So I finally decided to work up a homebrew RPG, it’s gone well so far. I’m trying to keep things as quick and simple as possible, so it’s not that tough: basic resolution amounts to rolling a d6 + Attribute versus a target number (defined by difficulty levels ranging from 0 to 15). Attributes (Body, Mind, and Soul) range from 0 to 6, with 3 being average.
The first problem I’ve come up against is with skills, though. Originally, I’d planned to just give characters a number of skills equal to their rating in the relevant Attribute. So, if you have an extremely smart character with Mind 4, you get four Mind-related skills, which works perfectly well for the three basic Attributes.
Problems begin when we start to talk about Combat, though. Since I’m working partly off of Tri-Stat, I’d originally had it setup as an average of the three basic Attributes, giving an average character a Combat value of 3.
The problem is, there are only three combat skills. Even an “average” character is going to be able to take all of them.
Now there are ways around this without changing the fundamentals, most of which rely on player self-control. You can take a number of skills up to your Attribute rating, but you don’t have to. Reasonable players would just take the skills that best represented their character concept; if that met (or even required more than) the number of skills they’re able to take, all the better.
There’s always some jack-ass out there, though, that want’s to squeeze every last drop of whatever he (or she) can get out of a system, and it’s these people I’m worried about. Even a character with average Attributes could be a Combat demigod.
So what to do? I don’t want to alter the way skills work just for combat, as I’m trying to be as consistent as possible here. I could require that all combat skills be focused, so that players couldn’t just take Melee for their character; they’d have to take Melee (Swords) or something to that effect. No other skills work that way, though; focusing a skill is meant to be optional, not required. And even then, the chance of abuse is exceedingly high; a character could still have something like Unarmed (Strikes), Melee (Batons), and Ranged (Pistols), which cover a pretty good amount of area in a modern-day campaign.
I may just eliminate Combat related skills. It’s not a normal Attribute, and there will still be other ways to create a combat-trained character. We’ll see.