House rules; Aid another, Leveling skills and training skills

House rules on skills

Aid another

There are existing rules on aiding another in a skill check (basically the bonus is number of skill ranks – the square of the number of characters aiding a skill). It doesn’t give much benefit in aiding others. Here is what I propose.

Aid another can be used where it makes contextual sense; examples include knowledge, observation, organisation, tactics skills etc….I think practically I would exclude it where only one person could complete the activity. This would allow (if there was sufficient room) a person to aid another to try and bash a door down with their shoulder but not pick the lock in. What I could see is someone using lock lore to aid another persons lock lore check (which if successful gives a x2 modifier to the appropriate pick lock attempt).

In practice how it would work

1. You need at least 3 ranks in a skill to aid another
2. The aid replaces a separate skill check role (you can do one or the other)
3. My thoughts are 1^st person adds 30% and 2^nd adds 20% of their skill to the appropriate check/attempt. Yes it means some very good bonuses can be jointly developed but also means I can play more with the difficulty levels of certain tasks.

I am hoping this will encourage you  to develop skills even if you have a low percentage chance of success if you know it will help the group out. It also means that couple of ranks in geology isn’t wasted if you go looking for that iron mine with another PC or a NPC.

 

Skills and leveling up

We will use a variation on the skill gain rules at level up from character law. Your character does not “automatically” gain his skills on levelling up they must spend downtime “training” the skills to get the ranks. I am going to make it fairly simple especially at earlier levels and use the following rule. 

It takes a base 1 month of training in your downtime (non-adventuring) time to learn your skill ranks after a level up add 1 week for every 2 skill ranks above rank 10 and 1 week for every skill rank above 15 (probably not an issue but who knows).

The fact you are assumed to automatically know these new skills as soon as you level up has always bugged me. Assume the skills you have used a lot while levelling need minimal training but those that you want to acquire but haven’t used take more time as do the higher ranks of expertise.

 

Skill gains and downtime

 I will introduce the concept of downtime between each “adventure” it is assumed half the time is spent resting, drinking, helping manage the development of your realm. The other half is up to you but basically I assume you are doing something that will fall into categories of 1) self improvement 2) realm improvement or 3) just chilling. During this time you could explore with your scouts trying to find resources of dangers, build something, training your troops in elite moves, go and do some trading for interesting items, or improve yourself.

You will be able to learn up to  rank 2  in any skill through the use of downtime. You start with none at this point its only available when the campaign starts. If you are “self-improving” it is assumed you are doing the minimum in helping the realm develop. How I propose it works;

 It only applies to skills where you have 0 or 1 rank in the skill

1. If the development cost of the skill is 4 of less (6 for hybrid classes) it will take 1 month downtime to take a single skill from rank 0 to rank 1, or two months downtime from rank 1 to rank 2 (these don’t have to be consecutive time periods)
2. If the development cost of the skill is >4 (or 6) it is not a natural area of expertise and it is a lot harder for you to developvia downtime. The cost in that case in time is as above (1 or 2 months) plus the DP cost of the skill divided by 2 in additional months.

This means you can elect to spend some of your time learning new abilities to a basic level outside of level-up which, if you desire will then be able to easily get the “aid another
bonus. The idea is try and create an incentive to build a wider range of skills.