Staying in a Career

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Rat Catcher
Posts: 46
Joined: Fri May 03, 2019 1:11 am

Can you check out these house rules for character advancement, please? They are aimed at allowing players to stay in a career as long as the player wants (to an extent).

(a) Spend 100 Ep to train a skill you possess, which provides a +1% bonus when using that skill. May continue to increase skills in this way, adding a maximum of +20% to any single skill.

GM may put a limit of +30% from skill bonuses, when making a test. Iincludes bonuses gained from the original skill and from multiple skills if they apply.

(b) Must take three +1 or three +10 advances before they can take any +2 or +20 advances, and they must take at least three +2 or three +20 advances before they can take any +3 or +30 advances.

(c) The cost to advance in a career costs 100 EPs more.

I didn't make up the above rules, but not sure where I got them from.
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Totsuzenheni Yukimi
Posts: 344
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2019 12:38 pm

Rule a) is ok, but are these skill bonuses in addition to the advances that can be made to characteristics? If so i see two potential problems. The first is that the combination of skill bonuses and characteristic advances could get quite high. The second is that it costs 100Ep to advance a characteristic by +10/+1, so the incentive will be to advance characteristics rather than train skills in this way, even if that means spending 800Ep just getting to the career that has the relevant advance scheme. Even if the costing were equal in terms of Ep for both training skills in this way and advancing characteristics there would still be an incentive to advance characteristics rather than train skills because characteristic advances will generally get used more.

Rule b) seems to misunderstand the way in which characteristic advances work. (I presume rule b) is referring to characteristic advancement.) In the rulebook each advance of +10/+1 costs 100Ep. Advance schemes indicate what characteristic advances a character can get in that career, but advance schemes are not cumulative with one another and the advance scheme indicates the maximum advance that a character can take for any given characteristic. If an advance scheme has +20 for Dexterity then this means that a character in this career has the option of advancing their Dexterity by a maximum of +20, in +10 increments, each costing 100Ep, if they have not already done so in that career or in any other. So, for example, if character A has an advance scheme with +20 Dexterity and they have already taken a +10 advance to Dexterity then they have already taken +10 of that +20. As such character A can take a further +10 advance to Dexterity (for 100Ep), giving them a total of +20 in advances to Dexterity. They have now reached the maximum amount of advances that they can get for Dexterity from that advance scheme and if character A wants any further advances in Dexterity they will need an advance scheme with +30 (or higher) Dexterity. Rule b) seems to be working on a completely different premise and looks to me to be overpowered.

Rule c) seems like an unnecessary change to the costs of changing careers that negates the difference between different classes.
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Rat Catcher
Posts: 46
Joined: Fri May 03, 2019 1:11 am

Much to ponder, thanks totsuzenheni
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