When Everyone's Super

[Bryce]

I'm happy with the skill cap, and think it was a great step for CLOK. There's one thing that bothers me a little about it though, that being the "When Everyone's Super" effect. Here's a little analogy to explain my concern.

We've got two characters, Sneaky Sam and Fighter Fran. Sneaky Sam wants to be the best sneak there is. He trains for it, he gets sneaky-based abilities, his whole character is built around that primary concept. Fighter Fran wants to be the best fighter there is. She trains for it, gets combat abilities, her backstory involves a proud warrior tradition and wanting to prove herself worthy of it and all that great stuff.

Sneaky Sam is quite dedicated and eventually caps his sneaky skills. Meanwhile, Fighter Fran caps her combat skills. But Sam gets bored - what to do now? Sam figures eh, might as well grind up some other stuff, and before he knows it, he's capped a bunch of combat skills as well.

Sneaky Sam and Fighter Fran get into a violent conflict with one another for some reason. Fighter Fran has a modest edge in open combat because of some of her ability choices geared toward combat while Sam's abilities are more geared toward sneaking and utility. However, the skill rolls for Fran's abilities are still taking Sam's capped combat skills into account for his defense, even though Sam doesn't care a lot for combat and the only reason he has these skills is because he was bored and wanted to grind more skills. I feel like Fran should have the option to have a significant numbers advantage against Sam, even with both at cap, if she chooses to spend some points that way. Some abilities like a powered version of Melee Focus with a number of melee-focused prerequisite abilities that, say, increases her combat calculations by 25%. As a particularly combat-focused character, she has an advantage, even at and against cap-level skills, because she has this boost over other people that aren't specifically focused against it.

Flipped, let's say Fran gets bored at cap and is decides "I'll grind up my stealth and perception since I have nothing better to do." Now Sneaky Sam, a super-sneaking-focused character, is having trouble with/competing with Fighter Fran, who has no particular concept nor reason supporting being incredibly stealthy and perceptive other than, "I got bored after capping my prime skills and these were some other skills I could grind up." I feel that Sneaky Sam should be able to get some super sneaky stealth/perception focus abilities with some sneaky-based prerequisite abilities that, say, increases his stealth and perception rolls by 25%. As a particularly sneaky-focused character, he has an advantage, even at and against cap-level skills, because he has this boost over people that aren't specifically focused against it. By the way, I'm combining stealth and perception because combat bonuses usually end up helping both offense and defense. Maybe they shouldn't be combined, and that's fine too. I'm not too worried about it.

Now, this isn't to say Fran shouldn't be able to be extremely stealthy and perceptive, or that Sam shouldn't be able to be particularly apt at combat. It just means they'd need to spend the ability points for that extra "I've got got an edge in this area even beyond capped skills" boost. Or if we think ability points are too strained already, have some "expertise focus" thing that characters can choose to focus on one particular area for the boost on that character. Someone else can probably come up with a more balanced way of doing it.

I'm not feeling extremely passionate about this or anything since I don't know if I'll ever cap anything myself beyond locksmithing, but I figured it would be worth tossing the idea out there.

[Noctere]

I think we have always had the idea of adding some more abilities later and I would not be opposed to this. However, I think I should summarize this suggestion to help those who did not have the time to read the entire post and to make sure I understand what you mean.

- At a high skill level, let's say 1500 in a major skill. (melee, marksmanship, stealth, crafting, etc) Characters will be given the option to polarize their character type with a major ability. Each character can only choose from this other pool of major abilities once (meaning Sneaky Sam cannot take both the special stealth and special melee abilities) and is meant to polarize yourself to your preferred character type (melee, marksmanship, stealth, crafting, etc)

Is that what you meant?

[Bryce]

Yup, I think you've got the basic idea I'm shooting for. So even at the skill cap, one character's got an advantage over (most) other capped people in their chosen area of polarization or specialization or whatever it might be called.

I'll add that I think the advantage would have to be fairly significant. If it's some tiny little bonus like 5% or something, I wouldn't think that was worth the effort of trying to make a mechanic like this work.

[Dorn]

Gpod post. Cookie cutter characters are definitely an issue with a skill cap though due to the nature of the grind it will probably be a long time before you see that sort of situation occurring to a high degree. At the same time never hurts to plan for the future.

This was actually something a lot of people pointed out as a possible con to the cap in that original thread.