I think the issue is that most tech items are going to be generally quite available to characters, whether bought borrowed or stolen. A skill costing a few points may be required for some of them, but your best bet may be to design permanent powers so they're intrinsically better than tech, rather than trying to balance powers against them.

At lower TLs, at least. At the point Tech becomes equivalent to super powers, characters should be able to buy them with cash and a night in the mutation tank or whatever.

What does it mean to be skilled? It turns out that this is a big question in competitive sports and in purely mental competitions such as chess. It's not as simple as RPGs make it out to be, but they do get a lot of things right.

A skilled person is fast: they can predict complicated situations from incomplete data based upon seeing millions of iterations.

A skilled person is resilient to pressure: when under a lot of pressure, the elite competitor can call upon reserves of focus less skilled people lack. This seems to be because they need to use less resources to maintain focus, not that they are necessarily more focused (though they often are).

A skilled person's skill doesn't translate into other fields. A major league baseball player can get struck out by a softball pitcher because the ingrained responses needed to hit a 70mph ball are not applicable to the trajectory of a softball.  Likewise, when someone brings a new or unexpected technique in a MMA fight, even the most trained fighters will be thrown off.

When two very skilled individuals compete, victory depends on the slimmest margins. In a boxing match, victory is not a matter of your success, but of the opponent's mistakes. In a chess match, victory among grandmasters depends upon who can take the game 'out of the book' and present the opponent with completely novel situations. In an elite competition, players will attempt to fake each other out, triggering an incorrect reaction and then seizing the initiative.

When a talented fighter meets a weaker fighter, the chance of the weaker fighter's success drops significantly in the macro resolution. In the micro resolution, the weaker fighter will find gaps in defense fewer and further between, and will often be put on the defensive, because any mistake will cost them greatly.


There's an old saw that says that it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery in a task. That statistic is misleading, because the amount of time it takes to learn a skill is highly dependent on a person's natural inclinations. In his book The Sports Gene, David Epstein points out how much genetics and inclination matters in sports. Elite athletes, despite what you may thing, tended to muck around with lots of different sports before finding something they were really good at. As he says, a slow kid will grow up into a slow adult. Training is important, but it's better to be talented and trained.


In most games that use a roll-over system, player make opposed checks to determine success in a competition. This creates a situation where two evenly matched opponents will have a 50/50 chance of winning. This gives a result very much in line with the Elo chess ranking system, in fact, very nearly identical to it.

However (and here's a big But), the Elo system only ranks the end result of a game, not the thousands of events that occur in play. The Elo system works because all of those thousands of individual choices aggregate into a likelihood of success.  Which is exactly what you're talking about with an RPG skill.

It seems breaks down, though, when you start talking about task vs. goal resolution. In a goal resolution system, the player states the overarching goal, rolls the dice, and interprets the results. In task resolution systems, the unit of choice is down to individual actions. I like task resolution systems, because each step gives a chance for the game to spin off into unexpected directions.

This 'breakdown' is an illusion, though. Over at Fightnomics.com, the statistician Reed Khun ranks fighters by statistics like striking defense, power shot accuracy, and takedown defense. At these highest levels of competition, in as close to a close-combat situation as you can get, the statistics falling within a 50/50 chance for two evenly matched fighters. In fact, you can quickly pick out the dominant fighter in a match up based upon their accuracy and knockdown ratio, and Kuhn's analysis has shown these stats to be an accurate predictor of likely outcomes.

So where does that lead us? Well, rolling 3d6+Skill vs. 3d6+Skill gives us the most realistic measure of a skilled opponent. And like all statistics, there's room for flukes: a lucky shot, a poorly timed defense, and a sudden change in tactics can throw a fight suddenly.

Ah, one last point about skills being contextual: even a very talented athlete will find himself in trouble when faced with an opponent that does not do what is expected. Which is why defending against a technique or weapon style is dependent on the defender's skill in the attacker's technique.

For example, if you attack Chuck Lidell with a cestus, he will know how to defend against that. It's similar enough to a fist that his millions of iterations stored in his brain will inform him of the proper response.  But if you say, come at him with a spear or a sword, he will be in real trouble, because he has to defend with whatever generalized skill set he has, and his Specialization is useless.

Big things don't move quickly-- or if they do, it's for very short periods of time and they require tremendous amounts of energy. For organic creatures, the ability to accelerate and decelerate quickly is called Agility. Small, light things are more agile than say, an elephant. A blue whale may be absurdly powerful, but it can't exactly turn on a dime.

So I was playing around with different methods to accomplish this. I could create an inverse link between Body and Agility, but that would require including an additional stat that essentially just neuters the Fitness statistic.

I thought about creating some complicated mathematical formula baked into the game that would mimic the cube-square law, but that was insane and stupid.

Instead, I settled on a modification to Agility skills (the primary subset of Fitness) based upon Body.

Agility Penalty =(Hit Points-10)/4. This means that Fitness will have to be higher to compensate for very strong characters. Note that HP = Body*2

This means that while HP and Body are linked directly in character creation by default, they can be disaggregated to better represent creatures with phenomenal strength for their size. For example, a chimpanzee weights about 160 lbs, but can pull around 1,000 lbs with one hand. If we run the numbers, that gives a Body of 13 but only 12 HP instead of 26 hp.

Actually, this makes me wonder if it doesn't make more sense to come up with a STR/HP ratio to give a bonus to Agility.

I think something like that could work.  I got into some real arguments when I was on the Rolemaster revision panel.  The person in question would jump to personal attacks and strawman arguments at the drop of a hat but would never answer the following questions:

Which is more Agile, a world champion heavy weight boxer or a world champion gymnast?

Which is more Agile, a house cat or a tiger?

He always wanted to compare the boxer to the tiger.  There are many other factors than the cube square law and he made some valid points, but he was such an ass that I eventually left the revision projects and washed my hands of Rolemaster forever.  A big part of the problem is that Rolemaster ties reaction speed to movement rate and hand eye coordination to agility which is okay in many cases.  I can understand and support their refusal to change the stats.  I think that's an awful big step towards being another game entirely.

Dexterity is another question of course.  A paraplegic in a wheel chair isn't very agile but the can still work with their hands or be a good shot.  Not so much with bows of course but still.

And really, with bows and bullets it's less about fine motor control (though that matters) and more about maintaining concentration when hell is erupting around you.

Tying HP to mass and Agility penalty kills two birds with one stone: If you know the mass of something, you can estimate it's HP, and it gives a nice Realistic/Pulp lever. Pulp characters can have much higher HP totals without increasing mass, because the switch from Realism to Pulp means HPs stop being Abstract Mass and start being Narrative Importance.

Sure, as long as you maintain cross genre statistical compatability.  I think that's really where Fuzion failed.  The books weren't very cross compatible due to the various switches being thrown.

I still think Fuzion was a good idea, even if the execution was less than spectacualar.