Introducing the Skill Bonus

I wrote this post a while back but got caught up in other things and didn't post it.  Since this I've gone and made a bunch of changes to Beacon and the Roll20 sheet.  Consider this post #1 of the new changes for the next release*.

Skill Bonuses vs Skill Points

I've been doing lots of hemming and hawing over skill points and damage etc.  The basic Microlite mechanic is to add skill and your attribute bonus to your d20 roll and classes are defined by which skill they can use, and which ones they advance in.  Its a great mechanic and gets rid of so many special rules.  Coming up with  simple but robust skill advancement for longer campaigns is what started me writing Beacon.  However as I am playtesting higher level play I am starting to see some issues with Beacon and how it plays.

Playtesting is a big deal, especially when you start to see the trends to the way a game changes as players get more skills and abilities.  Elegant rules at low levels can start to really change as the players progress.

The problem I am seeing is I don't like seeing +10 bonuses to dice rolls before magic or other effects at mid level.  Mid level players getting that much of a dice bonus seems fun to them now, but sets of warning bells in my mind when I extrapolate that trend to the second half of the level ladder.  Given the current rules, its very likely players at the highest levels would be getting +15 or even +20 to their dice rolls at which point so many of the other rules become irrelevant or washed out by that one calculation.  Magic swords need to be +5 or more to make any noticeable difference at that level.  Since armour does not scale to match all those high numbers become wasted unless you start ramping up the opponents.  You can just keep scaling up the monsters, but then you have inflated the numbers to no purpose.

Also I don't like seeing higher damage bonuses flatten out all the differences between weapon types and attribute bonuses.  There is already a problem where clerics and magic users do such low damage in comparison to the martial classes that they cannot participate in combat.  This is by design when the certain classes are doing two or three times the baseline damage of others, but when it becomes 4 or 6 times greater, then its a problem.  The root issue is the core mechanic of adding skill number to the dice roll.  Having such a big component of the bonus come from skills flattens out the dice rolls and either washes out or causes inflation to everything else. 

I tooled around with making it harder to get skills, like one every couple levels or limiting how much a skill could be raised per level etc.  However this just makes it harder to level up, and less fun.  Skill is such a core differentiator to class in the system that it made progression more complex and harder to manage.  You really do need to give a new skill point each level and the classes getting extra additional skill at different levels helps balance and define their progression.  Also I found any time I limited total skill points it caused issues somewhere, either there was not enough of an effect or there was too much effect from the skill, in and I was fiddling around with each case.

I think I have the answer though.  Making the skill BONUS equal to half the skill number.  This is the same as how stats work where every second point gives a point (except skills have no negative mods).  It also has the effect of letting skills operate on two scales, the skill Bonus can be used for die rolls and the skill NUMBER can be used for other things.

This seems to me that it may resolve the issue and a downstream of this change is that I can simplify a lot of other calculates to use skills.  I can change base attack bonuses calculation from a table to use the physical skill bonus.  I can give fighters a damage bonus based on physical as well and also the sneak attack and hunter damage now will be seen to work in a similar manner.  Casters would use knowledge or commune BONUS instead of caster level which makes sense however the spell effects can still use the skill NUMBER.

 It also makes leveling up more interesting since you have to balance long term point gain vs immediate effects and I can also do away with the hard to track level caps on skills.

*Actually a Morale system would be the first change I made to the sheet and the rules, so it should be post #1.  Consider it Bonus Content.