Something I regard as a minor irritant for me with the game I'm currently working on, but maybe a greater problem for the world at large, is that by giving people discounts off the cost of skills if they already have similar skills, I've ended up counting fractions of advancement points - halves and quarters.

I've also ended up with the cost of a rudimentary skill at 3 and a solid skill at 5.

What I am thinking of doing is multiplying these points numbers by 8 and tweaking things so that a rudimentary skill now costs 20 and a solid skill costs 40. This would make it simpler to swap a solid skill for two rudimentary ones at CharGen.

It would also mean no fractions.

But it would mean that the advancement points people get per session would go up to a max of 960 for 4 hours of solid gaming, instead of 120 as currently (diminishing as the campaign progresses). Characters would be accumulating up to around 30,000 APs over their lifetimes (at godlike levels of power). (Most of these points go on numerical stats, not on skills - skills are mostly flavouring.)

Those are big numbers.

Are they too big?

Is it better to deal in fractions or to deal in big numbers?

I like the small numbers, but I can imagine people finding fractions off-putting.

Thoughts?

1) Most people prefer integers to fractions.

2) D&D successfully used Experience points counted in the tens and hundreds of thousands for high level characters so doing that is not likely to be an issue in and of itself.

3) Suggestion: Figure out what the lowest common denominator of cost is for any of the things you are letting players buy and set that to a cost of 1 AP. Then everything else will be some multiple of that number and you won't need to use fractions.

Quote from: Bren;8213451) Most people prefer integers to fractions.

2) D&D successfully used Experience points counted in the tens and hundreds of thousands for high level characters so doing that is not likely to be an issue in and of itself.

That was my thinking too.

Quote from: Bren;8213453) Suggestion: Figure out what the lowest common denominator of cost is for any of the things you are letting players buy and set that to a cost of 1 AP. Then everything else will be some multiple of that number and you won't need to use fractions.

The lowest common denominator is strictly 1 but there is a related solution.

I realised while out walking earlier that because the vast majority of costs in my system are multiples of 5, with really only very marginal exceptions currently (and it is half of 5 or a quarter of 5 which produces most of the fractions), if I change that to 8 (multiplying costs by 1.6), I can entirely avoid fractional costs, provided I compromise the numbers on a few fringe things with no real impact on the main text.

Through what dumbassery have I missed this so far??

8 is the cost of a solid-level Skill by these numbers, and 4 a Rudimentary-level skill, so if you buy a Rudimentary-level Skill at a 75% discount you are spending exactly 1 AP.

I have a vague feeling someone may have suggested this +60% to me in the past and I ignored them. Maybe I just needed time to cogitate.