SkinnyOrc wrote: ↑Sun Sep 08, 2019 11:37 am
Looking at it again, limiting the special skill to half SKILL would be a lot better than not addressing it all.
So I still think that, and I get that going further is too much change for a simple revision of the rulebook. What I want to suggest is there's another even simpler way to get a similar result to limiting special skills to half SKILL. That is changing the cost of special skill advances from new score x 10, to new score x 20.
Because special skills cost new score x multiplier, and their new score only goes up to 6, at x10 they're cheap advances compared to everything else. STAM advances only cost new score x 5 but the lowest you can start with is 8. To go to 9 it's 45 XP (9x5), so it's more expensive than going from special skill 2 to 3 (30 XP) or even 3 to 4 (40 XP). But a more comparable STAM upgrade would be to 15, which costs 75 XP. SKILL advances are more expensive again, going from 7 to 8 costs 160 XP!
Making special skills x20 just offsets the range of scores for that being low compared to everything else. It means after the first adventure there won't be enough XP to take their main weapon from WSS 2 to 3 (a good thing), but they can still take a special skill from 1 to 2, or learn 2 new ones, or lots of other things. If you find the rate of advance is slower than the players like you can always give out more than 50 XP an adventure, but it's still best none of the advances stand out as cheap.
On this graph the lines are showing how many adventures the PCs need to complete at 50 XP each to reach that AS, against the blue bars of the numbers of creature types with that AS. The red line is the current rules, the yellow line is WSS limited to half SKILL, and the green line is increasing special skills to new score x 20.
You can see the green line follows a similar path to the yellow line. But it's a little better; the first PC AS increase from 9 to 10 takes 2 adventures rather than 1, it doesn't zig-zag so the advances are more evenly spaced out, and AS 18 takes a minimum of 28 adventures to reach instead of 24.
This is the number of adventures to get to each AS level for the alternatives in the graph.
. . . . . . . . .
Now . .
SS ½ SKILL .
SS x20
AS 10 . . . . . . 1 . . . . . . 1 . . . . . . 2
AS 11 . . . . . . 2 . . . . . . 4 . . . . . . 3
AS 12 . . . . . . 3 . . . . . . 5 . . . . . . 5
AS 13 . . . . . . 4 . . . . . . 9 . . . . . . 8
AS 14 . . . . . . 7 . . . . . . 13 . . . . . 11
AS 15 . . . . . . 11 . . . . . 14 . . . . . 14
AS 16 . . . . . . 15 . . . . . 18 . . . . . 18
AS 17 . . . . . . 19 . . . . . 23 . . . . . 23
AS 18 . . . . . . 24 . . . . . 24 . . . . . 28