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Message: <blockquote data-quote="shurai" data-source="post: 1994221">I prefer levelless, classless, so-called 'point-based' systems (really I prefer to call them skill-based), and I always have.  Which is not to say I hate d20 and its kind; in fact I think d20 is pretty good and I play it all the time.  All of my issues are matters of degree:  d20 absolutely allows much of the benefit of skill-based systems.Here's the most important reason I prefer the finer grain of skill-based systems:  d20 and similar systems get in my way in terms of playing the character I want to play pretty frequently.  I want to carve a sculpture out of marble and d20 says I have to lay bricks.I'll give an example.  I'm playing a cleric in a certain game.  He wants more skills, so he can be good at noticing things, listening to people, and convincing people with gentle reason to do as he asks.  As a healer and a compassionate soul he's highly empathic and I want to play that up.  This character's willing to sacrifice to get good at those skills, so it's not like I'm asking to break play balance.  He's a straight-up guy so he's not interested in stealth or sneak attacks, and he's not particularly musical.  How do I do it?  I'm asking for something perfectly reasonable and in straight d20 there's no way I can have it without unreasonable sacrifice.Why should I have to live with it when in another system I can just have what I want without the sacrifice?  I feel like d20 makes me adapt to the system, when it should be the system adapting to me.Finally another Silhouette fan!  : ]  It's my favorite system.  Would it help with your complaint to tell you that high levels of skill (3 and 4) are very difficult to attain because success rates grow exponentially with respect to the skill level?  The probabilities are hard to work out, but I think it's the case that a level 3 skill is much better than a level 2 skill; I want to say that level 3 gunnery beats level 2 piloting more than half the time.  So it makes sense that the costs rise exponentially too.Also, I don't think that's unrealistic.  It's seems true to me that as you study a particular subject or practice at a particular skill that you make huge progress at first but then later on you have to work hard to make lasting improvement.I assume you meant the old d6 system here,  It occurs to me that the easy way to 'suggest' that diversity is good is with in-game activity.  If people are playing poorly-conceived characters, they should lose and you should tell them why they lost.  It's perfectly okay to be a little mean about this stuff because they're the ones being powergaming tweakers.Have you ever played any White Wolf system games?  They have a very good character creation mechanic whereby a character can "focus" their skills in a certain area but can't put all of their points in that area.  Also, as MoogleEmpMog mentioned, Silhouette does an excellent job of defeating this problem.  A character can absolutely put all their eggs in one basket, but they'll pay so dearly for it that it's actually the opposite of powergaming; it weakens the character!  For example, instead of improving a single skill from level 2 to 3 (from professional or veteran to elite, basically) I can instead spend the same resources on improving two skills from level 1 to level 2, and have enough left over to learn a new skill at level 1.  Mog may need to correct my math here.You'd be surprised how willing people are to pick up "Knowledge: Local (Peace River area)" when it's sufficiently cheap and getting just one more pip at shotguns is highly expensive.Finally, I think the argument that levelless games are too easy to powergame is completely absurd.  Pot to kettle, you are black!Anyway, I want everyone to know that I really like d20 over all; it's absolutely the best class/level based game we've seen.  Yet, do you notice that it's an improvement over older games in large part because it's become more like the skill-based games?-S</blockquote>

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