>here are some tricks I am picking up running PCs with higher
>skills than joe clan average
This is something I keep seeing on this list. Someone raises a query about the rules, and gets a series of GM tricks in reply. While these are sometimes (often?) useful, they aren't really addressing the issue raised. Maybe they are the only suggestions that can be offered, but I find it worrying that too many of them seem more like work rounds than bug fixes.
My point remains that the game makes it relatively easy for heroes to become better than most at their skills, at least in an established campaign. Reaching W2 relatively quickly is, IMO, a good thing. Players like to feel they are the best swordsman/archer/singer/spirit talker/whatever in the area. Fair enough. But however long it takes them to gain one mastery, it takes the same to gain two. (And the same to gain four as to gain two...) In theory gaining a mastery could take twenty weeks. In practice it seems to me to take about twice that. But that still means after three years solid play, I'm looking at people with four or five masteries. And after a five year campaign (not an unreasonable time) they may be on, what? W7? I want some system that will stop that happening, but not discourage the growth at lower levels.
I'm tempted to do one of two things - issue a blanket ban ("I don't want to run past 5W3, so you can't have characters past that") or seriously increase the cost of increases past a reasonable point, probably to one HP per mastery minimum. Any other ideas considered.
Cheers,
Graham
-- Graham Robinson graham_at_... Albion Software Engineering Ltd.
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