an obscenely good discount still! But also the half-skill thing means that if you want to hit the really high-point powers, you just won't be able to get there via raw skill at all.

The stuff under the specializations is going to sometimes just be better than what you can do with the general skills, so it makes sense to me to make it more expensive (effectively) to buy. And its nicer for that extra expense to also get you other stuff rather than just being extra cost outright - its expensive because you need a lot of infrastructure in your character to support the cool thing, not just because the cool thing was priced higher.

So... if I'm following you correctly here... buying 6 Mentalism specializations at 1 rank costs exactly as much as raising Mentalism from 5 to 6. Which sounds to me like a strong argument for making Mentalism add its full rank to the specialization *if*

a) having around 6 specializations is "normal" / "expected";

b) ranking up the Specialization gives you access to cool stuff (feats?) that the Mentalism 4 / Specialization(s) 3 character can access, but the Mentalism 6 / Specializations 1 cannot;

c) only buying a single specialization is unlikely.

For example, my character might well buy Necromancy 4, Animation 3, More Undead, Even More Undead, All the Undead, Re-re-animation, Mix and Match Parts, Brains!, Bones of Steel, Skilled for a Corpse, Collective Awareness, Telepathic Orders, Nimble Bones, etc etc etc. And it sounds like that's cheaper and a dominate strategy over Necromancy 6, Animation 1, even at rolling full dice, especially if those feats are gated behind ranks in Animation.

However

My character might well go with Chronomancy 6, Time Travel 1, Time Manipulation 1, Temporal Scrying 1, Prediction 1, Alter Age 1, Grandfather Clause 1, Best Outcome 1, Retroactive Actions 1, Timeline Awareness 1, Evolution/Devolution 1, Retcon 1, Sense Temporal Importance 1, Reversion 1, Alternate Timeline 1, Extra Time 1, Action Economy 1, Trial and Error 1, Paradox 1, Contingency Plan 1, Instant Comprehension 1, etc

... and? If feats are locked behind certain number of ranks in the specialty, that isn't a dominate strategy, even for my chronomantic desires, regardless of full or half ranks.

Put another way, half ranks seems to make Base 4, Specialty 3 the dominate strategy, regardless of what the user desires wrt number of Specialties or Feats, at least until you reach a number of Specialties that seems unlikely and uncommon given the system description thus far. I guess the question is, is that the desired outcome, or is it a side-effect of being used to looking at the numbers from the previous / current system?

Granted, all this depends a bit on just what "Mentalism 6" or "Medicine 6" or "Programming 6" can do if the user has 0 specializations... and on how often someone effectively has 0 specializations due to moving away from the source of their power / reality not recognizing their specializations where they currently are.

[NichG]

I wonder if this is a word choice issue. In other systems, Specializations are aspects of a skill the character is particularly good at. In this system, they're specialized things that require extra training to be competent at but are associated with a broad category.

If I called them 'Advanced Skills' would that change your reaction?

Because I actually do want the low general skill/high specialization to be the dominant strategy in all cases where you want anything beyond the basics. That's why I went with the skill shadow version first, because it's even more 'if you want to be a good pyromancer, max pyromancy and not arcanism'

[Quertus]

I wonder if this is a word choice issue. In other systems, Specializations are aspects of a skill the character is particularly good at. In this system, they're specialized things that require extra training to be competent at but are associated with a broad category.

If I called them 'Advanced Skills' would that change your reaction?

Because I actually do want the low general skill/high specialization to be the dominant strategy in all cases where you want anything beyond the basics. That's why I went with the skill shadow version first, because it's even more 'if you want to be a good pyromancer, max pyromancy and not arcanism'

Honestly? In an amazing coincidence, I happen to be able to give you a good answer wrt my reaction, and the founding causes, because I just happen to have been thinking about such things for entirely different reasons. That is, it's more a reaction to something else than directly a reaction to your proposed system.

So, personally, I expect Professor X to be a really powerful Telepath. I expect, if he has Find Mind and Telepathic Communication and Probe Mind and Control Thoughts and Mental Therapy and Mental Illusions, they'll all be pretty darn strong. Now, sure, he might not have much practice with some of those, so there might be a little variance in practice, but he'll be in most ways better at all of those than Joe Average Telepath.

Similarly, if Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, picks up a new Xth level spell, I expect its power will be roughly in line with other Xth level spells in his hands, not roughly in line with (X-5)th level spells, or (X+2)th level spells in his hands.

If you ask me to program something, even in a language I don't know, I expect I'll be miles ahead of an average noob straight out of college, because my core "I know how to think" skill is so much higher.

If you give "guy at the gym" most any physical task, I expect him to significantly outperform me.

If you give a Brain Surgeon most any medical task, I expect them to significantly outperform me.

In short, I have a bias to believe in the power of "core competencies" in a skill area. I can buy that a Wizard can be great at Transmutation, and rubbish at Curses, but if that Wizard is Dumbledoor, I expect his curses will outdo any 1st year Slitherin unless said 1st year is an absolute 1-in-a-million genius of curses - and not only outdo them, but outdo them by a wide margin.

I have a bias to believe that, if you have the power of Dumbledoor, but are worse at curses than a 1st year, that says something about you, is itself a 1-in-a-million event, and isn't something you expect to see anywhere else in your lifetime.

Now, I'm too senile to remember the story, so the story is True, but... I'm gonna fill in the blanks in my memory with random things that sound good. *ahem* Once upon a time, I was in college, taking Differential Equations. The class after a test on Matrices, the Professor called me up after class. He asked where I learned the techniques I had learned on the test. With a confused look on my face, I said, "In class, from you?". He explained that, no, he hadn't taught those techniques yet - they're what we were about to learn. I responded something along the lines of, "Oh, you introduced the idea, the concept of Matrix Math Operations, and I just saw that this was the obvious logical method, and kinda zoned out (looking at the cute girl beside me) after that".

