Yes, that's essentially what GURPS and a whole swag of other systems do, they just make each skill attached to one attribute, and both the first skill level and the default are joined to the attribute, after that it doesn't matter much.

One idea I had once and tried a bit was this. You'd have percentile attributes and skills, but each skill had an attached attribute. With each attribute, you had a "talent level", basically 0 for 01-25%, 1 for 26-50%, 2 for 51-75%, and 3 for 76-100%. When you first learned a skill, you'd roll d100 to see what your starting skill level was, rolling once for each talent level and taking the highest. The minimum - which you also got if you had no talent - was attribute/4.

It's always fun rolling for things, but we got some funny results like a starship pilot with 38% piloting and 22% navigation. "Now we know why he is freelance," said the player.

Quote from: John MorrowSimply adding attribute to skill creates all sorts of problems, especially dealing with min-maxing.  Years ago, someone called it the "double point effect" meaning that if there are two ways to buy a value in something and the two components don't have the same cost, there will always be an optimal and suboptimal way to create characters.  

FUZION addresses this by having two separate point pools.. One for buying attributes (CP) and another for buying skills (OP).  This insures that there will be no mini-maxing since they don't even use the same point pool. Although the game allows the option to convert CP into OP (and vice versa) , thereby creating this "double point effect," it is discouraged, lest it leads to mini-maxing.

FUZION's "Rule of X" basically allows for determination of a character's combat and defense values. All characters have a "Rule of X" value above which the character becomes imbalanced. It is a simple gauge for determining power levels for all characters at any point in a campaign and a way for the GM to insure that all characters are balanced to one another .

EDIT: The way that Talents were valued in FUZION (a flat 3 OP for each) was very imbalancing compared not only to each other but to their more expensive equivalent Powers. I had  revalued FUZION's talents  so that their values match those of their equivalent Powers.

Neither of these totally solves the problem.

Quote from: LancerFUZION addresses this by having two separate point pools.. One for buying attributes (CP) and another for buying skills (CP).  This insures that there will be no mini-maxing since they don't even use the same point pool. Although the game allows the option to convert CP into OP (and vice versa) , thereby creating this "double point effect," it is discouraged, lest it leads to mini-maxing.

You still get min-maxing to the extent that certain character builds will be more effective than others created using the same number of points because the way points are spent from one pool has in impact on the points spent from the other pool.

Quote from: LancerFUZION's "Rule of X" basically allows for determination of a character's combat and defense values. All characters have a "Rule of X" value above which the character becomes imbalanced. It is a simple gauge for determining power levels for all characters at any point in a campaign and a way for the GM to insure that all characters are balanced to one another .

While this helps keep characters from becoming unbalanced overall (Hero has similar guidelines), the problem there is that players will build toward the maximum "X" allowed, thus you don't necessarily get a lot of diversity, especially if some ways of getting to a certain "X" value produce characters that are more efficient in play than characters with the same "X" value built in a different way.

Quote from: John MorrowNeither of these totally solves the problem.



You still get min-maxing to the extent that certain character builds will be more effective than others created using the same number of points because the way points are spent from one pool has in impact on the points spent from the other pool.



While this helps keep characters from becoming unbalanced overall (Hero has similar guidelines), the problem there is that players will build toward the maximum "X" allowed, thus you don't necessarily get a lot of diversity, especially if some ways of getting to a certain "X" value produce characters that are more efficient in play than characters with the same "X" value built in a different way.

Lesson: there is no perfect game. I do certainly think the steps lancer cites improves the situation. I'll add one more method to mitigate minmaxing and aid variety: Randomization. :cool: (Yep, this is a "choice" impact. But choice vs. minmaxing is like squeezing the baloon animal, I'm afraid.)