Should all basic skills start at the sum of 2 charac. ?

[Tabularasa]

One thing I found strange is that the base score in some basic skills is given by adding two characteristics (or 10+characteristic) while in others its simply the score of one characteristic. Why the difference?

Basic skills are according to my understanding skills that everyone has picked up as part of daily live. As such, everyone be pretty proficient at those.

The weirder thing is that some advanced skills start at two characteristics, meaning for instance that your starting score in Streetwise (POU+CHA) is very much likely to be higher than your base score in Acrobatics (DEX). That does not seem right to me, as I envisage the advanced skills as skills that require some prior training and are therefore likely to be harder to pick-up. I think their starting score should be based on only one characteristic or the average of two characteristic.

I think this would add some consistency to the system and lead to starting characters being slightly better than they currently are.

Agree/Disagree?

 

[Tabularasa]

Lot's of no but very little explanations as to why.

Wouldn't this make the system more internally consistent and help low level characters?

 

[soltakss]

From an old-school RQ point of view, skills had different basic scores. Some skills had low basics and some high basics.

From a Mongoose RQ point of view, the same should be reflected. Some skills should have a high basic (based on multiple characteristics) and some should have a low basic (based on a single characteristic).

 

[Rurik]

However there was logic to the skill bases in RQ2/3. For example weapons skills were based on how hard a weapon was to learn. There is a good reason militias used spears in addition to cost - they had a high base chance. Even if money was no issue you were better off giving untrained fighters spears than greatswords.

I don't always see the logic behind the skill bases in MRQ. It seems kind of arbitrary that some skills get 2 stats for the base and others get only one.

What bugs me most though is stealth and dodge. 10 plus a stat that is rolled on 3d6 minus a stat rolled on 2d6+6 means that these usually start in single digits.

That being said I like the simplicity of the skill system, which is closely tied to the fast chargen, and I think there are other parts of the game with bigger issues, so I voted against changing the skill system.

 

[Deleriad]

I personally use 2 characteristics for every skill, including advanced. By the time you start finding discussions about whether skill A should be 5% harder than skill B and so on you're into micromanagement.

Intuitively some things seem like they should be easier to do than others but I find when it comes to actual play, I would rather just assign a modifier.

There is one thing however that has been bothering me and that's the effect of very high characteristics on skill chances. For example, close combat skills are based on STR+DEX. Therefore, if you gave a 10m Giant with STR 90, DEX 10 a (big) rapier, its base chance is 100%.

Obviously that is an extreme example but I'm going to be implementing a rule which states that no characteristic can add more than +25% (or subtract more than 25%) to a base chance.