Making a homebrew. Skill/Ability improvment through use dawned on me. Exploitable?
My thoughts were that each use of a skill or ability would add points to improving the use of it, eventually raising it's level. At a high enough level, you'd no longer need to roll below certain difficulties for tasks involving those skills or abilities.
The first thing that came to mind is what's to stop players from using skills over and over again to improve them. But then maybe higher skill/ability levels require higher challenge ratings to earn improvements?
I don't have a whole lot fleshed out. It's called Mettle.
I also wanted to implement the idea of skill trees, to try to force people to choose between strong focus, or broad dabbling.
Another idea I've latched on to was flexible adjustable enemy/monster cards for DMs. A small group, maybe ten to twenty, of different stat blocks of enemies to skin as you please, maybe add a couple of different abilities here or there for different scenarios.
I'm trying to limit paperwork.
>>46235066
difficult, because the players depend on what their adventures gives them as opportunity and the gap between power gamers and story players will not only be thanks to their skill/ability choices but also the amount of points they have.
I think about that regulary too, but never found a solution I'm comfortable with. Closest things I'm okay with is giving the chars a discount on a number of skills/abilities they have used, or allowing them to put a fixed number of points only in the skills/abilities they have used recently, but imho that still hasn't the feeling of developing through practice....
>>46235066
Tracking every individual use of a skill seems pretty tedious to me.
I know some games with similar ideas let you check for skill increase only after some time using it. So you could earn the opportunity to raise a skill during play (doing something interesting, or rolling very well), but you only determine if the skill increased after like a month or so of practice. In Pendragon, you only determine skill increase around the end of the year, during which time your PC is supposed to be working on it.
If you want to encourage downtime practicing there's also the idea that Shadowrun uses, where you need to spend a specified time period training to raise a skill. For instance, if I want to raise my firearms skill from 4 to 5, I might be spending 5 weeks at the range (about 6-10 hours a day total commitment), including lessons from a specialized trainer.
Both of these ideas ensure that things happen at a believable pace - you don't go from zero to grand-master in a month. No matter how much action you saw in that month, there's only so much that can do for you. And they also discourage PCs from trying to spamming needless skill use throughout a session in the hopes that they improve it faster.
>>46235066
I'd absolutely say that raising skill points through using the skills would require higher challenges to improve them above threshold values.
Perhaps consider sets of tasks that all require the use of a particular skill to be used before that skill level can be raised. Such as, if someone wanted to raise their ability to hide from things, they would have to:
hide from someone chasing them and successfully evade capture
hide from someone that has no idea they would be there in the first place, but would cause a scene if discovered, and
hide while stalking someone, and fulfill a point to stalking them that advances the story's progression
Then to add punishment to someone for FAILING a hide check, they would have to remove one of their successes (of their choice) from the list and be forced to reattempt it later. That way, it may discourage them from TRYING TO HIDE ALL THE FREAKING TIME if they're just 1 task away from improving their hiding level, and circumstances dictate that using some other skill would be better for overcoming a challenge
>>46235383
I like that. I'd also toyed with the idea of earning exp but as a spendable resource. Or... literally having to spend earned wealth on maintenance and self improvement.
The improve from use idea just came to me now, which is why I'm looking for falsification.
>>46235066
Yeah my group does something like this in a d20 based homebrew system. You get XP (tally marks on the character sheet) based on your roll, as follows:
>1 = 0 XP
>2-5 = 1 XP
>6-10 = 2 XP
>11-15 = 3 XP
>16-19 = 4 XP
>20 = 5 XP
When you got 20 XP the skill leveled up, until you were at a certain skill level and broke into "Tier 2". The skill got more functionality or specialization but the XP to level up went up to 30. It works well as long as you remember to add XP after every roll. Also in our system attacks with different weapons are skills (like in Morrowind) as are defenses like Dodge and Block, and actually basically everything was a skill both in and out of combat, and therefore covered by the XP leveling system.
>>46235066
Check out Role Master and MERP
A skills use has to have a significant result to grant exp. It is not enough to make a check, the check must be used to further a goal.
The first exp gain in a given skill catagory during an adventure grants a lot, following gains grant less and less.
Greater challenges give greater experience.
In combat exp is granted for serious hits and kills. Like other skills, the first kill grants good exp but each kill after give less and less. Killing a single worthy opponent is much better for advancement than slaughtering waves of welps.
