Something that is a bit old fashioned but might take care of most of your points is to have numbers remain relatively static or advanced at a fixed rate, say only +5 to any single skill per level or some such. Then have hit points be the determining factor between characters of varying levels. A more experienced character won't be much harder to hit (on a dice roll anyway) so low level mobs an still be threat but the higher level characters will be noticeably more resilient.
Making a homebrew system; need help w/ optimizing and balancing system itself (percentile)
System Ufera
First Post
It's a point-buy system, meaning that you buy your stat increases with experience points. The difference in experience between levels increases with each level. A character at level 1 would normally have around a 55-65 Talent on their attacks or spells, and players will probably try to increase that as much as possible, as quickly as possible, meaning that they'll end up increasing their relevant stats and buying benefits that increase their Talent. Those things don't go away at higher levels, and since the player is focusing on the stats that influence their Talent for whatever it is they do in combat, their characters will reach talents of 100% and higher by level 4 or 5.
By the way, the "goal" for the flavors of levels is something along these lines, assuming a "fighter" type character:
Level 1: You just woke up one day and decided to leave your parents' basement to become an adventurer.
Level 2: You probably have experience as a town guard or common soldier.
Level 3: You were probably an exceptional soldier.
Level 4: You were probably a soldier well-decorated with many highly prestigious awards for your service.
Level 5: You are on the same level as Miyamoto Musashi.
Level 6: You might be able to swing a Buster Sword (don't worry, I'm not including that in my game).
Level 7: You might be able to swing a Buster Sword effectively.
Level 8: You are on the same level as Hercules.
Level 9: You could reasonably go toe-to-toe with a deity.
Level 10: History will always remember that momentous day of great wonder when you saved the world (or even the universe) from that grand existential threat. But for you, it was Tuesday.
GMMichael
Guide of Modos
You have my sympathy, mostly because your homebrew resembles my homebrew. So with that in mind...
- It makes sense for players to increase what their character does well. D&D resolves this issue with classes - required progression. In other words, a Fighter gets so many skill points, but he's required to spend some in fighting, saves, and hit points. He's free to distribute the rest. So fighting increases quickly, but not too quickly.
Take my homebrew (Modos RPG). It's a point-buy system, classless, but with three requirements: you must spend one point on an ability score, one on a skill, and one on a hero point. The last, a perk, is basically a wild card. Since the GM determines when you get a level-up, there are no experience points, and there is definitely not an increase in points available at higher levels. (So you might consider altering the increasing XP in your game).
- If players are maximizing a combat skill by level 5, they're neglecting others. Why would they neglect others? Should you force them to make balanced characters? Or should you encourage GMs to spread the mix of encounters, so that combat skills are only useful, say, 1/3 of the time? (If a player wants to make an uber-hacker, great! But that won't be too useful when his quest is to make friends...)
- I'm with you on the level progression. I've named my levels, they look like this:
1 - Amateur
2 - Professional
3 - Expert
4 - Paragon
5 - Master
6-9 - Legendary
10+ - Epic
System Ufera
First Post
I have set caps for how high stats and skills can reach per level, basically to accomplish the same thing as your three requirements. Oddly enough, they used to be set lower than they are now, and with slower progression, but the same person who is now complaining about the current issue was the one who pushed me to make them higher and have faster progression...
Anyway, my goal for my game has almost always been that a min-maxed one-trick-pony character will be FAR from optimized. Most of the 9 main attributes in my game influence derived stats that are directly useful for just about anyone - even your standard "dumb brute who just hits things" can directly benefit from increasing 6 of those 9 main attributes. In case you're curious, the main attributes are the following, in order that they appear on the character sheet:
-Strength: How hard you hit, how much you can lift, overall how much force you can exert with your body
-Constitution: How healthy and resilient your character is, and how long your character can do stuff
-Agility: How fast and flexible your character is
-Knowledge: How much your character knows and may comprehend
-Instinct: Your character's senses, coordination, and reflexes
-Wisdom: How fast your character thinks, as well as your character's cleverness and ability to understand others
-Willpower: Your character's force of personality and adrenaline
-Morale: How hard it is to scare or discourage your character
-Charisma: Your character's ability to influence others with persuasion
Of those, Knowledge, Wisdom, and Charisma are next to useless for the dumb brute. Wisdom is the least useless, since it helps the Skepticism defense. The rest help said dumb brute in the following ways:
Strength will influence how accurate the character's attacks are, how much damage they deal, and how many attacks can be made per round, not to mention the Fortitude defense, Encumbrance, and some applications of the Athletics skill. Constitution and Agility may also influence accuracy and damage, depending on the type of weapon used.