I am just accustomed to core competencies being, y'know, important. When you have those down, advanced techniques are generally trivial. My core competency in "I can think" let them send me in to help a stumped team with code written in a language I didn't even know. My core competency in "math" let me invent my own theorem in an afternoon, and instantly grok advanced math just from hearing the concept. That's just... my day to day life, so to speak.

Then there's other, less egocentric examples, like the company trying to make an electric bread maker, that sent its team to go learn the fundamentals of bread making when, shortly before launch, the product turned out to fail terribly at its intended purpose, or how some of my friends / coworkers are just phenomenal at nigh-instantly groking new scams or the potential for exploits in proposed code / projects / rules. Or how, the smartest person I know, 20 minutes into a conversation about a topic he formerly knew nothing about, an outside observer would assume he was the expert talking to his junior. Or how one of my professors' tests were always about applied concepts, like "you've been learning about Area; in this exam, apply that to architecture in these 10 problems".

And the fail cases? They usually / the worst of them are IME generally a result of a failure to master the fundamentals. (Yes, I'm a ****, I failed to master the basics of remedial goodness or whatever ).

Anyway, all that ramble is to say, I'm biased to believe in fundamentals being very important.

That and... if the Advanced Skills are somehow sufficiently divorced from the Broad Category that the Broad Category no longer really serves significantly as the "fundamentals" for the Advanced Skill? If there was a broad, "How good are you at life?" skill, and "Cooking", "Cleaning", and "Making Friends" were Advanced Skills? Then, at that point, I'd wonder why the cap on Cooking was in any way related to the number of ranks in "Life Skills".

It's difficult for me to imagine skills having a symbiotic relationship where skill in one is required for skill in the other, where they simultaneously lack the symbiotic relationship where skill in one helps (and, per my bias, helps significantly) with the other. That's just something really hard to convince me of.

Still, one could argue that I'm biased to believe that way because, having strong fundamentals, I'm more likely to catch and notice errors that stem from lacking strong fundamentals.

If you want ranks in Thermonuclear Astrophysics to be more important that a general grounding in Science? I'm obviously in some ways the wrong person to ask, but... I'd suspect it'd feel more realistic to me if a) things that deal with the fundamentals get the full base skill added, or perhaps *only* roll the base skill (hint: most everything involves the fundamentals, just usually not exclusively); b) the power of the Advanced Skill was like my Brain Surgery example: there's a significant cost for not having your Surgery high enough. So, to generalize "b"... hmmm... "high DC tasks that are clearly within the specialization (as "Brain Surgery is to Surgery") have increasing Advanced Skill requirements / suffer increasing penalties (ie, Side Effects / Side Effect die) the greater the difference between the Advanced Skill and the Expected Advanced Skill (see table)".

So [Chronomancy 6, Time Travel 1] could use their vast understanding of the basics to power their way through basic Time Travel (say, travel within a single timeline) with ease. But when it came to more advanced Time Travel (multiple timelines, intersecting time lines, returning to a future from before you changed it), their lack of skill in the advanced nuances of Time Travel makes them as clueless as that Youtuber I had the misfortune of listening to who said that there are only 2 forms of Time Travel, and the [C6/TT1] therefore suffers Complications (or just "this makes no sense!" meltdowns (ie, doesn't attempt the roll)) when attempting to interact with such complex scenarios.

I guess that's one example of how I might try to design a system if I wanted to appease both my personal sense of "how things work IRL" and your desire for maximizing ranks in Advanced Skills to be the Dominant Strategy.

[NichG]

Honestly? In an amazing coincidence, I happen to be able to give you a good answer wrt my reaction, and the founding causes, because I just happen to have been thinking about such things for entirely different reasons. That is, it's more a reaction to something else than directly a reaction to your proposed system.

So, personally, I expect Professor X to be a really powerful Telepath. I expect, if he has Find Mind and Telepathic Communication and Probe Mind and Control Thoughts and Mental Therapy and Mental Illusions, they'll all be pretty darn strong. Now, sure, he might not have much practice with some of those, so there might be a little variance in practice, but he'll be in most ways better at all of those than Joe Average Telepath.

Similarly, if Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, picks up a new Xth level spell, I expect its power will be roughly in line with other Xth level spells in his hands, not roughly in line with (X-5)th level spells, or (X+2)th level spells in his hands.

If you ask me to program something, even in a language I don't know, I expect I'll be miles ahead of an average noob straight out of college, because my core "I know how to think" skill is so much higher.

If you give "guy at the gym" most any physical task, I expect him to significantly outperform me.

If you give a Brain Surgeon most any medical task, I expect them to significantly outperform me.

In short, I have a bias to believe in the power of "core competencies" in a skill area. I can buy that a Wizard can be great at Transmutation, and rubbish at Curses, but if that Wizard is Dumbledoor, I expect his curses will outdo any 1st year Slitherin unless said 1st year is an absolute 1-in-a-million genius of curses - and not only outdo them, but outdo them by a wide margin.

I have a bias to believe that, if you have the power of Dumbledoor, but are worse at curses than a 1st year, that says something about you, is itself a 1-in-a-million event, and isn't something you expect to see anywhere else in your lifetime.

Now, I'm too senile to remember the story, so the story is True, but... I'm gonna fill in the blanks in my memory with random things that sound good. *ahem* Once upon a time, I was in college, taking Differential Equations. The class after a test on Matrices, the Professor called me up after class. He asked where I learned the techniques I had learned on the test. With a confused look on my face, I said, "In class, from you?". He explained that, no, he hadn't taught those techniques yet - they're what we were about to learn. I responded something along the lines of, "Oh, you introduced the idea, the concept of Matrix Math Operations, and I just saw that this was the obvious logical method, and kinda zoned out (looking at the cute girl beside me) after that".

I am just accustomed to core competencies being, y'know, important. When you have those down, advanced techniques are generally trivial. My core competency in "I can think" let them send me in to help a stumped team with code written in a language I didn't even know. My core competency in "math" let me invent my own theorem in an afternoon, and instantly grok advanced math just from hearing the concept. That's just... my day to day life, so to speak.

