Already tasted and, err, found to be unpalatable by some, as part of the dread 'Broad abilities' thread, if you cast your mind back. In that thread I wrote:
> Hmm, perhaps we need rules that can handle abilities of any broadness
> or narrowness. At the moment we have a one tier approach. It seems
> the proposed new rule [for HW2] will be two tier: abilities are 'broad' or
> 'narrow'. Perhaps someway of indicating degree of breadth or
> narrowness would be better? The debate so far has focused on broad
> abilities, but in my experience narrow abilities are also a problem
...
> For such abilities to really work, narrow abilities must have a
> bonus, and the narrower the ability, the greater the bonus.
A 'pointless' ability being a 'narrow' ability, in that it is rarely applicable.
I suggested the following rule:
> Each ability has an ability rating (as before) and a breadth rating
> (new).
> The breadth rating is a positive real number; for convenience is
> should be an integer or the reciprocal of an integer; broad abilities
> have large values, narrow abilities have small values.
> The breadth rating is the cost, in HP of raising the ability rating
> by 1 (or gaining it at 12).
> The Narrator decides the ability rating for an ability, which is a
> constant, when the ability is gained; the default value is 1.
> Write the breadth rating after the ability rating, separated by an
> 'x'. An unrecorded breadth rating is taken to be 1.
>
> EXAMPLE 1: Hunting 1Wx3 would indicate a Hunting ability with a
> rating of 1W that costs 3HP to raise +1. As it has a breadth rating
> of 3, it is meant cover about three normal (breadth 1) abilities, for
> example, stalking, tracking and hiding.
>
> EXAMPLE 2: Dragon Slaying Sword 10W2x1/5 would indicate an item with
> an ability rating of 10W2 that can be raised by +5 per HP spent. As
> it has a breadth rating of 1/5, it is meant to be useful in only
> about 20% of situations that a sword might be useful in.
>
> The Narrator can use the breadth rating as a guide for choosing
> improvisational modifiers.
I also pointed out that the existing rules actually penalize players for choosing interestingly specific abilities in their 100 word character descriptions:
> From a mini-max PoV, why should a player choose 'Hate Black Oaks 5W'
> when he could choose 'Hate Enemies 5W'? The former is useless if your
> enemies change. What is more, the latter is more likely to be
> 'related to a session', so as the rules stand, on average it will be
> cheaper to increase!
> That is what I do not like about all abilities being equally costly
> to increase. The narrative in the rules tries to encourage you to
> have cool-sounding abilities, especially ambiguous references. But
> the rules actually discourage this, because abilities are not
> actually effective unless they have a big rating and they are
> applicable. You must therefore use your cool abilities or ambiguous
> references often, and their description must make them often useful,
> or they will be pathetic. But if you use an ambiguous reference
> often, it is no longer ambiguous! And cool-sounding abilities are
> usually narrower in scope!
> Consider the example in the rule book: the 'Collapsing Wind' that
> Kallai has. The narrative implies that Kallai's player never uses
> that ability until long after character generation. So it would
> almost certainly have a rating of only 13, which will not collapse
> anything. And why have a 'Collapsing Wind' when you could have a
> 'Wind'? Or an 'EWF Scrying Crystal' when you could have a 'Scrying
> Crystal'?
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