Skills, all encompassing general catagories, or detail specific catagories.

[Falconius]

So my current thoughts are to have general catagories instead of the highly specific skills I’ve been using. So for instance medical would all be under one ‘white’ catagory. And for things that actually require specific knowledge and experience, like saying surgery would need a specialization.

Specializations would function thusly: you already have skills at the catagory but you buy a specialization and in that area it increases your roll by half and allows unrestricted attempts at whatever the skill is (like surgery). Attempting the task without the specialization results in a penalty of only being able to use half the overarching catagory.

Also thinking of having ‘double specialization’ where the specialization takes two specialization slots but doubles the roll (so instead of normal specialization which gives a multiplier of 1.5 this gives 2). And maybe the penalty being you get no basic catagory roll to add to it.

Examples. You want to do first ais, you roll your white catagory. You want to generally assess a patient, you roll your white skill. You want to prescribe some drought to cure an ailment you roll white. You want to do surgery you need the surgery specialization and if you have if you roll white * 1.5, if you dont have it you roll white * 0.5.

The exception would be combat skills which I kind of like being very detailed. The reason for using broad catagories is so that characters would feel more ‘useful’ and wouldn’t have to rely on players making sure they were covering their bases. Im not sure if this is actually preferred or not. Im not sure if this is actually what I want or not.

Also im thinking of having discrete costs for skills, instead of generic calculated costs. I think that this new method kind of covers my desire for generality, cost balancing, and specailization.