[Torg] Stat/Skill balance

[Kansas Jim]

Phil writes:

> 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? 

Well, right off the bat you'll have to hand out a lot more points during
chargen for skills since there's more ground to cover and you're asking
them to buy them up to higher levels in order to be competent with them.
And skills will probably have to be cheaper to buy or easier to learn in
order for character advancement to take place (in my experience once a
skill hits the +5 to +6 range players start considering the expense of
raising it further to be prohibitive.)

> 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?

Yeah, there are little things like SCUBA that just fall through the
cracks; they don't seem like they should be a skill unto themselves but
it also feels wrong to say that anyone who has the Swimming skill
(and the right Tech axiom) automatically knows how to SCUBA. I've
been toying with the idea of something like 'binary specialisms'
myself, the idea having grown out of an aborted Martial Arts rewrite.

Basically MA maneuvers are things you can do with a skill like Unarmed
Combat (or the Martial Arts skill in the original rules) that you either
know how to do or you don't. Similarly, spells are basically things you
either know how to do or don't that fall under a magic skill. So why not
something similar for other fields? (Maybe change Scholar and Science to
work the same way, you buy the skill once and then you buy additional
Knowledges to represent the fields you know with the skill?) So yeah,
something like SCUBA might be a Knowledge you buy for 1 PP and then
you're able to use your Swimming skill to go SCUBA diving. But if you
don't have that Knowledge, you don't know how to do it.

Skiing though has always thrown me for a loop. Is it worth making it
a skill of its own? It's not like there's an existing skill that really
covers it. And it does show up in Bond movies and the like often enough
that you want to throw a chase scene on skis into an adventure at least
once. But I've have enough trouble getting players to consider pretty
basic abilities like Running, Swimming and Climbing to be skills a
character should have, I'm not sure I could get anyone to take Skiing
as a skill. So maybe as a cheap specialism, but what skill would it
apply to? Land Vehicles? :D

> 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: 

I've never really liked the idea of 'career' skills, though I suppose
if you rebuild the entire skill system around the idea it would be
feasible. But won't everyone want to choose a career skill for their
tag skill? But then you couldn't start out with subskills better than
your career skill (as in your example with taking Fire Combat and
Stealth higher than Soldier.) I suppose you could always change that,
or say you can't take a career skill as your tag skill.

> 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)

Could the player justify Tracked Vehicles as being encompassed by
Soldier ("he drove a tank") and so not have to buy it as a specialism?
Or would any Specialism have to be bought, no justifications allowed?

> 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.

Could he change the group name from "Soldier" to "Special Forces" and
then justify Swimming as a core ability?

-- 
Kansas Jim, Torg guru (ksjim (at) sdc (dot) org)
Torg website: http://www.sdc.org/~ksjim/index.html