Revamped Skillsystem

[Quetzacotl]

So I was thinking, since our group was unhappy with how specializations and enhancing them, I thought up a kinda different System.
Some might have already thought of that here, havn't read everything, so sorry ig Someone already got the idea ^^


So, instead of adding all together and pay the cumulative cost and the problem of "if I increase the Attribute and/or the skill, the specialization won't get better", we increase them separately.

Meaning that you start with the 18D in Attributes. You also get the Skill dice, but instead of "adding" them to your attribute to have the final result that is now independent of the Attribute, you protocol them seperately.

For example, you might have 4D in Technical and 3D in Droid Repair.
Now, if you try to repair a Droid, you would roll 7D for that, as they're added together.

Same thing for the specialization.
For 1 CP, you can get a specialization at 1D that you can raise from that point forth.

So in result, you might now have Technical 4D, Droid Repair 3D and Droid Repair: R2 unit 2D.
If you repair a R2 Droid, you roll 9D. Repairing another Droid would be 7D, and doing something else (First Aid for example) would only be 4D.
Now you can either increase Technical (for 40 CP), Droid Repair (for 3 CP) or Droid Repair: R2 unit (for 1 CP).
In either case, you can repair a R2 Droid now with 9D+1, no matter where you put the point.

So now you can decide at all times if you wanna specialize a lot (which is rather cheap), going very broad (which is expensive) or doing something in the middle (which is ok, but not really cheap) or just make a mix of that, it doesn't matter, because you can do all that without "wasting" any points.


Of course, now you have the "Problem" that you can get high skill values relatively fast for relatively cheap.
But this can be remedied by increasing the difficulty ratings.

For example:
Very Easy: 1-5
Easy: 6-11 (+1)
Moderate: 12-18 (+2)
Difficult: 19-26 (+3)
Very Difficult: 27-40 (+4)
Heroic: 41+ (+5)

Or even:
Very Easy: 1-5
Easy: 6-12 (+2)
Moderate: 13-21 (+4)
Difficult: 22-32 (+6)
Very Difficult: 33-50 (+8')
Heroic: 51+ (+10)


It's of course not perfect, but it removes the "depending on what order you raise the skills, you waste points"-flaw that the game currently has.
And it's in the end kinda similiar to how Advanced skills work (as you would add (A) Medicine to your First Aid skill when you use First Aid).

Any thoughts?

[cheshire]

If I understand you correctly, my concern is whether the tabulation of CP cost with the separated out attribute / skill / specialization method is going to lead to a greater skill to CP bloat. That is to say, specializations are cheaper to purchase, which seems good in this system. But it also makes skills cheaper to purchase.

Under the normal system if I have a Tech with a Technical attribute of 4D and a raises his Starfighter Repair by another 2D, then he has a functional skill of 6D. In order to raise that to 7D he has to spend 18 CPs, and to raise it to 8D he has to spend an additional 21 (so a total of 39 CPs thus far). That's quite a lot of play time and investment to make his character really awesome at that skill.

Under the system I'm seeing (if I understand you properly), we'll take the same tech with a Technical Attribute of 4D, and then he has an additional Starfighter repair of 2D. He'll raise that to 3D (functionally rolling 7D) with a cost of 6 CP. He'll raise it again to 4D by spending an additional 9 CP. So, this same character only spends 15 CP to roll 8D to repair a starfighter. I'm of the opinion that it's too cheap to make people too awesome. They have to invest far less play time to exceed the skills of heroic movie characters.
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Before we take any of this too seriously, just remember that in the middle episode a little rubber puppet moves a spaceship with his mind.

[Quetzacotl]

You understand it correctly, and that's why I added that you probably have to rework the difficulty as well.

If the difficulty increases on higher levels (like Heroic is 51+ and not 31+) then it evens out in the end.

this would lead to something like 16D becoming "Known galaxy wide" instead of 12D.

Of course it will not work if you cling to the old difficulty values.

[cheshire]

And so the structure is designed so they can hit Easy and Moderate sooner, but hit Diff-Heroic later in their development?
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Before we take any of this too seriously, just remember that in the middle episode a little rubber puppet moves a spaceship with his mind.

[Quetzacotl]

Well, in the end it should be that they're able to make the later difficulties at nearly the same time.

What I mainly wanted to fix was the problem I had with the "depending on what order you choose to increase the Skill/Specialization/Attribute, you might loose points".

I simply think that it's a flaw in the system that when you increase an attribute, your skills and your specialization don't rise as well (same with skills and specializations). But just increasing them as well would introduce a similiar flaw.
So that system doesn't have that flaw at all, but it leads to a faster increase in Skill levels for the characters so it becomes necessariy to rebalance the difficulties.

[DougRed4]

My problem with your new rule is that it's 'correcting' something I don't see as a problem at all.

[Centinull]

DougRed4 is correct.

I don't see what problem this solution is trying to fix.

[Whill]

[garhkal]

Which imo is one of the balancing factors. Get that spec now where its use can be cheap and meaningful or wait till you have upped the base skill THEN get it.
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Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk!

[Quetzacotl]

Well, if you don't see it as a flaw then it can't be helped, no point in arguing about differences in opinion.

[atgxtg]

Legend D6 (as used in the Herc & Xena RPG) handles specializations this way, too, so it not like it hasn;t been done by WEG.

We've been using this method for specializations in our campaigns, too, with a couple of minor tweaks. Mostly we require the specialty to be used over 3 missions, before it can be raised, and it must be raised in full dice. That is just so it is easier to use in play, since the players doesn't have to add in more pips.

Characters do get to higher die codes a bit faster this way, but it's not too hard to offset by allowing the NPCs to grab a specialty die or two.