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Demi Benson's picture

Good Idea, Hard to Add

I like the idea of adding mechanisms for skill breadth - a decade ago I tried my hand at a GURPS-derived homebrew system which included a way to narrow or widen skill focus, and was effectively an alternate way to handle GURPS Techniques and Wildcard skills. Here's what I learned from that: if you're going to have a skill system with two degrees of freedom, it needs to be integrated from the very beginning, as one of the foundations of the system.

Using a convergeant series is a clever way of adding similar skills with a decreasing utility. I will definitely steal this idea should I ever return to game design. :)

But for future readers, I would suggest a few changes to your spreadsheet image: add another column of rounded-off cumulative values, and either highlight all the rows where the cumulative cost rounds to the same number (different colors for different blocks), or highlight only those rows where the rounded-off value changes. This would be a quick way to show that only a few more points gets you many more skills.

 

I also rather like your explanation of "exotic points"! I suspect that like me, very few people have ever thought of modern point-buy systems like that, but in many cases it does work out that way. A few more examples of alternate point systems:

  • BESM suggests that no starting characters should have more than a single stat above X level (X depends on the power level of the game), which gives everyone a single "have an awesome stat" point to spend.
  • Old 3rd edition GURPS Supers suggested that supers could start with a 250 point budget (or 500, or 1000, or whatever), and would have to allocate 50 of those in an Unusual Background for the privilege of having superhuman powers, but a super-normal (with no special powers. e.g. Batman) wouldn't have to buy the UB, giving an equivalent of 50 more points to spend. Often the superpowers were further limited to "only 100 points of superpowers, or any single superpower at any point level". So what we have there is a system with 3 types of points: 200 regular (mundane) character points, plus either 20 superpower-buying points (or some other reasonable number) or a single ultrapower-buying point. Anyone could take the single ultrapower point to spend on any single superhuman ability, or they could spread it out amongst a number of different lower-level powers, and if they didn't spend either the ultrapower-buying point or the superpower-buying points, they got another 50 character points.

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