Then there's other, less egocentric examples, like the company trying to make an electric bread maker, that sent its team to go learn the fundamentals of bread making when, shortly before launch, the product turned out to fail terribly at its intended purpose, or how some of my friends / coworkers are just phenomenal at nigh-instantly groking new scams or the potential for exploits in proposed code / projects / rules. Or how, the smartest person I know, 20 minutes into a conversation about a topic he formerly knew nothing about, an outside observer would assume he was the expert talking to his junior. Or how one of my professors' tests were always about applied concepts, like "you've been learning about Area; in this exam, apply that to architecture in these 10 problems".

And the fail cases? They usually / the worst of them are IME generally a result of a failure to master the fundamentals. (Yes, I'm a ****, I failed to master the basics of remedial goodness or whatever ).

Anyway, all that ramble is to say, I'm biased to believe in fundamentals being very important.

That and... if the Advanced Skills are somehow sufficiently divorced from the Broad Category that the Broad Category no longer really serves significantly as the "fundamentals" for the Advanced Skill? If there was a broad, "How good are you at life?" skill, and "Cooking", "Cleaning", and "Making Friends" were Advanced Skills? Then, at that point, I'd wonder why the cap on Cooking was in any way related to the number of ranks in "Life Skills".

It's difficult for me to imagine skills having a symbiotic relationship where skill in one is required for skill in the other, where they simultaneously lack the symbiotic relationship where skill in one helps (and, per my bias, helps significantly) with the other. That's just something really hard to convince me of.

Still, one could argue that I'm biased to believe that way because, having strong fundamentals, I'm more likely to catch and notice errors that stem from lacking strong fundamentals.

If you want ranks in Thermonuclear Astrophysics to be more important that a general grounding in Science? I'm obviously in some ways the wrong person to ask, but... I'd suspect it'd feel more realistic to me if a) things that deal with the fundamentals get the full base skill added, or perhaps *only* roll the base skill (hint: most everything involves the fundamentals, just usually not exclusively); b) the power of the Advanced Skill was like my Brain Surgery example: there's a significant cost for not having your Surgery high enough. So, to generalize "b"... hmmm... "high DC tasks that are clearly within the specialization (as "Brain Surgery is to Surgery") have increasing Advanced Skill requirements / suffer increasing penalties (ie, Side Effects / Side Effect die) the greater the difference between the Advanced Skill and the Expected Advanced Skill (see table)".

So [Chronomancy 6, Time Travel 1] could use their vast understanding of the basics to power their way through basic Time Travel (say, travel within a single timeline) with ease. But when it came to more advanced Time Travel (multiple timelines, intersecting time lines, returning to a future from before you changed it), their lack of skill in the advanced nuances of Time Travel makes them as clueless as that Youtuber I had the misfortune of listening to who said that there are only 2 forms of Time Travel, and the [C6/TT1] therefore suffers Complications (or just "this makes no sense!" meltdowns (ie, doesn't attempt the roll)) when attempting to interact with such complex scenarios.

I guess that's one example of how I might try to design a system if I wanted to appease both my personal sense of "how things work IRL" and your desire for maximizing ranks in Advanced Skills to be the Dominant Strategy.

So there are a couple ways in this system that that sort of thing would come about.

For one thing, Dumbledore is going to have a lot more experience to spend than random 1st year Slytherin. And the first rank of a Subskill (current working name) only costs 1xp to pick up. So if Dumbledore has wide interests, he might have thrown 3xp into Curses at some point even if it was just to learn a bit about curse breaking - that wouldn't be a noticeable portion of his budget, like 1 sessions's worth of XP out of 100 sessions + milestone XP + character starting XP + in-game opportunities to pick up free ranks from teachers + whatever. Its not just because his Wizarding 101 grade was better than the 1st year. It's not going to be particularly cheaper for him in an absolute sense to pick it up, but retraining is fairly generous and it would be a comparatively minor effort for him to 'bone up on Curses' for a particular game if it was going to be relevant. Certainly he'd have the unlock already, and if his general skill is high then he can 'push' the subskill higher than the 1st year Slytherin can possibly do. He still has to actually study Curses to get that though - its not just freely derived from some broader magical principles.

Or if we go another route, you have the character who bulls through through raw attributes and spending. I don't think its the Dumbledore archetype exactly, but this would be someone who invests hard in the Attribute rather than necessarily in the skill or subskill. So they've got the 1 rank of Mentalism and the 1 rank of Telekinesis, but then they throw their 6 Intellect at that and just spend 6 Focus to pull off ST 13 actions and eat the Complications that would be above the limit of what the Intellect 4/Mentalism 4/TK 4 guy could do going all out. But this guy burns bright and fast - as long as they just have to do their one miracle a day, they can seem hypercompetent, but they're not going to have the endurance to do this over and over again.

But in this system you can also have the guy who went and got a PhD and spent their time in grad school minding a single instrument, and they have like Science 5 and Mass Spectrometry 5, but ask them to derive Kepler's laws or something and they're just not going to have any idea even if that's under Science. They're qualified to have Kepler's laws explained to them, but just because they're good at science doesn't mean they know the details of every scientific field. Similarly, they might be able to learn something like non-Abelian Quantum Information Theory much more easily than the 1st year undergrad in Physics because they know generally how to do things like read scientific papers, but they're not there *yet* - they have to actually invest the time to read those papers.

Or like, if we're talking about a programmer, its like saying 'ah, you spent 20 years programming backend stuff in Perl; people just started getting this neural network stuff to work (subskill unlocked), so clearly you should know how to design an attentional neural network architecture to process sequences into a generative model over hypergraphs right? That's also computer science, after all'. You could pick it up quickly, but you still have to actually do the action of picking it up - spending the xp on the subskill. Maybe you're interested and decide that's worthwhile, and so good news you can get your AI subskill up to 3 or 4 without having to raise your Machine Use (which would be the general skill in this system) any more first. Whereas someone starting from scratch would have to raise both. So effectively, its half cost to you compared to that guy, because you already paid the half learning to do webserver backends.

