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Shrinking benefit of skill levels?
You're of course right that when skill level gets high, each additional level confers a shrinking number of added percentage points to the chance of success on a skill roll. I always find it interesting, though, to also turn such probabilities on their head and look at them again. In this case:
Instead of chance of success, look at chance of failure. It's 50% at Skill-10. Increase that to Skill-11, and the chance of failure drops to 37.5%. That's 12.5 percentage points, but a 25% decrease in the size of the chance of failure itself (50 points x 3/4 = 37.5. I welcome suggestions from the more learned on how to better express in words this difference between an absolute change in percentage points of a probability, and a percentage change in the degree of probability itself.)
This welcome percentage decrease in probability of failure gets better with each added skill level! At Skill-14, the chance of failure is 9.3%. Raise skill to 15, and the chance of failure plunges by half to 4.6%. That's a greater decrease in chance of failure than the improvement from Skill-10 to Skill-11 bought!
The increase to Skill-16 further slashes the chance of failure to 1.9%, less than half of Skill-15's chance. Skill-17 cuts the chance to less than a third that of Skill-16, or 0.5%. And finally, Skill-18 divides that remaining chance of failure by an effective infinity, to achieve 0% chance of failure.
So, that's another way of looking at the matter of whether increasing skill levels are worth less and less, or not. Yet that doesn't do away with the original viewpoint. They're both good observations. In the end, what's the deal – is each added level of skill actually worth more than the previous level, or less?
I wrote my thoughts on just that topic in an earlier article, noting how arguments can be made for each side. Here's the article; tell me what you think.
http://www.gamesdiner.com/game_design_musing_point_cost_scale_stats