Forum

Howdy All,

I have been watching a lot of streams and lurking on forums, and it appears players almost always only spend XP on talents. This is fine if everyone is having fun obviously, but what are the thoughts on lowering the cost of a skill from X5 to something like a X3 or even a X2 for leveling the skills? I have a smaller group so fewer players are going to have to work together to get a group that can handle all of the items needed. The game is going to be meeting once a month so leveling will be slower and I did not want to give out too many skills or talents beyond the normal rules at start so they get the survival part of the game early on.

Any red flags or things I should be concerned about? Overall thoughts on leveling or the cost of skills? Thanks for the time and feedback.

My exp costs are...

Skills. 5 for the first rank.
new rank x2 for rank 2-5

Talents 5 x rank

Magic Talents without a teacher is x2 cost.

You can buy into other professions talents using magic rules. Without a teacher it's x2 cost. If it's another professions magic talent it's x2 with a teacher x3 without.

I think that's due to people not realizing the big benefits of skill dice. Gaining a +1 for 10/15/20/25xp seems lackluster but

• Skill dice don't have banes so they can't hurt you

• Not having skill dice makes penalty dice turn into negative dice and negative dice are quite bad..

• Skill dice don't have banes so they can't hurt you

But d6s and d8s from talents are added to your ”skill dice” pool when available though, so they also have no effect on a 1.

• Not having skill dice makes penalty dice turn into negative dice and negative dice are quite bad..

Negative dice are often less bad than losing skill dice. Example: rolling 3 attribute dice and 2 negative skill dice has a higher chanse of success than rolling 1 attribute die and 0 skill dice. However if a malicious GM interprets a negative result as some kind of fumble (no support of this in the rules though), then in that case, negative skill dice might be worse.

Situational skill dice that can be taken from you are significantly different from skill does that apply every time a specific skill is rolled. Even if it's something like Sword Mastery, swords break. People get disarmed or equipment is stolen.
Skill dice are the best dice. And raising your skills is one of the best investments.

I'm not certain 3 dice and 2 negative has a better chance of success than 1 base die. Mind you I haven't done that sort of math in forever

As Konungr mentioned though - it's important to remember that Talent dice and similar while adding Skill dice are still very dependent on an outside situation that can change. If I put +1 in melee it doesn't matter what type of hand to hand attack I try, I get that die. Everything else is dependent on being equipped with the right thing (and then not being disarmed or having it broken)

Simplest possible example would be that 0 dice have 0% chanse of success, 1 positive + 1 negative would be 1/6 (6/36) chance of a success on the positive die and a 1/36 chance of rolling 6s on both dice, taking out one another. So 5/36 chance of success (~14% success rate, not far from the ~17% of just having 1 positive die).

Pure skill dice are much better than dice from talents, I will not argue about that. Talents dice are much cheaper and adds other nice effects though. Those that add ”free actions” are often especially good.
I can just say that I increased the price of talents and lowered the price of skills, and my players still invests much much more into talents.

The thing I miss most is that NPCs do not have enough talents in the core material. A powerful NPC can have a Melee skill of even up to 4, but then often zero good combat oriented talents.. often a waste in xp and makes for blander/less interesting fights.

The thing I miss most is that NPCs do not have enough talents in the core material. A powerful NPC can have a Melee skill of even up to 4, but then often zero good combat oriented talents.. often a waste in xp and makes for blander/less interesting fights.

Just give them the Talents you feel they should have for your game. Part of the GM's job is to make the game interesting and exciting. If my party is just dealing with random slavers they meet on the road I'll grab stock NPCs from the book. If they're specifically hunting a dangerous band of slavers then you bet those are going to be customized.

Thanks for the feedback and discussion. I agree that skills are more valuable, but players still focus on the fast reward of talents. I think I will go with lowering what it costs to get a skill with a X3 multiplier just like talents for now. No one thought it was a bad idea so I will test it. Thanks all.

After being mostly through with the ravens purge, my experience as a gamesmaster is that my players have bought a lot of talents from their XP´s.
i had lowered the costs for skills a lot, they cost were 5, 5, 5, 10 and 15 per rank, but they skilled their talents lot more then their skills.

In the bitter reach, my group will have to spent 3, 6, 9, 12 and 15 for skillranks, but 5, 10 and 15 for their talentranks.