I don't claim to have the perfect solution. Heck, really my solution is the rules as written....just not the rules as possibly viewed by people who are used to RuneQuest. Well, I also have a suggested optional rule for those who feel that more is needed, but you have to scoot down to the very end for that.
First I want to jump back and mention that I think the guidelines suggested by the thread originator seemed perfectly sane. There is nothing wrong with having a few broad abilities, but players need to know that if they have nothing but broad abilities they will always be facing penalties.
I think there is more than just hefty improvisation penalties that can help keep broad abilities in check, however. A quick brush up on page 31 of the Hero Wars core book reminds us that:
"Improvements to the character are often related to the session just played. These improvements make sense in the context of the game. Other improvements seem to come from left field......To keep the improvements related to the game, there is a higher cost to improvements that have no narrative flow. If the character has not been specified to have been studying, actually used the skill, or whatever, the player must pay the Hero Point cost in the the Unrelated column of the chart below."
Now, imagine for a minute that you'd never played Runequest, so weren't used to putting a tick for a free improvement roll beside a skill every time that you used it. Instead, look at what is really said in that paragraph. "there is a higher cost to improvements that have no narrative flow." If during the course of a session you used your hero used his "tough" to resist being hurt, is there a narrative flow suggesting that he would get tougher? I don't think so. Instead I'd suggest that to improve his or her tough for just one hero point would require training of some sort, a prolonged contest that focused on toughness (such as being tortured), or a session that fairly specifically tested the hero's endurance (they performed a forced march across most of Sartar on snow shoes in mid-winter). Note that in some cases the player may never have actually rolled against his "tough" trait, but there is a narrative flow that could reasonably be extrapolated into a tail about the hero had pushed his limits and found that he was capable of more than he'd ever realized.
Even moving away from inherent traits like tough or smart, this would even apply to many overly broad skills. If you used your "knowledgeable" (at a huge improv penalty of course) to remember something about troll riding insects, this doesn't make you any more knowledgeable. If you managed to wrangle a week in the stacks at the Jonstown temple, or attended a great entertainers fair where folk from all over were swapping stories, or you just finished spending two seasons as a guest of Sir Ethilrist, then you have a reasonable claim that your impressive base of knowledge has widened further. Otherwise no. Similarly, if you use "hunting" to follow some tracks, you could buy a new skill in tracking cheap, but you don't have a narrative flow that suggest that you have become a better all around hunter.
In short I would suggest that "broad" skills are inherently somewhat penalized by the fact that seldom can they be improved without double cost. Combine this with hefty improvisation penalties and narrator nudging to have a mix of narrow and broad skills, and I think that there is no great unbalance. Not that broad skills won't be more useful most of the time than narrow skills, just it should keep all but the most dedicated mini-maxing from abusing them.
However I have one more suggestion if you think that there is still too much abuse. When a broad skill is facing a narrow skill in an extended contest (the one place where you really worry that a hero will always default to a high broad skill), the narrator can reserve the right to give a bonus edge to the narrow skill, based on the degree of difference in breadth. "Strong" versus "Arm wrestling" is an example that has been talked about here. First give strong a -5 or more, then give the person using "arm wrestling" a 3 point edge both ways to reflect the fact that he knows all the little tricks, signs of opponents intentions, etc, so that he can maximise his advantages and minimize his disadvantages. Arm wrestling 17 versus strong 3W2 will still lose, as it should, but closer contests will be heavily weighted in favor of the specialist.
The reason I think this should work is that generally you want heroes to be able to do simple things. Therefore you don't want to penalize broad abilities too much in simple contests. But you don't want broad abilities to too easily displace specific abilities in the really dramatic moments, i.e. extended contests. For example if the heroic strong man (with a couple of masteris in strong) walks into another clans hall and challenges all comers to an arm wrestling contest, you want him to be able to fairly easily beat most opponents, maybe even those known as decent arm wrestlers (simple contests, no edge). However suspension of disbelief might be stretched to believe that the other clan has someone who has arm wrestling with two masteries, to give him a good contest at the end. But somebody who has 'strong' 5W (for a good augment) and arm wrestling 15W (clan champion arm wrestler, after all!) isn't so hard to believe....and that opponent has a decent chance of winning when given an edge in an extended contest.
I hope all this wordiness has been useful to somebody.
--Bryan
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