Otherwise, Constitution helps with HP and reserves (similar to Healing Surges from DnD 4th edition), the Blocking and Fortitude Defense, resisting diseases, and performing physical labor.
Agility will help with moving around, making more attacks per round, the Dodging defense, certain applications of Athletics and other skills, and the like.
Instinct will help with the character's ability to make Granted attacks (Opportunity attacks in DnD), the Blocking, Dodging, and Skepticism defenses, and Perception checks.
Willpower will help with Hero Points, which may be spent to give temporary bonuses in combat; it also help with certain features of some professions, such as the Paladin or Barbarian.
Morale will help with not running away at the first sight of danger, as well as resisting certain Psychomancy spells, by boosting the Dedication defense.
Of course, whether or not any of his will be applied in any campaign is up to the GM, and so it's mostly beyond my influence.
After seeing this I'm not really sure I understand your issue. If by 5th level a character is supposed to be the equal of Musashi, arguably the greatest swordsman to ever live, why is having a score of 100 an issue?
System Ufera
First Post
The problem is that, once your Talent is at 100%, going higher isn't going to do anything, making further upgrades to your character mean less. Meanwhile, as your level increases, the enemies you'll fight will get higher and higher defenses, meaning your chance to hit will get smaller and smaller.
Well if enemies defenses keep increasing, thereby reducing your chance to hit, why not just allow skills to progress beyond 100%? They do this Fallout where you can increase your skills beyond 100 but you have diminishing returns. I think around 90+ you need to invest 2 points to get 1 point in the skill then at 125 or 150 its 3:1 then eventually 4:1. In that you usually need to have well above 100 to be able to take on high level threats.
System Ufera
First Post
...You do realize that it's impossible to get above a 100% chance to succeed, right? That's basically what Talent in my game is: it's the likelihood for your character to succeed at any given thing, based on your character's abilities. Sure, technically you can have a Talent above 100, but without special mechanics in play, it won't make a difference whether your Talent is 100, 200, 1,000, googolplex, etc.
In case it wasn't clear: how Talent works in my game is that two Main Attributes, or a Main Attribute and a Skill, will be added together, along with any relevant bonuses, for anything the character tries to do. When rolling to determine if you succeed, you'll want to roll below your Talent. Let's say you're trying to make poison: You'd take your Knowledge Attribute (let's say 25) and your Chemistry Skill (let's say 30), add them together, and we'll also say you get a bonus to making poisons (+15). Given those numbers in the parentheses, your Talent to make a poison adds up to 70, meaning that, when making a simple potion (as in one with no Difficulty), you have a 70% chance to succeed. Difficulties represent how hard the task you're trying to accomplish is and any opposition to your completion of the task, and must be rolled above in order to succeed. More complex potions will have Difficulties attached to them; a Difficulty of 25 will mean you'll have to roll between 25 and 75 on your Percentile roll, giving you a 50% chance to succeed at making the potion.