Maybe another way to put it is, its not like the general skill is Chronomancy and the advanced skill is Time Travel. Its like the general skill is 'Read Magic' and the advanced skill is 'Chronomancy'. You can't learn Chronomancy without Read Magic, but Read Magic itself doesn't make you a Chronomancer at all.

Edit:

What about if general skills cost 2x subskills? So then basically if you've gotten your general skill up, you've already paid 2/3 the cost that a student who was focus-studying that subskill would have to pay total.

Also, here's the actual project in progress if you're interested in more specific details. Everything is basically getting totally rewritten every time I visit this document though, so ... https://github.com/ngutten/patina

[Quertus]

What about if general skills cost 2x subskills?

Also, here's the actual project in progress if you're interested in more specific details.

Hahaha, I was considering asking about such a x2 cost multiplier, but didn't know enough about the system to know whether that made sense or not.

I may have to look over geek out over the system and get back with you later. Still,

Maybe another way to put it is, its not like the general skill is Chronomancy and the advanced skill is Time Travel. Its like the general skill is 'Read Magic' and the advanced skill is 'Chronomancy'. You can't learn Chronomancy without Read Magic, but Read Magic itself doesn't make you a Chronomancer at all.

If this is the case, then why is Chronomancy bound by ranks in Read Magic? I feel like the answer is going to be very Gamist (and a tad Aesthetics) rather than Simulationist; ie, that it's not because it makes sense, but because it makes for a better game. And, if that's the case, I'll just have to punch my Simulationist side a bit until it settles down and cooperates.

EDIT: Reading back over that, I saw that I misread and added in a word: I read "Read Magic itself doesn't make you a better Chronomancer at all". So I'm back to, "I should read over the system before commenting further".

[Telok]

Skill - aggression, subskills - despotisim, artillery

Skill - destruction, applies to - demolitions, using cannons to bring down a building, ruining someone's reputation

Um... Having looked at the link can we have an explanation of how this is supposed to work as a baseline? If you're expecting magic to run skill based like the rest... I dunno. Is a Mentalisim skill base expected to do anything telekinetic or is it just allowing you to buy Telekinesis?

If you want a character who shoots cannons but isn't actually good at hand-to-hand fighting or, I guess, being a despot or tin pot dictator. Do you want Agression 1 & Artillery 6, or do you need to be good at baseline dictatorship and h2h fighting with Agression 4 to get Artillery 4? Do you need different specialties in Destruction if you're shooting cannons at buildings vs people?

It looks like you're pairing stat+skill (or subskill) to reach a threshold for success, spending points based/limited by attribute to reach the threshold. So you have different effects at different thresholds, but the base skill is supposed to be... rarely used in preference for subskills? Then if you're still short of the threshold taking on risks. And I presume there's a dice roll somewhere at that point since there's uncertainty associated with risks.

During play, is using a base skill for something expected to be risky and likely to fail, so that characters need specialties to reliably succeed? Is the base skill expected to gate access to the specialties and not really be used? Or are you expecting the base skills to see lots of use and the specialties be occasion times for a character to shine?

[NichG]

Skill - aggression, subskills - despotisim, artillery

Skill - destruction, applies to - demolitions, using cannons to bring down a building, ruining someone's reputation

Um... Having looked at the link can we have an explanation of how this is supposed to work as a baseline? If you're expecting magic to run skill based like the rest... I dunno. Is a Mentalisim skill base expected to do anything telekinetic or is it just allowing you to buy Telekinesis?

In the current version (stopped counting), something like Telekinesis would be lets say based off of Insight. Insight as a base skill will let you do things like detect that someone is trying to manipulate your mind or emotions, search your mind to see if you're under a geas, compartmentalize memetic hazards so they don't mess you up, or determine that you really don't like that shade of wallpaper and you'd rather it be green than blue even if you're so used to it you're kind of numb.

But someone who is good at Insight has the capacity to be a really good telekinetic, since sort of 'having a proprioception of the mind and the shadow the mind casts over the informational connections instantiated within configurations of matter' would be the conceptual basis for how psionic stuff works. Like, if you can't actually feel that part of your mind, you're just not going to be able to get started. Once you get training, your ability as a telekinetic would be entirely based on the Telekinesis subskill. Your Insight gives you the capacity to learn Telekinesis, but its not 'how strong your mind is'. That's, variably, going to be the Intellect or Mind attributes, and those let you spend points of the Focus pool to 'push' your Telekinetic actions.

So e.g. lets say that levitating something with your mind for 10 minutes is a task with ST equal to 1 per 10lbs lifted, escalating to +1 per additional 100lbs lifted after you manage the first 100lbs at ST 10. You've got someone with Insight 6 - they know themselves and their way around their head really well - and their Intellect (which is like Might for brains, whereas Mind is more resilience) is 4. However they just started to learn telekinesis, so they have Telekinesis 1.

They can, all day long, levitate 10lbs with their mind without blinking. It's ST 1, their relevant baseline score is Telekinesis, which is at 1. They can levitate up to 50lbs at no risk, just tiring themselves out by spending 4 Focus per 10 minutes they want to sustain this trick. A character like that probably has around 12-16 Focus total, so they can do that for maybe 40 minutes. Alternately, if they're willing to risk a complication, they could take up to four Risk Dice to get a bonus +8 to their score, letting them levitate 90lbs for the 4 Focus per interval they're allowed to spend.

A session of play is about 4xp, so they spend the next game studying Telekinesis in between whatever stuff happens. That lets them buy to Telekinesis 2 with just a week of study with 2xp left over - they've doubled what they can just do passively, now carrying around 20lbs floating behind them everywhere they go. Their surge hasn't gone up so much because its based on their Intellect attribute, but if what they need to levitate is 50lbs then its a bit cheaper for them to do so - 3 Focus instead of 4 for every 10 minutes, meaning they can levitate 50lbs for 25% longer with just that week of study.

