Hi everyone!
tl;dr: level based static skill set, numerically equivalent to standard system
One of my players doesn't care much for skills. More precisely, he can't be bothered to assign skill ranks when leveling up. He often just picks the same skills to max them up, and is annoyed at all the book keeping that consists in erasing old value, writing new value, fixing the total bonus, etc. FYI, his class ranks + INT is 9, so he feels that it really just slows down his leveling up.
Regardless of whether it actually is really slow or not, I was looking into alternative solutions, since the goal is for the players to have fun. I stumbled upon the Unchained Grouped Skills, which seems great at first sight, but after doing the math I realised it gives *a lot* more skill ranks than the standard system (see math below). Since I wouldn't want to impose the system change to the whole party (just to that one guy), the new system had to be numerically equivalent to the standard system, to be fair.
Here's what I came up with:
- At the beginning of the game, compute your "skill credits". It's the usual class "skill ranks per level" + INT. Humans add 1 to this. And assuming the character will never multiclass, nor pick the bonus hit points, add 1 for favored class bonus ranks.
- Each credit lets you buy either 1 "main skill", or 2 "secondary skills". They will never change. You mark them as main or secondary in your sheet.
- The bonus for a main skill is modifier + level, the bonus for a secondary skill is modifier + level/2 (rounded up). Of course, the +3 class bonus and other bonuses still apply.
That's all :) You pick your skillset once, and you're done forever. The formulas are simple enough that the player can compute the full bonuses on the fly. Or just update two numbers on his sheet when leveling up: "main bonus" and "secondary bonus". I would personally still write down the total bonuses on the sheet, which would change at every level, and render the whole idea moot, but well.
A few notes:
- The rounding up gives you a small advantage over the standard system, every other level. You could also decide to round down, which gives a small penalty every other level.
- It's basically equivalent to adding one rank in each main skill every level, and adding one rank every other level to each secondary skill. But automatic.
- For more fine tuning you can also add "minor skills", worth a third or a fourth of a credit, and their bonus is modifier + level/3 or level/4. They are equivalent to giving them ranks every third or fourth level, but they also increase the advantage/penalty because of rounding. These let you for instance hit some class skills you'd be missing otherwise when your class ranks + INT is quite low.
- Since it's very static (it's the point), you can in principle never pick up a new skill entirely. As for the standard system, I would allow to "retrain" by spending time and ressources to do either of:
- swapping a main skill with a secondary skill
- swapping a secondary skill with a minor skill
- swapping a minor skill with an untrained skill
All in all the system is numerically sound, but is it that practical? I came up with it for that player, we'll see if he finds it useful or not. It sacrifices future choices for (arguably) easier level up book keeping.
==========================
For those who like math:
- S1 is your number of main skills
- S2 your secondary
- S3 your minor skills (I'll assume the factor of 4 here, but it works the same with 3)
- K is the class ranks per level + INT + human bonus + favored class bonus. It's normally the number of ranks you'd get per level.
The total bonuses you get at level L is:
Bonus(L) = S1 * L + S2 * L/2 + S3 * L/4
With the credit system, we have: each main skill is worth one credit, each secondary is worth half a credit, and each minor is worth a fourth. Therefore:
S1 + S2/2 + S3/4 = K
Combining these we easily find that:
Bonus(L) = L * K
which is the standard number. Of course with the rounding of fractions, it's not always exactly equal (it is every fourth level when using minor skills), but the progression is roughly the same.
If we do something similar with the Unchained Group Skills:
- Sg is the number of skills in groups you trained. It depends on the groups, but on average it's around 4 per group.
- Sp is the number of specialised skills you took
Each skill which is in a group, or specialised, gets a level/2 bonus:
Bonus(L) = Sg * L/2 + Sp * L/2
(note that some skills are counted both in Sg and Sp, it's fine, since those get a full level bonus = 2 * L/2)
So far so good, except that both Sg and Sp grow with time. Ignoring the fact that we add groups later, let's focus on the specialisations. You get one at level 1, and then again at 2nd every other level, plus a number equal to INT/2. Rounding down, the formula is:
Sp(L) = 1 + L/2 + INT/2
Can you see what's going on? Putting it back in the first formula:
Bonus(L) = Sg * L/2 + L/2 + L*L/4 + INT*L/4
Even assuming INT and Sg are constant (which they aren't), we have something of the form:
Bonus(L) = m * L + n * L^2
The bonuses becomes quadratic :) It simply cannot be equivalent to the standard progression which is linear.
If we express this m constant:
m = Sg/2 + 1/2 + INT/4
we realise that it's already much bigger that it should be. Even the low skilled classes that get 2 + INT get two groups to start with. I estimated each group to have on average 4 skills in it, so that would be
Sg = 2 * 4,
m = 4.5 + INT/4
which is much bigger than 2 + INT (unless you have high INT, but well...)
The rogue with 8 + INT skills per level gets three groups to start with:
Sg = 3 * 4
m = 6.5 + INT/4
and get slightly robbed.
In any case, the quadratic term, independently of class, grows far too fast. The 2 + INT people, even without the groups, already get more bonuses than standard by level 4 with just the specialisations.
To restore the linearity, we would need Sg + Sp to be constant and equal to 2K, which would mean: pick groups and specialisation at the game start, and never change them. Does that ring a bell? :) Or alternatively, if you want to keep the progression of specialisations, you'd have to lose group trained skills as the game progresses. Sounds unsatisfactory. And even then, those with low K would quickly lose all their group skills, and stop picking specialisations after a certain number of levels.
Anyway. I'm not saying it's a bad system at all, it's actually quite nice. But you should be sure that every player uses it, to be fair, and even then, the balance is shifted: the difference between low skill and high skill classes is less big than with the standard system, although everyone does get more bonuses.