Or, let's say you want to attack someone with a Longsword. As a Large Blade, attacking with a Longsword uses the Strength and Agility Attributes. Let's say you have a Strength of 35 and an Agility of 25, and a bonus of 12 to attack with a Longsword. As such, you have a Talent of 72, which means you have to roll below a 72. Your target, if living, may choose to either block or dodge, thereby applying either his Blocking or Dodging Defense as a Difficulty. Defenses, by default, are calculated by adding the Modifier (attribute/5, rounded down) of two Main Attributes, and can be added to with Benefits (my game's equivalent of perks), equipment, and cover. Blocking uses the Constitution and Instinct Modifiers, while Dodging uses the Agility and Instinct Modifiers. Let's say your target tries to block: his Constitution is 30, and his Instinct is 27. 30 divided by 5 is 6, and 27 divided by 5 (rounded down) is 5; therefore, his base Blocking is 6+5=11. Let's also say he has a Light Shield (+5 Blocking), and has a benefit that increases his blocking even further by 5 when he's wearing a shield. Therefore, you'll be adding that to his Blocking Defense: 5+5=10, and 11+10=21. All that considered, you'll have to roll between 21 and 72 to hit.
These are all numbers typical of characters from levels 1-3; when you've got a Strength of 65 and an Agility of 50, and a bonus of +25 to the Talent to use longswords, that adds up to a Talent of 140; sure, you won't have to worry about most penalties, but in most situations, it won't do you any more good than a Talent of 100, because you can't roll above 100 on a Percentile die. Furthermore, a roll of 100 is a guaranteed Critical Failure, so you're going to need to roll below 99 to succeed. Meanwhile, your targets may have 50 Constitution and 55 Instinct (10+11=21), and they may be wielding enchanted Tower Shields (+15 by default) and have maxed out all benefits that add to Blocking (let's say +25). That's a Blocking of 61, which you'll have to roll above. Having to roll between 61 and 99 only gives you a 38% chance to succeed.
As I said before, there is an idea my players and I will try out called "bypass," which means that a Talent above 100 will decrease the Difficulty of a task by the difference between the Talent and 100, but I'm not sure if it's going to be a permanent change. My system's not exactly streamlined as it is, and I don't want players and GM's to be keeping track of too many things during play.
That said, the cost to increase Main Attributes and Skills will rise as they get higher; that's something I've included from the start.
[MENTION=6671268]Jadebrain[/MENTION]
I do understand the basic concept of percent. I was unclear of the mechanic for raising the minimum value of the percentile. Why do that though? You then limit yourself to a maximum value of 100. This problem would disappear if instead difficulties or defenses merely subtracted from a given talent to produce a target number. So instead of 70 with a difficulty of 25 being 25-70 on a percentile. It is instead target number of 45. With this in mind having a talent higher than 100 would be encouraged.
I do understand the basic concept of percent. I was unclear of the mechanic for raising the minimum value of the percentile. Why do that though? You then limit yourself to a maximum value of 100. This problem would disappear if instead difficulties or defenses merely subtracted from a given talent to produce a target number. So instead of 70 with a difficulty of 25 being 25-70 on a percentile. It is instead target number of 45. With this in mind having a talent higher than 100 would be encouraged.
System Ufera
First Post
Ah, I see. The reason I have a minimum value for the percentile roll is so that people can keep track of their own stats without having to worry too much about the stats of others for everything they do. This will be demonstrated in the paragraphs below, assuming the scenario of a PC acting against (as in attacking or casting a hostile spell at) an NPC.
Difficulty Minimum: The player tells the GM what's going on, then rolls. The player merely has to compare their rolls to their own stats, and if they roll below their Talent, they then ask the GM if what they rolled was above whatever Difficulty applies.
Difficulty Subtraction: The Player would have to tell the GM not only what the PC is doing, but also tell the GM beforehand what defenses would be applicable if a spell is being cast or a special type of attack is being made. The GM would then have to tell the player what the difficulty is, and the player would have to subtract the difficulty from the Talent before rolling. Even if it ends up not being too much to keep track of, it still would bog down a game in an irritating fashion with all the repetition of the same dialogue.
This is one of the reasons why I'm hesitant to adopt the Bypass mechanism that my players came up with; even though it bogs the game down a lot less than the Difficulty Subtraction method, and it wouldn't even apply until later levels, it still puts an extra step of repetitive dialogue in the process. The player tells the GM what the PC is going to do, then tells the GM to subtract a certain number from the Difficulty; after that, it would proceed as normal with the Difficulty Minimum method. If we can't think of anything better, we'll have to keep it, though I'd rather not include the extra step.
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