Fallout: Equestria Resource

So, a few of us in Octagon Group were chatting, and someone mentioned that Group 2 was planning to allow skills to rise beyond 100 under certain conditions. We started kicking this idea around ourselves, and eventually came up with this:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ip1 ... UnXps/edit

Thoughts?

I would like to add in the caveats I proposed with my initial ideas for this rule:

- Any perks that increase skills by x amount are nullified after 100. (They can be taken to increase a skill to 100, but after a skill is at 100 they don’t give any additional effect.)
- Any temporary bonuses (magazines, environmental, etc) that would increase the character’s skills beyond 100 are nullified after 100 skill for the purpose of increased critical chance. The bonus to critical chance comes purely from the character’s baseline skill.

Also, I originally planned for the cost to be 3 skill points spent per point after 100, as I believe 2 points per would allow skills to grow too high, and risk something akin to a 50% crit rate. But this would require running some numbers before a definite value could be assigned.

I would say assign a cap to the Epic Skills. Something like 120 perhaps, since most circumstance penalties don't go higher than -30

Athilmar wrote:I would like to add in the caveats I proposed with my initial ideas for this rule:

- Any perks that increase skills by x amount are nullified after 100. (They can be taken to increase a skill to 100, but after a skill is at 100 they don’t give any additional effect.)

To clarify: The only way to increase skills above 100 is by spending SP. I will add this to the doc.

Athilmar wrote:- Any temporary bonuses (magazines, environmental, etc) that would increase the character’s skills beyond 100 are nullified after 100 skill for the purpose of increased critical chance. The bonus to critical chance comes purely from the character’s baseline skill.

Agreed; I will amend the doc.

Athilmar wrote:Also, I originally planned for the cost to be 3 skill points spent per point after 100, as I believe 2 points per would allow skills to grow too high, and risk something akin to a 50% crit rate. But this would require running some numbers before a definite value could be assigned.

On a somewhat related note...

TenMihara wrote:I would say assign a cap to the Epic Skills. Something like 120 perhaps, since most circumstance penalties don't go higher than -30

Yes, I forgot to put that in the doc; Epic Skills have a hard max of 120. I'll append that to the doc. This will also limit the maximum crit-success chance to 30%.

I just thought of another addendum: limiting the amount of SP that can be spent on any one Epic Skill per level to 10. This would make lvl 23 the earliest one could max out a skill to 120.

As the guy writing the rules for Group 2, I might be able to shed some light on how I thought it would work?

First, it'd be an Earth Pony 'trait' (but not actually a trait. Stupid terminology). The general idea was to give Earth Ponies a reasonable advantage over other kinds of pony in a few select fields; by no means at all would this apply to every single skill you can get. The way I envisioned it, an Earth Pony can put extra skill points into their Tag skills to get over 100, and their Tag skills only (looking at the doc, this is included). The limit for those skills would then be either 115 or 120, wasn't exactly sure which would be better.

There weren't any additional restrictions on whether you could pump it all the way up there right away, but there's actually a reason for that. The rules that I'm in the process of writing up include significantly more penalties and bonuses depending on circumstance. Say that you find a very difficult lock in the wasteland. That's pretty significant just by itself, and would be, say, a -20. Then if you happen to be doing this at night, it's another -10 to -20 depending on whether you've got decent lighting or not. If you have the unfortunate circumstances of being shot at, say hello to another -10. But hey, let's throw a little bone and say you've already tried this lock a couple times and have at least a little bit of a feel for how it works, so you get a +10 to offset that part where you're, you know, getting shot at. If you're lucky, you could be looking at just a -10. If your GM likes to watch you suffer, you could be looking at a -50. I happen to be one of those GMs, so I figured giving an Earth Pony player the ability to actually do things that I might throw at them would reduce the general rage level a few notches (tee hee).

That said, a target number higher than 100 would not be an instant, auto-success. It would be close though. If your TN is just 100, you still have the chance to fail all along the critical fail threshold. However, the higher it goes above 100, the smaller that threshold gets, the reasoning being that even hideously bad luck won't stop you from opening a lock you know like the back of your hoof in mild, bright and sunny, very peaceful not-filled-with-bullets air. That said, the critical fail threshold would never completely disappear. No matter how high your TN is, you will still always fail on a 100. Not sure if the shrinking of the critical fail threshold would be a 1:1 or something bigger like a 10:1 ratio though. Testing necessary when it reaches that point.

Anyway, that was my thinking on raising skills over 100. Earth Pony exclusive, must be a Tag skill, no other restrictions. Makes it easier to do things without making everything hilariously easy.

Yeah, I was aware you had it as an EP-only thing, but I felt that EPs already had enough race-specific bonuses to offset those of the other races, and making this EP-only would be unfair. So we threw it open to all races and added a few other limitations, like saying you can't push a skill over 100 until you hit level 20.