Vocations and Starting Skills.

Vocations and Starting Skills

yes - this is getting a lot edits as I go.

Thoughts and Archaeology

Back in 1st edition, C&S followed D&D in being heavily Class/Vocation based. Fighting, magical, faith and thievish abilities rose predictably as a character's level increased. There was no attempt to allow further specialisations nor to permit branching out by acquiring other skills.

2nd edition continued in having set fighting, magical and faith increases based on the character's level. It introduced a whole raft of skills (fighting specialisms, thievish skills, languages, lore, agriculture, crafts &c.) which could be bought alongside the general levelling up. A character's "general" level set a cap on the number of levels a character could have in any of these skills. When a character acquired xps they could be put towards levelling-up or towards gaining or improving these additional skills. 

From 3rd we have Skillscape. It may seem like a leap from 2nd but is really a natural continuation. We still have Vocations but now everything can be a skill. PCF is broken into a range of individual weapon and defensive skills, increases to Body and Fatigue are bought as skills, ML is split into Modes and Methods of magic &c. A character's Vocation originally altered the DF professional skills, so that a Fighter found it easier to learn combat skills, a Mage got the magical skills cheaper &c. The decrease in DF also granted a 10% increase to the base chance [BSC]. Some skills could be considered "Mastered" and this allowed a further decrease in DF. In 5th, this was re-arranged to be simple +10% PCF bonuses.

The big flip in Skillscape is that a character's level is determined by the amount of xp that a character has spent on skill levels - and allowing individual skills to exceed a character's level. However pushing skills beyond a level above one's level came at an additional cost.

Another change along the way is that in 3rd Mastery slots were more limited than in later editions, Mastery slots could be used to promote Secondary skills to Primary skills and characters had to buy their skills from scratch. In 4th/5th a character effectively gets 15 skill levels (from Primary and Mastery) for free.

I'm not keen on 5th's simple +10 PCF%. I can see the reason. Because of the way that resisted skills work it is advantageous to have 40 BSC% + 20 PCF% than to have 50% BSC + 10 PCF%. I also prefer 3rds explicit indication that Primary/Mastered skills are always learned at an advantage, rather than having to pick 10 at the beginning. Also, by keeping the costs the same, but adding a bonus, it nullifies any advantage gained from having a non-standard skill or a competence as a Primary skill.

The final bit is the small amount of experience picked up per annum by starting characters. 500 xp a year is pretty poor for a teenager learning their craft.

Aim

I'd like to bump up the starting experience points gained per year. Hopefully landing a 16 year old character at second level, or close. I don't mind characters starting at 2nd or 3rd level as an 18 year old. Back in 2nd ed a character in their mid 20s might be 7th or 8th level.

If possible I'd like to keep the lower DF for Primary and Mastered skills. If not for standard skills. then for the non-standard skills.

I'd like to be able to push Primary and Mastered skills further ahead of the character's level than the two or three which are currently allowed. My thinking is that while an effective 3 (or 7) levels of bonus is nice for starting characters, it gets a bit lost at higher levels. The thought is return to 2nd ed as having a hard (maybe not utterly restrictive) limit of non-professional skills to a character's level and allowing professional skills to reach something like level*1.5 or level * 2.0.  So a third level character might be limited to +15 PSF (+att bonus) for a primary skill while at tenth (with 15 levels in a skill) they'd be at +45. 

This will take a few experiments.

The Three