Mage Blade: Skills, Skill Trees, Dependencies

So I wrote much of the following in a G+ post yesterday, and I figured it'd be a good piece for a blog post, so I'm taking the original and expanding on it here.

This is also, sadly, the very first Mage Blade post I've made since starting this blog. Happily, it's back in my active RAM because I've just begun a weekly game of Mage Blade. It's been a rough start since I decided almost on a whim to get this going... But that's good, because I'd previously been waiting for the game to be "ready", which is kind of synonymous with "perfect"; It's never gonna happen, so I might as well get moving on it.

So I am noodling around with the idea of creating... skill trees, for lack of a better term. Right now, Mage Blade has a flat distribution of skills. It looks kinda like this:

• 2P/1G
• 1-5 Weapon Skill*, 6-8 First Aid, 9-12 Armor Maintenance, 13-15 Vigor, 16-17 Tactics, 18-20 Military Lore

The first part refers to the skill point distribution per year. 2P means 2 Path skills, 1G means 1 Generic skill point. Normally you'll roll a d20 for each Path skill, and select your skill from the results in the second bullet. Now, the exception to this is denoted by the asterisk by Weapon Skill; This means you don't roll 1 die, and you automatically get 1 point of that skill. So for this list (taken from the Soldier Lifepath) you'd get 1 Generic skill point, you'd get a single point of Weapon Skill, and you'd roll a d20 to get a skill from the list, assuming you'd taken a single year. If you took multiple years of the Lifepath (which is normal) you wouldn't get the focus skill each year, so you'd roll an additional 2 dice per year after the first.

If you were a Soldier for 10 years, you theoretically might have:

• 5 Weapon Skill
• 3 First Aid
• 4 Armor Maintenance
• 3 Vigor
• 2 Tactics
• 3 Military Lore

..assuming that you rolled perfectly average results across such a small sample size. Skills max out at 10, so you've got a fairly competent soldier here.

Unfortunately, despite having odds which shouldn't have had it happen, I've got two characters in my current playtesting group with the Vigor skill maxed out and then some. (they had to re-roll the excess points). Vigor represents your basic knowledge in how to move and use your body to best effect; It's a close analog to the Athletics skill you see in a lot of other games, and covers tasks like lifting, climbing, running, swimming, etc.

I consider it a problem that brand new characters have maxed out any skill, especially without having taken special effort to do so. Some of this, I know, will be fixed by rebalancing and diversifying the skills listed for each Lifepath, but it still perturbs me, so I've been considering solutions ever since we finished creating the characters.

The first solution that occurred to me is to have this skill have a special rule, where its effective value cannot exceed the value of the attribute it's rolled with. It's not a bad solution, but I don't think it's a particularly good solution, either.

The skill tree solution I'm considering would encourage skill diversification, without really penalizing specialists. The way it would work is that certain skills would be considered root skills, which would have sub-skills associated with them. The root skill would have a maximum value, after which you'll need to start diversifying into the related sub-skills. Some sub-skills may also have prerequisites.

Considering Vigor, it would be considered a root skill, and might have a maximum value of 4. If you rolled Vigor again once maxing it out at 4, you'd need to select a sub-skill, Running, for instance, which would now have a value of 5. If you rolled Vigor subsequently, you could choose to increment Running again, or you could choose another sub-skill at a value of 5, such as Swimming. Sub-skills would then be advanced as normal, once purchased.

If you were doing a Vigor-related task that did not match one of your existing sub-skills, you could then use your existing Vigor skill to cover that, such as climbing or lifting and carrying.

The interesting question is whether or not you'd be able to train up sub-skills without having the root skill. I think the answer would be yes, but on a case-by-case basis. I don't think you could do Running without having Vigor, but I do think it'd be possible to be a swordsman and have no skills in fighting without a sword. (Later edit: No I don't. That's stupid. Learning to fight with a sword will by necessity increase an overall skill in fighting, even if you find yourself without your weapon of choice.)

Which then begs the question, could you then get the root skill from the sub-skill? I'd say yes; Even as a pure swordsman, it wouldn't take too much effort to learn to apply your skills to more general fighting situations, so it seems like it should offer some discount or a way to pick up the root skill at a rating greater than basic.

This also sort of suggests that you might be able to transfer some skills to related skills. If you were a master swordsman in the sword-and-shield style, some of that should translate into learning how to use a longsword, shouldn't it? What about if you were an expert climber; could you translate some of that into an acrobatics skill, above and beyond the points contributed by the Vigor root skill?

So, points for discussion:

• What are your thoughts on being able to max out a skill as a beginning character, in the first place?
• What do you think about the ideas of root skills and sub-skills presented here? Should all skills be part of a similar framework?
• What are your thoughts about skills giving a discount to training up related skills?