Skill advancement doesn't feel right
Pen:
I came up with a roleplaying setting that I felt needed its own game system. It's called The Raptured and it starts out on our current real world Earth and proceeds into being a scifi, intergalactic space roleplaying game. The characters start as real world archetypes - our playtesting group of PC's had an American infantryman, a nurse, an ex-convict heroin addict, a 20 year old student looking for the man who killed his FBI father, a computer hacker, a professor and a kid who was a budding McGyver and liked making anything that blew up. In other words, a wide range of skills come into play.
The entire system is currently based on 2d10. You combine them to generate variables from 2 to 20. Skills are rated on that scale. If you make or miss your skill by 1, you can mark it and at the end of the game week, you get to roll to increase that skill by rolling higher. The highest a skill can go is 19. Rolling to increase higher than 19 instead gives you a feat in that skill (if your skill in Rifle is 19 and you roll a 20, you can choose from a list of feats related to Rifle skill, such as Precision Shooting or Crack Shot). There are bonuses to the roll that kick in when you reach 19 in a skill so that advancement doesn't stagnate. The system is a rough derivative of the old Runequest system that used D100 and had skill increases as I've just described rather than giving out experience points, which I personally abhor.
Combat is working really well. But I'm finding that skill increases are problematic. What I'm not liking is the trade off between training and "in the field" experience. One can go into the military and be trained rather quickly to become a crack shot sniper or how to fight hand to hand. However, things such as Engineering take a long time to learn. I'm having a hard time figuring out a skill advancement tweak so that it takes a reasonable amount of time to learn some skills, yet doesn't make learning other skills, what I call Shoot 'em up skills (brawling, guns, driving, jumping, etc) to drawn out. I want to keep the system simple, but I am starting to wonder if perhaps I should switch over to d100, because it allows me to stretch the distance from a beginner skill set to a masters skill set. I can then say that certain skills increase by 1% each time, while others increase by greater %'s'.
But on the other hand, I like the simplicity of everything works on rolling 2d10. So I'm wondering if there might be some other alternative to skill advancement techniques that would allow me to easilly inhibit some skill advancments while allowing others to increase more easily without resorting to XP.
Anyone else out there grappled with this and won?
Mathew E. Reuther:
Change the number of checks needed on a per skill basis. It's the addition of a single number to the skills, and a short addition to the skillup mechanic rules.
Ar Kayon:
1d100 is technically 2d10, with the added benefit of a larger range of numbers and simple probability calculations.
Pen:
Ar Kayon: Actually, 2d10 is much different than d100 in a very fundamental, and for my purposes critical, way: D100 is a linear progression. Your chance to roll any one value is the same as your chance to roll any other single value. 2d10 is a bell curve. It is much easier to roll 10 than to roll 2. In fact, you have only a 1% chance to roll 2, but 9% chance to roll 10. That means learning a new skill is very difficult at first, then, as you get the hang of it, it gets much easier until you near mastery, then it gets very difficult again.
That reflects a real life learning curve IMO.
Mathew: That may be the simplest solution.
Mathew E. Reuther:
Yeah, there's no curve on a d100. The more dice you are rolling and adding, the steeper the curve. Which is something particularly noteworthy in dice pool systems.
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