WodenKrait wrote:
DW, being a "class" based system, does not easily permit skills and abilities fom one profession to be learnt by the member of another. Sometimes this makes sense but other times it really would be good to be able to differentiate the career of a character a little more by allowing them to pick up abilities from other professions, and there doesn't seem to be any reason why this should be allowed, apart from the mechanics.
I had a thought about how this might be made to work in some cases, however, and it all comes to sacrificing experience points. I haven't thought it out in great detail yet, but here goes, using use a knight learning alchemy as my example.
A player declares that he wants his knight to begin learning alchemy (in a plausible way, for instance from a sorcerer in the party). Whenever the character accrues experience points, he has the option to assign them not to the normal xp stockpile but to the alchemy score instead. This accumulates and in the same way as regular rank it improves at specific intervals. The points at which the skill "ranks up" should be set at some fraction of the normal rank escalation, say 20%, with a 'buy in' to allow rank 1.
Our knight, for instance, needs 6xp (20% of 30) to get to rank 1, then 6xp more to get to alchemy rank 2, 12xp to get to alchemy rank 3, and so on until 40xp are accrued, bringing alchemy rank 6, sufficient to brew the most basic potions.
Although this only works for certain skills and abilities, I can't see any obvious issues with it. Needless to say, I haven't actually tested this idea in any concrete way. Perhaps this is an old idea and I just haven't heard of it before. Thoughts?
You've almost exactly described my skills system... (
read it here, if you're interested).
In a nutshell, as your character earns experience points, you can either save them towards your professional development (going up in rank when you have a certain number of XP, as currently), or you can go 'off-piste' with your training and deduct experience points you want to spend on developing skills outside your profession. I've playtested it and it works pretty well, especially when combined with the 5d6 character creation method (drop highest and lowest result) so adventurers have more moderate ability scores and therefore need the additional bonus that a skill in something gives them.
However, you need to be careful about what is an ability (like a sorcerer's spellcasting) and what is a skill (like a barbarian's tracking skill) - you have to ask yourself whether it's possible for another character to learn another profession's skill. For example, if alchemy is purely an academic exercise of mixing ingredients, then anyone could learn it. However, if alchemy requires a sorcerous ritual to be performed over otherwise inert materials to turn them into a potion, then it wouldn't be a skill another profession could learn.
As a skills system is probably one of the biggest detractors to the Dragon Warriors mechanics, I'm particularly interested in the Players' Book's skill system to see what SKG's approach has been.