RE: Re: Broad abilities

From: Silburn, Luke <luke.silburn_at_...>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 11:03:44 +0100

 >>end.  The best rule I have seen so far to handle this is to increase 

>>the cost of improving a skill as it progresses (similar to the fetish
>>table). My suggestion is the mastery level, so upto 39 would cost 1
>>HP each, 40-59 would cost 2 etc.

>>Of course this may well result in the players driving ONE skill up,
>>rather than 2 or 3... yeah I can see that happening actually. So maybe
>>this isnt an answer either.

You could you tie advancement cost to the average of recorded abilities in some way (similar to Benedict's idea of throttling back narrow abilities to keep them in line with their parent broad ability), so you can drive up one or two skills away from your general level of competance but such specialisation becomes increasingly costly - say an extra HP to base costs for every mastery beyond your ability average that you go or something.

It would increase the handling time of character advancement of course and might drive players to take as few broad abilities as they can get away with, so it might not answer... Perhaps combine this idea with an HP cost for raising keywords and make the average of a characters keywords the threshold from which increased ability costs are calculated??? I dunno, I'm just busking here and don't have any playtest experience to back me up (maybe I'm on an improv penalty...)

>>Perhaps you need to talk to your players and simply ASK them to stop.

Talking with your players is always good. If they are being irritating by overly focusing on two or three 'hammers' and turning all encounters into 'nails' - then discussing the problematic playstyle that has evolved is a good way of sequeing into possible houserules to rectify the situation; who knows, they might have some interesting pointers for the GM about how the game is run....

Regards
Luke

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