Skill Advancement Thought

[Hedgehobbit]

I don't have the new book but have been thinking about making some skills more difficult to learn that others. RQ2 had some of this whereby it was more expensive to train some skills other others (rapier v club forex). What I would like to do is make magical or more exotic skills advance slower while ones with more limited usefullness adventure (crafting and other odd thing) go faster.

I was thinking of two ways to accomplish this. First is to vary the number of skill points received for each advancement checks. Hard skills go up 1d4, regular 1d6 and easy ones 1d8.

Another idea was to give a bonus or penalty to the advancement check itself. Not sure what a good number range would be.

Is there anything in the new BRP rules like this?

Also, the old game Bushido was similar to RQ in some respects. In that game they had something called Okuden which were "secret" skill. Basically, it was a skill that let you do something that you normally couldn't, like throw a sword. It was a normal skill as far as using it but it would only go as high as the skill it was based on; your "throw sword" skill can't exceed your "sword" skill. I was thinking something like this would be nice for BRP as it would give a method for adding "feats" to the game but without another system or the on-or-off effect of feats or other special powers. Anyone do anything like this?

Finally, one of the issues I had with my long running BRP and Stormbringer campaigns was that after a while, all the characters started to look the same. Since the characters lower skills advanced more quickly, they eventually ended up with all their skills in a similar range. So, I was thinking of making each character pick a number of skills that his character specialized in and give him a bonus to his advancement checks for those skills.

Aaron

[Harshax]

Finally, one of the issues I had with my long running BRP and Stormbringer campaigns was that after a while, all the characters started to look the same. Since the characters lower skills advanced more quickly, they eventually ended up with all their skills in a similar range. So, I was thinking of making each character pick a number of skills that his character specialized in and give him a bonus to his advancement checks for those skills.

If you opt for the Easy/Moderate/Difficult skill categorization, you could keep characters on there toes by introducing a skill degradation mechanic.

When experience checks are rolled:

Every difficult skill, that did not receive an experience check during the session is automatically reduced by 1d4.

Every moderate skill, that did not receive an experience check during the session is automatically reduced by 1.

Easy skills do not degrade.

[Trifletraxor]

I was thinking of two ways to accomplish this. First is to vary the number of skill points received for each advancement checks. Hard skills go up 1d4, regular 1d6 and easy ones 1d8.

Sort of like the idea. RQ4 had all skill categoriesed into either easy, medium or hard.

SGL.

[rleduc]

I have long used special skills that only become available when the base gets reaches 90%.

In one world RQ3-like, when a wizard reached 90% in Intensity they would start a new skill that applied to each spell at 90% called “Mastery” – this new skill did not increase with experience or study, but rather was based off the characters knowledge of the arcane secrets of their order. Each order had 10 mundane skills: a Geomancer might have Geology, Geography, Anthropology, and seven others; each of these skills then contributed +3% if it was 30%+, +6% for 60%+ and +9% if it was 90% plus. So if our geomancer had 30-59% in all ten skills, his master would be 30%. Master would give -1 Magic Point to casting mastered spells and some other benefits.

The idea was that this gave a motivation for wizards to have great sage-like lore. Our geomancer would benefit from knowing about the nature of hills and mountains (geology), from knowing about the distribution of rivers and cities (geography) and from knowing about the different peoples of the world (anthropology) etc. It fit the world.

Likewise, for combat skills over 90% I have allowed characters to study Weapons Mastery – the only advantage is that it adds to both attack and parry rolls for the weapon. This was basically a way to accelerate advancement in a given weapon – except I kept tight control over teachers – you had to find someone who would teach the secrets of the weapon.

[Hedgehobbit]

In one world RQ3-like, when a wizard reached 90% in Intensity they would start a new skill that applied to each spell at 90% called “Mastery” – this new skill did not increase with experience or study, but rather was based off the characters knowledge of the arcane secrets of their order. Each order had 10 mundane skills: a Geomancer might have Geology, Geography, Anthropology, and seven others; each of these skills then contributed +3% if it was 30%+, +6% for 60%+ and +9% if it was 90% plus. So if our geomancer had 30-59% in all ten skills, his master would be 30%. Master would give -1 Magic Point to casting mastered spells and some other benefits.

That kinda reminds me of the religious bonuses used in the Pendragon game. I'll have to think about groups of skills (10 sounds like a lot though).

I was also thinking about making the skill groupings like Perception and Comminication also increase with experience. So if you rolled particularly well on your Listen advancement roll, you might get a +1 to your Perception bonus. Either that or treat them as mega-skills for either a more simplified game or to gloss over skills that a particular character might not care about. For example, a barbarian-type character might must have one skill called Communication that goes up slowly but applies to all the sub-skills in that category.

[Nightshade]

As the beetle herder said, the RQ4/AIG draft did this. The final version's take won't probably be much help, because it used the idea that AIG/4 had that you only got a limited number of rolls in a session; what you used just told you what they could apply to. So the difficulty just said whether you had to us a half roll, a full roll, or two rolls.

An earlier version just changed the output; Hard skills yielded 1d3 percentage points, Medium skills 1d6 and Easy skills 2d6.

[frogspawner]

Yes, yes and yes.

I don't have the new book but have been thinking about making some skills more difficult to learn that others...

Ironically, in the cause of harmonizing with straight BRP, I have only just dumped my own mechanism for this. I gave each skill a 'difficulty rating' which meant they increased by +1%, +2%, +3% or +5% accordingly (weapons and many skills being in the simple, +5% category).

I liked it, but two bad points were: (i) having to work out NPCs skills exactly (but that's probably more a fault of my perfectionism!); and (ii) having to tell people all the time what their increases were.

I was thinking something like this would be nice for BRP as it would give a method for adding "feats" to the game but without another system or the on-or-off effect of feats or other special powers.

I'm using Martial Arts for exactly that, and give the "special abilities" (feats) every 10%.

So, I was thinking of making each character pick a number of skills that his character specialized in and give him a bonus to his advancement checks for those skills.

I do this by only allowing INT increase rolls per session "back at town" - any others not checked are lost.