After the next session of play they could have their Telekinesis to 3 with 3xp left, the session after that they could hit Telekinesis 4 with 3 left, Telekinesis 5 with 2 left the session after that, and finally Telekinesis 6 with 1xp to spare by the session after that, at which point they've stalled out unless they raised Insight further.

So already having paid for Insight is making it possible for them to quickly get their Telekinesis to a high level. But you're never adding Insight to your TK checks.

If that same character was trying to work out whether their body was being controlled through mental domination or through someone telekinetically puppetting their muscles - that would be an Insight check, and they'd get a bonus of half their TK subskill to that check because it's directly relevant.

If you want a character who shoots cannons but isn't actually good at hand-to-hand fighting or, I guess, being a despot or tin pot dictator. Do you want Agression 1 & Artillery 6, or do you need to be good at baseline dictatorship and h2h fighting with Agression 4 to get Artillery 4? Do you need different specialties in Destruction if you're shooting cannons at buildings vs people?

Well, you can't have Aggression 1 Artillery 6, because Aggression sets the cap for your competence at Artillery. But that's not going to help you with the specific things you'd get from the Despot subskill, which is going to involve special tasks like 'as a standard action, you can give an order that will crush dissent in a country you run'. That's not to say you can't crush dissent without having Despot, but you don't get a button to push that lets you just 'do it' - instead you would have to play it out.

As far as Artillery, its a bit more complicated. 'Attack with a Weapon' is a basic Aggression move - you don't need specialized training with a sword in particular to swing a sword at someone in this system, or to put a torch to the wick of a cannon and roughly land a cannonball where you want. But the subskill will give you access to extra buttons you can do - speaking of Artillery, by default its not going to be something you can target an individual person-scale target with, you basically are creating an AoE hazard at best against individuals. But with the Artillery subskill, you'd get access to a Task letting you fire a cannon specifically to hit a person. If you're really good at Aggression but only middling at Artillery, you'll find it harder to hit a person than hitting a ship, above and beyond any difference in success thresholds from say the person dodging. If you're equally good with both, then its purely down to the size and dodginess of the target, but as far as timing the shot and stuff - you've got that.

It looks like you're pairing stat+skill (or subskill) to reach a threshold for success, spending points based/limited by attribute to reach the threshold. So you have different effects at different thresholds, but the base skill is supposed to be... rarely used in preference for subskills? Then if you're still short of the threshold taking on risks. And I presume there's a dice roll somewhere at that point since there's uncertainty associated with risks.

General skills are broad, so for anything where the player comes up with some new action or idea it's going to usually fall to the general skill unless the idea is using a magic or specialized mode of interaction (like, trying to lift water with TK isn't going to be a push-button task I write into the rules, but you can do it, and you'd use TK not Insight if you tried).

There's also a rule for 'forcing' a general skill to do something that *should* take a subskill - I think I have it down there under Improvisation or Experimentation currently. Basically, if you have some idea of how to do it, you can still try to do it but it takes 10 times as long and you always roll at least extra one Risk die per rank you're missing from the Subskill that would normally let you do the thing. So like, you find a crashed Goa'ld spacecraft and you want to repair it - well thats basically a... Nurture? check I guess - ok weird... Or maybe Making? Devices? Maybe multiple checks... Not 100% happy with these skills yet. But anyhow, realistically, how to repair a hyperdrive is specialized knowledge you shouldn't have as a Victorian era steampunk scientist. However maybe you have some vague ideas like 'run power through it, look for leaks, patch the leaks, see if any components are shattered and jam in the most similar stuff I have in my lab, then pray'. There's presumably some Subskill 'Hyperdrive Theory' out there and maybe rebuilding a hyperdrive is a thing that needs like rank 3 of that. So the GM says 'okay, you have some kind of plan, but its really a stretch and you have no clue about integrated circuits or optronics or naqadah or anything, so lets call that like ST 16. On top of that, you're 3 ranks shy of the subskill, so take 3 risk dice. But if you can hit 16 with your Making, you'll pull it off'. If your mad scientist has, say, 6 Intellect and 4 Making, they'll end up rolling 9 risk dice which just gets kind of absurd - basically they're guaranteed to get at least a Major Complication probably damaging the ship in some other way or making it have Star Trek console-itis issues - but maybe the thing can get off the ground.

Anyhow, the math of it is that you can buy +1 temporary skill rank for 1 point of pool, or +2 temporary skill ranks for 1 point of pool and taking on a d10 Risk die. You can't spent more than the controlling attribute, so you can basically get higher if you take risks than not. Each risk dice has a 30% chance of adding a minor complication, and two minors becomes a major - that's the minimum threshold for stuff like 'you break your weapon when attacking'. If I saw like 4 complications on a roll that's when I'd start going like 'so, there's this point you have to reach really close to the unshielded reactor while it's powered on... you think you can get this to work, but you might be down an arm and also have lots of cancer, still wanna go ahead with it?'

During play, is using a base skill for something expected to be risky and likely to fail, so that characters need specialties to reliably succeed? Is the base skill expected to gate access to the specialties and not really be used? Or are you expecting the base skills to see lots of use and the specialties be occasion times for a character to shine?

Base skills should apply for most stuff that you'd think a character would be able to at least try to do by virtue of e.g. being a human. Like, if you want to build a chicken coop, you don't need Architecture as a subskill for it (but it'd help). If you want to swim, you don't need to have a dedicated subskill for that. And none of those checks would be any harder by virtue of missing a potentially related subskill (since I went away from Quertus' previous suggestion about having them add).

Subskills are more like, summon spirits, perform brain surgery, design a computer from scratch, command a demon by its true name, scry upon the infosphere to find out who leaked the information from your organization. Or, they're stunts - yeah anyone can shoot a gun, but this guy can aim a ricochet to hit three people with a single shot. Or, they let you turn extended multi-check things into single push-button options like 'as a standard action, disband your opponent's political party and avoid any fallout'.

