Should you cap basic skills?

[Rasta]

My point is that the more experience and more skilled Randy Courture recently lost his title to the hulking brute Brock Lesner.

Ah, please forgive me. I don't keep up with UFC nowadays (being more of a K1 watcher until I gave up having a TV), so I missed the inference.

Not having seen the fight (I don't actually pay for my MMA - thank god for the WEC, which IMHO is better anyway), and having nothing but disdain for the WWE, I will point out that he was the NCAA national Wrestling champion one year and runner up another year, so he can't be a total bum.

But back to the little black belt versus the big weightlifter - it is entirely possible that the big guy can get lucky and land a blow wins the fight, but more often than not I still think the big guy is going down (especially in a real world no-rules fight where vitals can be targeted).

I think it can be a toss up. If you ever watched UFC 1-4. The little skilled Ju-Jitsu guy Joyce Gracie dominated everybody until the competition learned take down defence.

 

[Rurik]

While this whole discussion has got me thinking about the subject quite a bit, and one thing the Randy Couture (and Chuck Liddle) losses had me think about is what is it that goes when a fighter ages? Skill or Physical Prowess?

I'd have to say it is the Physical Prowess (or in game terms, Characteristics). Personally I think it is the loss of speed (Dex) more than strength that spells the end for a fighter.

There are plenty of examples of older fighters beating younger, more fit fighters with skill (Ali vs. Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle and Holyfield vs Tyson), but ultimately as fighters age, it is their body that goes.

Which really argues for the point that that I have been arguing against all along. In the real world there is more of a relationship between Characteristics and Skill than is currently modelled in MRQ.

But is it practical to cap all skills based on a statistic? I still don't think so. Many skills would cap at around 60%, and even the ones a character is good at would cap at 75%-90%. This has a number of downsides. It means there is a lot less variation in skill level in the game as a whole. It also caps advancement - once your primary skills reach their limit you have to work on improving characteristics which is a slow and unexciting progression. RuneQuest has always been about skills. While I think the relationship between Characteristics and Skill can be better tied together in a game system than in RQ, to try and impose such a relationship on RQ would not be worthwhile. RQ works good enough as is. And by good enough I mean "Has been one of the most kick ass systems for over 30 years now."

Another thing I know is that players HATE aging rules, or at least ones that really set characters back significantly. One of the primary joys of roleplaying is character advancement. If you keep a character alive for 15 or 20 game years and improve him to be a kick ass dude it really sucks for all of a sudden that character to start getting worse the more you play him rather than better.

 

[zozotroll]

No weight classes in fencing. And being a bit short myself, I can tell you that the other guy haveing a lot of reach ia a big pain. But if you want to play the game you learn to deal.

And when I was learning judo, there was no weight classes in that either. Perhaps at a proffesional level there would be, but I never got that far.

 

[zozotroll]

We all have to age in the real world. It is not much fun. Why have to endure it in a game?

Rurik one thing the Army is good for is tracking your body falling apart. You have to take a test every 6 months or so. I hear lots of guys claiming to be just as good at 40 as they where at 25. When you have test scores from both ages, you tend to not be so free with those claims.

 

[soltakss]

Should basic skills be capped?

I am tempted to cap some of the basic skills (i.e. all those not having to do with social interaction or knowledge) based on a multiple of the underlying characteristic.

The only reason I can think of capping skills is when the character has time or other restrictions on practising those skills. So, in old RQ Priests and Shamans were capped at DEXx5% because they hadn't the time to use their skills. Similarly, I can see an argument that physical characters might havbe intellectual skills capped at INTx5%.

Having said that, I wouldn't cap skills.

My argument for this is that, though everyone is proficient with these skills, the drawback is that they are much more dependent on your underlying characteristics than on something you learn. I never understood why someone with 6 in STR could theoretically end-up with 80%+ in Atheltics.

Technique is more important than raw physical power. It is possible to get a high skill with a low characteristic, but it should take longer.

