[Torg] Stat/Skill balance

[Phil Dack]

I'm thinking of going back to Torg in the next few weeks, but I want to toy with adjusting the balance between stats and skills. I'm thinking of keeping stats as they are, as I'm happy that in Cinematic World 7-13 offers enough of a range between Weedy and Heroic attributes (a 7-spread is the same as Ars Magica's -3/+3 and D20's -2/+4).
However, I want to add a little more granularity to skills, so that Tag skills are perhaps +5 and characters as a result have more skills overall. Can you think of any implications this might have, other than needing to increase average difficulties by a couple of points? 
I also want to add a little more detail to skills. Or I think I do. I want to reflect abilities that perhaps don't take a huge amount of practice to become familiar with, but if you haven't done them before at all can be extremely challenging, and in many cases I think these are subskills of other abilities - I'm thinking of SCUBA use, parachuting and skiing in particular, although I'm sure there are many other examples (driving a manual transmission car, flying a light aircraft, a musician to pick up another musical instrument, learning a new area of general knowledge). Perhaps I could do this through binary specialisms - so that Scuba is a specialism of Swimming that you either have or you dont, and they cost a single PP to gain?
I'm also toying with less detail, as well as more detail, to go for a 3-tier skill system overall, to bring a narrative element into play. I'll illustrate through example: 
Group: Soldier +2
(encompassing any skills the player can justify)
Skills: Fire Combat +3, Stealth +3
(reflecting that they're better at fire combat and camouflage than their other soldiering skills)
Specialisms: Scuba, Tracked Vehicles
(within the Soldier group, they've got specific experience of these two areas)
I could complicate this further with Core and Peripheral skills. In the above example, the GM might rule that although learning Scuba within the Soldier group is perfectly reasonable, Swimming is Peripheral rather than Core. Unless the character has the Swim skill elsewhere on the character sheet, their ability is half of the Soldier score, or +1.
Would welcome any thoughts.
ta,
Phil


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