[Telok]

Ok, cool. General skills are like another form of attribute, the specialties are "you need actual training, lots of luck, or being really good at this kind of thing" stuff. Specialties are capped by general skills.

There's no "driving" skill but different general driving things would fall under different general skills. Specialties would be things like "jump bikes" and determine your Evel Knievel jumping the Grand Canyon, or "tank combat" involving how to keep moving so other tanks don't get good shots at you, or "formula one racing" which is so specialized it doesn't include right turns. Doing something in a specialty but using the general skill always involves risk dice.

Hmm... so being a telekinetic involves an attribute (governing the pool for going past baseline function), the base skill (capping TK & functioning at half value if you don't have TK), and the TK sub/special/whatev skill that actually defines the TK stuff you can do automatically and what you have to push & risk for.

I'd say your costs scheme is mostly dependent on how fast you want a character to advance generally vs as a specialist. That and what sorts of characters you want to incentivise. Since there's potentially functionally near infinite possibilities for the subskills I'd think I'd be making characters to max a particular attribute & skills related to the specialties I'd want for the character... hmm... it depends on the risk analysis of high stat + base skill & accepting risks while buying up subskills, versus how much it takes to start with good values in the subskills I want.

Ok, hypothetic theorization. You want a fire mage. If you can start baseline human + base skill 6 + fire 6 but nothing else, is that a viable character for anything except fire magic or is it like a d&d fighter with 1s in everything but strength (except con but thats passive so don't care here). The character has to accept risk to do anything but fire magic, is that viable or an utterly terrible idea? Or is the assumed starting character going to be more of a generalist with 1 point in lots and lots of stuff to be minimum playable enjoyment, but 2 or 3 points in that fire magic?

Hmm. Is starting pure point buy or is it a sort of priority/package method that tries to encourage more generalist characters?

[NichG]

Ok, cool. General skills are like another form of attribute, the specialties are "you need actual training, lots of luck, or being really good at this kind of thing" stuff. Specialties are capped by general skills.

There's no "driving" skill but different general driving things would fall under different general skills. Specialties would be things like "jump bikes" and determine your Evel Knievel jumping the Grand Canyon, or "tank combat" involving how to keep moving so other tanks don't get good shots at you, or "formula one racing" which is so specialized it doesn't include right turns. Doing something in a specialty but using the general skill always involves risk dice.

Hmm... so being a telekinetic involves an attribute (governing the pool for going past baseline function), the base skill (capping TK & functioning at half value if you don't have TK), and the TK sub/special/whatev skill that actually defines the TK stuff you can do automatically and what you have to push & risk for.

Close, but it's since been changed a little following the back and forth with Quertus. In the current iteration, being a telekinetic would involve the attribute and numerically only the TK skill. That would be capped by your base skill, but the base skill wouldn't add. However, if you wanted to improvise telekinesis from a vague theoretical understanding that its possible and seeing a guy do it once, you could use your full base skill, but the ST would be higher (depending on how much incidental exposure your character had to the principles of TK), you'd incur risk dice, and it'd take ten times as long as normal.

I'd say your costs scheme is mostly dependent on how fast you want a character to advance generally vs as a specialist. That and what sorts of characters you want to incentivise. Since there's potentially functionally near infinite possibilities for the subskills I'd think I'd be making characters to max a particular attribute & skills related to the specialties I'd want for the character... hmm... it depends on the risk analysis of high stat + base skill & accepting risks while buying up subskills, versus how much it takes to start with good values in the subskills I want.

Ok, hypothetic theorization. You want a fire mage. If you can start baseline human + base skill 6 + fire 6 but nothing else, is that a viable character for anything except fire magic or is it like a d&d fighter with 1s in everything but strength (except con but thats passive so don't care here). The character has to accept risk to do anything but fire magic, is that viable or an utterly terrible idea? Or is the assumed starting character going to be more of a generalist with 1 point in lots and lots of stuff to be minimum playable enjoyment, but 2 or 3 points in that fire magic?

Hmm. Is starting pure point buy or is it a sort of priority/package method that tries to encourage more generalist characters?

There's Backgrounds to package some stuff together at the start, but on top of that you'll get a decent chunk of XP. Numbers still TBD (and determine different campaign power scales anyhow so I might leave a few options here), but lets say you start with 3 in all Attributes and 30xp and ignore the backgrounds/advantages for now. You would in practice want to spend a bit on a Background that lets you actually have backstory access to a fire magic instructor, but lets say that gets you the right general skill for it anyhow so cost-wise its more or less a wash.

With 30xp you could have a 4/4 fire mage as a starting character, with basically nothing else - just relying on attributes. You could if pushed do a lot of stuff that generally characters will want to do, but its going to drain your pools fast and you're going to be incurring a lot of risk. For example, hitting the average person with a weapon in a one on one duel is like ST 5 or 6. You can burn 3 Stamina and take 3 Risk dice and just do that - in fact, your pool of 12 Stamina is enough to do that 3 times, and if they have no particular tricks to dodge or mitigate damage thats more than enough to kill an average person. But then you're basically done until you get an hour of rest. Also this basically doesn't assume you're burning things to not get hit yourself, or to mitigate the hits you do have to take. And that the complications don't make you slip and fall or otherwise take penalties that shift things in their favor. You could probably climb a tree or walk in hilly terrain for 4 hours or whatever - you're just going to be winded much more quickly than someone who got 1 or 2 points in other stuff.

You might be a little more squishy than someone who put points into Grit, but the Grit checks to mitigate wounds start at ST 6 and go up by 4 each time so basically most starting characters are going to have to pay some Stamina to e.g. turn aside a stab through the heart and instead have it scrape off their ribs as a flesh wound, since no one is starting with Grit 6. They're just paying maybe 1-2 Stamina and rolling one Risk dice where you'd be paying 3 and rolling 3 Risk dice. Its not good but its not awful.

