Game design for tabletop games (including RPGs, war games, board games and card games)
Limiting skill-based progression?
Hello, everyone. Nice to meet you. Some recent reading reminded me of a problem with skill-based rule systems: namely that it's quite possible for a character to become the best at everything if the game goes on long enough. What would be a good solution to prevent that without feeling like a forced, arbitrary limitation?
Note, the question relies on the assumption that the use of a class-based system has already been considered and rejected for the author's hypothetical project.
(And yes, the question is purely hypothetical. I'm not working on any RPG right now.)




Just brainstorming, but here are some of my ideas of how this can be prevented:
1) Make sure that the skill space is bigger than the progression space. That is, for example, if you expect most people to play a campaign lasting 40 sessions, with 1 skill increase after each session, then you make sure that your total skill raises are significantly greater than 40. For example, you might have 25 different skills that each range from 1 to 10, which means it would take 250 skill increases to max them all out. You're not going to be able to do this with 40 increases. This isn't a true solution to the problem, but it solves the problem for most practical game lengths, without feeling arbitrary or frustrating players by limiting their growth.
2) You could increase the cost of buying skills the more points the character has in them. For example, imaging your first skill rank costs 1 exp, your next one costs 2 exp, your next costs 3 exp, etc. As your player begins to master more skills, their progression in skills also gets slower. This is another way of limiting the progression space vs. the skill space.
3) Some editions of Traveller tie advancement to time in the game world. So, for example, the character gets to advance for every 4 years that pass in the game world. Under this system a character is likely to die of old age (and there are aging rolls after a point) before they can master all the skills.
4) In real life, when people don't use their skills, those skills atrophy. You could do something similar. For example, after any session where you didn't roll a particular skill, that skill has a small chance of decreasing. This makes it difficult to keep everything at max, although as a player I would find it frustrating.
5) GURPS largely solves this issue by both having lots of skills and linking skill advancement to the time spent working to improve that skill in the game world. In fact there are downtime tracking sheets you can fill out to keep track of the time you've spent working on advancement. For every 400 hours spent (or half that with an active teacher) you get a character point towards advancing that skill. Since that's a point towards a skill every 10 weeks o full-time study (or 5 weeks with a teacher), the game world time that passes in a campaign limits skill advancement in this way.
Thank you very much! My own thoughts were along the lines of #2, except with a weighing system that encourages the player to focus on two or three skills after a while and mostly grow those while the rest are left to trail behind. But the clever system I'd come up with a while ago is long gone from my memory...