Originally Posted by
Quertus
Honestly? In an amazing coincidence, I happen to be able to give you a good answer wrt my reaction, and the founding causes, because I just happen to have been thinking about such things for entirely different reasons. That is, it's more a reaction to something else than directly a reaction to your proposed system.
So, personally, I expect Professor X to be a really powerful Telepath. I expect, if he has Find Mind and Telepathic Communication and Probe Mind and Control Thoughts and Mental Therapy and Mental Illusions, they'll all be pretty darn strong. Now, sure, he might not have much practice with some of those, so there might be a little variance in practice, but he'll be in most ways better at all of those than Joe Average Telepath.
Similarly, if Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, picks up a new Xth level spell, I expect its power will be roughly in line with other Xth level spells in his hands, not roughly in line with (X-5)th level spells, or (X+2)th level spells in his hands.
If you ask me to program something, even in a language I don't know, I expect I'll be miles ahead of an average noob straight out of college, because my core "I know how to think" skill is so much higher.
If you give "guy at the gym" most any physical task, I expect him to significantly outperform me.
If you give a Brain Surgeon most any medical task, I expect them to significantly outperform me.
In short, I have a bias to believe in the power of "core competencies" in a skill area. I can buy that a Wizard can be great at Transmutation, and rubbish at Curses, but if that Wizard is Dumbledoor, I expect his curses will outdo any 1st year Slitherin unless said 1st year is an absolute 1-in-a-million genius of curses - and not only outdo them, but outdo them by a wide margin.
I have a bias to believe that, if you have the power of Dumbledoor, but are worse at curses than a 1st year, that says something about you, is itself a 1-in-a-million event, and isn't something you expect to see anywhere else in your lifetime.
Now, I'm too senile to remember the story, so the story is True, but... I'm gonna fill in the blanks in my memory with random things that sound good. *ahem* Once upon a time, I was in college, taking Differential Equations. The class after a test on Matrices, the Professor called me up after class. He asked where I learned the techniques I had learned on the test. With a confused look on my face, I said, "In class, from you?". He explained that, no, he hadn't taught those techniques yet - they're what we were about to learn. I responded something along the lines of, "Oh, you introduced the idea, the concept of Matrix Math Operations, and I just saw that this was the obvious logical method, and kinda zoned out (looking at the cute girl beside me) after that".
I am just accustomed to core competencies being, y'know, important. When you have those down, advanced techniques are generally trivial. My core competency in "I can think" let them send me in to help a stumped team with code written in a language I didn't even know. My core competency in "math" let me invent my own theorem in an afternoon, and instantly grok advanced math just from hearing the concept. That's just... my day to day life, so to speak.
Then there's other, less egocentric examples, like the company trying to make an electric bread maker, that sent its team to go learn the fundamentals of bread making when, shortly before launch, the product turned out to fail terribly at its intended purpose, or how some of my friends / coworkers are just phenomenal at nigh-instantly groking new scams or the potential for exploits in proposed code / projects / rules. Or how, the smartest person I know, 20 minutes into a conversation about a topic he formerly knew nothing about, an outside observer would assume he was the expert talking to his junior. Or how one of my professors' tests were always about applied concepts, like "you've been learning about Area; in this exam, apply that to architecture in these 10 problems".
And the fail cases? They usually / the worst of them are IME generally a result of a failure to master the fundamentals. (Yes, I'm a ****, I failed to master the basics of remedial goodness or whatever :smallamused:).
Anyway, all that ramble is to say, I'm biased to believe in fundamentals being very important.
That and... if the Advanced Skills are somehow sufficiently divorced from the Broad Category that the Broad Category no longer really serves significantly as the "fundamentals" for the Advanced Skill? If there was a broad, "How good are you at life?" skill, and "Cooking", "Cleaning", and "Making Friends" were Advanced Skills? Then, at that point, I'd wonder why the cap on Cooking was in any way related to the number of ranks in "Life Skills".
It's difficult for me to imagine skills having a symbiotic relationship where skill in one is required for skill in the other, where they simultaneously lack the symbiotic relationship where skill in one helps (and, per my bias, helps significantly) with the other. That's just something really hard to convince me of.
Still, one could argue that I'm biased to believe that way because, having strong fundamentals, I'm more likely to catch and notice errors that stem from lacking strong fundamentals.
If you want ranks in Thermonuclear Astrophysics to be more important that a general grounding in Science? I'm obviously in some ways the wrong person to ask, but... I'd suspect it'd feel more realistic to me if a) things that deal with the fundamentals get the full base skill added, or perhaps *only* roll the base skill (hint: most everything involves the fundamentals, just usually not exclusively); b) the power of the Advanced Skill was like my Brain Surgery example: there's a significant cost for not having your Surgery high enough. So, to generalize "b"... hmmm... "high DC tasks that are clearly within the specialization (as "Brain Surgery is to Surgery") have increasing Advanced Skill requirements / suffer increasing penalties (ie, Side Effects / Side Effect die) the greater the difference between the Advanced Skill and the Expected Advanced Skill (see table)".
So [Chronomancy 6, Time Travel 1] could use their vast understanding of the basics to power their way through basic Time Travel (say, travel within a single timeline) with ease. But when it came to more advanced Time Travel (multiple timelines, intersecting time lines, returning to a future from before you changed it), their lack of skill in the advanced nuances of Time Travel makes them as clueless as that Youtuber I had the misfortune of listening to who said that there are only 2 forms of Time Travel, and the [C6/TT1] therefore suffers Complications (or just "this makes no sense!" meltdowns (ie, doesn't attempt the roll)) when attempting to interact with such complex scenarios.
I guess that's one example of how I might try to design a system if I wanted to appease both my personal sense of "how things work IRL" and your desire for maximizing ranks in Advanced Skills to be the Dominant Strategy.