As far as what things your general skill lets you do as a fire mage, well, lets say that the base skill there is Scholarship. You studied a lot, and that study has also let you realize that you can quote some off-color poetry designed to insult the Roman emperor and there's a particular local spirit that finds it hillarious and will just set everything on fire when you do it with the right funny voice. Or things like that, dunno! Anyhow, at 4 Scholarship, you're going to be able to do things like go to a library to find 1 piece of uncommon lore relevant to any sort of question basically for free. You could burn a little Focus (where others would have to burn a lot and risk) to do something like hearing an offhand quote in a tavern and then tracking down the work it was quoted from, the author of that work, and where they currently are.

With your fire magic, you could do the bog standard 'attack someone with fire' for 1 Focus each time - thats 12 attacks before you're dry and no Risk Dice needed. If you wanted to do something like make a ladder out of flames and use it to climb a tree while not getting burned yourself, maybe thats like ST 9 or so - mostly due to the 'treat flames as solid and harmless' rather than the actual creation of the ladder, so you can get there for 3 Focus and 2 Risk. Maybe not the best way to climb a tree, but its fire magic so what did you expect? If you wanted to fly around like rocketman, now we're talking more like ST 12 and you're just not doing it yet - probably your fastest way to get there would be to buy up your Attribute for 16xp, since then you could burn 4 Focus+4 Risk and just hit it - that's like 4 sessions from start I guess to gain a very risky, short-duration flight as a fire mage, if you go all in. Getting there via skill would cost 2xp more to get Scholarship to 6 and 11xp more to get Fire Magic to 6, at which point your +6 from Focus/Risk would be enough (but hey, less risk that way).

Something like that anyhow...

[Telok]

Sounds like a perfectly reasonable set up then. The only question after that being how viable are generalist characters or characters with skill 1 & spec 1? Like you mentioned Grit for fire mage guy when he gets hit. Is 1/1 or 2/2 enough to get by for someone who expects to stay away from melee and not get shot a lot? If someone decides to go... ok, here's an archetype I enjoy because it fills so many holes in common gaming groups; a character with a reasonable & reliable offensive combat ability, defense/resilience less than a combat whore but better than a dry twig, and all the social & political (and possibly larcenous) skills. Its basically a character aimed at being barely above minimum combat requirements to go adventuring, but who can cover all the stuff that a random selection of players who assume d&d-style gaming are likely to be partially or seriously deficient in. Can you have a character like working out or do you need to highly specialize in order to have functionality in something?

Probably all you need now is filling out the rosters of skills & specialties, plus deciding power levels and advancement speed.

* d&d-style: must win all combats because retreat & surrender are impossible or equal to death. can dump the rest because the GM is expected to feed them plot to keep the game on track.

[NichG]

And the Advantages, and setting details, and...

But yeah, probably next is to redo the skill list. I thought going with abstract actions would be neat but it feels flavorless and weird (Nurturing a spacecraft to repair it... Plumbers and doctors have the same skill?!)

One thing I've noticed in the theory craft so far is that Attributes are really strong. They're already quite expensive, with cost = new rank^2, but if the skills only go to 6 then being an absolute master vs absolute novice is like 3 points of attribute (modulo risks and costs). So something like 10 ranks rather than 6 ranks might be a better reference point to keep in mind for absolute mastery of a skill. Which probably means slightly upping the per session XP and making attributes even more expensive relative to skills. Also might be nice to make the resource pools a little more generous...

So maybe attributes are more expensive, but take them down to 6 from 8, and pools are double the sum of attributes rather than just being the sum...

Well, it's a work in progress!

[Vogie]

Out of curiosity, why not allow the specializations to exceed your overall skill rank?

I was watching Youtube the other day, and I got autoplayed a video about Traveler 2e. In that system, you begin character creation with an amount of general skill ranks, then go through a couple of eras of life in 4 year chunks. So if you start off with Gun Combat of 0 (as the system has a -3 modifier for any skill you aren't trained in) and Electronics of 1, but as the character grows they pick up training with energy weapons or sensor systems specifically, you could have Energy weapons 2 or Sensors 3. At the same time, that doesn't increase your base skill in gun combat and electronics - they're still at 0 and 1, specifically. However, just because you picked up the ability to figure out energy weapons doesn't mean you understand archaic or ballistic weapons, and because you're a half-decent sensor engineer doesn't make you more skilled in computers generally or know the ins and outs of being a trained Comms operator - both Comms and Computers are at 1 because your Electronics skill was at 1 in the beginning.

Using the above examples, your Prof X character would have a high Mental Powers skill, which brings up the bases of all of the sub-specializations to that level. So if he's a Mental Powers 4, his subspecializations are 4. But if he then begins focusing on a specific mental ability beyond others (such as "Find Mind"), he could then have a higher Find Mind skill than his base mental powers. Likewise, a person might not be particularly aggressive or destructive but pretty good at artillery - I'm thinking of John Yossarian from the famous Heller novel Catch-22. In that WWII story, he's a passive self-involved person who just wants to stay alive and go home. The catch-22 of that is because he's good at being a bombardier, the circular reasoning of the military bureaucracy means he keeps being sent on missions - If he was worse at his job, he would be more likely to both be sent home; however, being bad at his job means he's more likely to get killed in action, so he's stuck in the circle, risking his life against his will to save his life. "If one is crazy, one does not have to fly missions; and one must be crazy to fly. But one has to apply to be excused, and applying demonstrates that one is not crazy. As a result, one must continue flying, either not applying to be excused, or applying and being refused."

Apply that to an artillerist rather than a bombardier, you'd have something like an aggression of 1 but a much higher artillery rating. Similarly a "Fire Mage" might be really good at Fire things, but not so great about other mage things. You mentioned that their base skill might be something like "Scholarship", but it isn't a huge jump in logic that there's a firebug who isn't good at learning other things - I'm thinking Rience from The Witcher Netflix series or Hannah Ascher from the later Dresden Files novels.

