[Torg] Stat/Skill balance

[Phil Dack]

p.s. sorry about the formatting. All new yahoo email is still playing merry hell with me...



----- Original Message ----
> From: Phil Dack <philipdack at yahoo.co.uk>
> To: torg at justintimeadventures.com
> Sent: Monday, 21 July, 2008 1:21:47 PM
> Subject: [Torg] Stat/Skill balance
> 
> 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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