[Forge-main] Re: Re: Skills List [LONG] (Ricardo Gladwell)

[Enrique Perez]

Yo, Ricardo wrote:

> I have to say, after working so ahrd to keep the difficulty range within
> the intuitive, human-readable 0-20 range I am extremely reluctant to
> break it - it was one of the original design criteria. I hate to say it,
> but both methods appear, on analysis, to have their flaws.

Well, the difficulty scale or our rules range has to give. We haven't even 
discussed magic and
equipment bonuses that could easily give another five points. We might end up 
with a 0-30 range;
but, whatever difficulty scale we end up with, that's going to be it, we'd 
really have to squish
every other scale to knock off five or ten points. I believe that gamers can 
easily handle
0-whatever, as long as it ends in a zero or a five.

In any case there is going to be a continuum of difficulties, there's not going 
to be a number
where you can say this is exactly the highest that a human can ever go, because 
there will always
be a synergistic combinations of abilities, skills, spells, equipment, tactics 
or whatever that
push it in some area, especially as the game evolves. Basically for gods and 
humans to be
different, gods will have to have abilities probably at least fifteen higher to 
do be impossibly
different. What I mean is that the scale will go something like 15 hard, 20 
near impossible, 35
godlike.

> Another suggestion would be to simply have the skills groups as they
> were (collections of related skills, such as Animals(Horse),
> Animals(Dog) and so on) without the generic skills (Animals) and instead
> have an optional substitution rule - you can subsitute a skill from your
> group for another skill in the same group, if you don't have it, but
> only if you make the action at a -3 penalty to difficulty.

This leads to the same problem as the seperate skills, you could have a higher 
ability in a
generic skill than a specific skill. Say for example you have a bow skill of 
five and a thrown
dagger skill of one, your generic skill of 5 ( bow ) - 3 ( generic penalty ) = 
2 would be higher
than that of your thrown dagger skill ( 1 ).

Enrique


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