[NichG]

Out of curiosity, why not allow the specializations to exceed your overall skill rank?

I was watching Youtube the other day, and I got autoplayed a video about Traveler 2e. In that system, you begin character creation with an amount of general skill ranks, then go through a couple of eras of life in 4 year chunks. So if you start off with Gun Combat of 0 (as the system has a -3 modifier for any skill you aren't trained in) and Electronics of 1, but as the character grows they pick up training with energy weapons or sensor systems specifically, you could have Energy weapons 2 or Sensors 3. At the same time, that doesn't increase your base skill in gun combat and electronics - they're still at 0 and 1, specifically. However, just because you picked up the ability to figure out energy weapons doesn't mean you understand archaic or ballistic weapons, and because you're a half-decent sensor engineer doesn't make you more skilled in computers generally or know the ins and outs of being a trained Comms operator - both Comms and Computers are at 1 because your Electronics skill was at 1 in the beginning.

Using the above examples, your Prof X character would have a high Mental Powers skill, which brings up the bases of all of the sub-specializations to that level. So if he's a Mental Powers 4, his subspecializations are 4. But if he then begins focusing on a specific mental ability beyond others (such as "Find Mind"), he could then have a higher Find Mind skill than his base mental powers. Likewise, a person might not be particularly aggressive or destructive but pretty good at artillery - I'm thinking of John Yossarian from the famous Heller novel Catch-22. In that WWII story, he's a passive self-involved person who just wants to stay alive and go home. The catch-22 of that is because he's good at being a bombardier, the circular reasoning of the military bureaucracy means he keeps being sent on missions - If he was worse at his job, he would be more likely to both be sent home; however, being bad at his job means he's more likely to get killed in action, so he's stuck in the circle, risking his life against his will to save his life. "If one is crazy, one does not have to fly missions; and one must be crazy to fly. But one has to apply to be excused, and applying demonstrates that one is not crazy. As a result, one must continue flying, either not applying to be excused, or applying and being refused."

Apply that to an artillerist rather than a bombardier, you'd have something like an aggression of 1 but a much higher artillery rating. Similarly a "Fire Mage" might be really good at Fire things, but not so great about other mage things. You mentioned that their base skill might be something like "Scholarship", but it isn't a huge jump in logic that there's a firebug who isn't good at learning other things - I'm thinking Rience from The Witcher Netflix series or Hannah Ascher from the later Dresden Files novels.

That goes the opposite of the design goal I'm trying to achieve though, which is to make the magics be more of a narrow investment where there's more headroom to pump more XP into them, while the general skills represent broad competencies that you can expect to generalize to a lot of different situations. Basically, you shouldn't be able to make a Prof X who is instantly very good at any new mental power that gets discovered once it gets unlocked.

Also this isn't really trying to be a universal system like GURPS where any given fictional character is possible. If fire magic exists in this setting, there's a specific way that it comes about and you can't really be good at it independent of going about it that way. So its more like, there might be a kind of supernatural power that is based on scholarship - lets say to be concrete, it involves knowing and invoking the true names of demons and being aware of the ancient compacts they signed in blood and power that still hold today. Within that, there might be specialized knowledge that pertains to a specific demon associated with fire. So if you want to use this path of power to do fire stuff, you need to study Alloces and the 5 promises that Alloces made to Zenafar 861 years ago in exchange for their soul, and the successful interpretations of that contract that allow (most) people to call upon the fact that pretty much everyone can trace some descent to Zenafar in order to command fire in Alloces name under the basis of the promise that 'your descendants shall never fear flame be their master', of course expressed in an ancient and lost regional dialect where the interpretation of the word 'master' determines what you can get away with as far as controlling fire...

That doesn't mean that you can't instead be, say, be a pyrokinetic psionicist who traces connections between matter in the Infosphere and uses them to dump a bunch of entropy from random processes into their target. But that's also a different and distinct approach to 'I make my enemy catch fire' which also has prerequisites like being able to mentally access the Infosphere, and understanding enough mathematics and statistics and your own cognitive processes to actually grasp what it is you're doing when you manipulate it via tying things through your own mind.

An alternate approach I was going to take was just to have a system with hundreds of very narrow skills. 7th Sea is sort of like this, where like 'disarming someone with a sword' is just a totally separate skill from 'parrying with a sword' is just a totally separate skill from 'using a sword to tag someone's clothing in a stylish way'. So e.g. 'Sorcerous Lore of Alloces' would just be a skill that's totally separate from, say, 'Goetic Legalism'. But that makes it hard to have freeform actions, because somewhere hidden in the system there might be some skill that technically is what you should be using.

With the general skills, there's a relatively small number of categories that can soak up stuff that doesn't seem to fit, but also doesn't seem like it would be unreasonable for someone to just try. If someone is trying something that really should have a subskill, then there's the improvisation mechanic where you can basically pay for the missing narrow knowledge with risk and time and difficulty. So that's the compromise I'm currently trying to make work. An alternate system would basically just be to have skills be able to have prerequisites to invest in them, so e.g. 'you need Mathematics 3 to get Infodynamics, but then you can buy as much Infodynamics as you want; however, Pyrokinesis requires Mathematics 4 and Infodynamics 2 before you can start to invest in it'. That would satisfy my design goals, but it would be complex and hard to learn for players I think...

[Satinavian]

They're already quite expensive, with cost = new rank^2,

Personally i don't like cubic costs. It tends to lead to everyone having roughly the same attributes everywhere because the early points are too cheap to skip them but eventually it becames too costly for even a specialist.

[NichG]

Personally i don't like cubic costs. It tends to lead to everyone having roughly the same attributes everywhere because the early points are too cheap to skip them but eventually it becames too costly for even a specialist.

For the attributes, they contribute quadratic benefit, so it kind of has to be cubic. You get more points of your resource pool to spend, and your spending cap also goes up. I could just make it impossible to pay XP to raise them and you have to do weird IC stuff, or just make it char-gen.