 

[Tabularasa]

Reading all the above, I would like to thank everyone for their contribution. It is great to be able to have such discussion on a board these days without it ending into a flamewar (Page 2 and eveyone is still polite).

Bottom line, I am changing my mind. I don't think skills should be capped mainly because having a maximum number is frustrating. I think the best way is to model pure physical feats in another way

However, would you cap Resilience or Persistence?

I am balancing between capping then at 5xCON and 5XPOW respectively and leaving them uncapped but applying a penalty based on damage taken (i.e. you are hit for 6, roll your Persistance at 6*-5% = -30%). What would you do?

 

[Loz]

I completely echo your sentiments! Its great to have a good, informed discussion that's kept civil, constructive and informative. There's nothing at all wrong in changing your mind having listened to various arguments, well-put, and thinking through the possibilities.

Should Resilience and Persistence be capped? Yes and no. Originally I capped them for the Players Update because there were some real anomalies that capping would fix. But that's fixing the symptom rather than the cause. There are other ways of fixing the effects of high Resilience and Persistence without having to report to a cap.

 

[soltakss]

Resilience and Persistence are a problem because of the nature of the skills. Personally, I would prefer to set them as a Characteristic x 5 rather than skills that can be increased.

If you have a long running campaign then Resilience will increase to a level where it makes it difficult to kill PCs. So, you get PCs who are difficult to poison, affect by disease or kill. Some people might like that and others might hate it. Again, personaly, I am uncomfortable with the idea.

 

[Rurik]

After some play I disagree that a high resilience makes a character kill proof. A major wound to a vital results in 2 rolls a round (plus the roll for the hit that did the wound. A Major wound to a limb or serious wound to a vital results in one roll a round. With a 5% automatic chance of failure, the character is going fail 1 in 20 rolls. If they are making two rolls a round, they will likely fail within 10 rounds (5 rounds being an average). Making 4 rolls a round (plus a roll for any new hits on one of the wounded locations) means that the character should fail within 5 rounds.

So with a resilience of 95-200% you are far from invincible. You may be able to fight on for a few rounds after taking a nasty wound but you will drop without healing. It has a very heroic feel, fighting on desperately knowing you are on short clock.

With regards to poison and disease those are opposed rolls against the potency, not a straight up roll, so even with a high skill success is not assured.

The capping of Resilience and Persistence rule was introduced at the same time as the rule that made spell resistance an opposed roll. Dodge however is not capped. So in combat, and with spells that oppose dodge, the defender is not limited. But with spells that are opposed by Persistence or Resilience there is a cap on the targets skill, but not the casters. As a game reaches high levels spells become much harder to resist.

 

[Rurik]

Oh yeah, I almost forgot: Bugger off you sorry sots! My opinions are facts and yours are all silly.

 

[Tabularasa]

Oh yeah, I almost forgot: Bugger off you sorry sots! My opinions are facts and yours are all silly.

... yes but you cannot prove that. Ah!

 

[zozotroll]

I have not yet had anybody get high enough to make the uncapped caster skill vs the caped persistance apperent. I dont think my players are aware of a potential cap on those to skill. One more quiet change they never need to know about.

 

[duncan_disorderly]

I'd consider capping skills based on Species Max rather than current value of attributes. That way you can still allow good technique to compensate for poor attributes, but still prevent characters becoming "superhuman"

But realisitically it's only worth worrying about if (some of) your players consider that boosting one or two skills to incredibly high values is a sensible move (because if everyone is getting all their skills to this sort of level then it shouldn't be a problem)

 

[Deleriad]

I have in the past considered putting caps on various skills but the older I get the more I realise that it would be a level of detail and complexity that is unlikely to achieve very much because the premise behind each cap would be different and might not match up with the basic score.

In the end, you could argue with perfect legitimacy for all kinds of caps and there would be unlikely to be compelling objective reason for choosing between them. In that case then I think game elegance and minimum rule-load becomes the deciding factor. That's to say that adding caps adds a rule which has to be remembered. So if you don't need the rule for the game to play well then you don't need the rule. That's my premise.