Re: Re: Broad categories, Hunting

From: Benedict Adamson <badamson_at_...>
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 14:04:17 +0100

Nick Brooke wrote:
>
> Tim writes:
>
> > I thought the "proper" way to deal with this to give improvisation
> > penalties to the broad skill when used in place of any of the
> > specific skills that the "specialist" might have in it's place
>
> Something like that *might* work for me. But then you'd have the
> problem that the broad "Hunting" ability and the specific abilities
> in the occupational "Hunter" keyword become fairly interchangeable --
> and unless HP costs change radically, it'll still be cheaper to
> improve the former than everything in the latter. Not good.
...

A suggestion:

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.

Thoughts?