Skills with partial limitations

[Smeazel]

Okay, I'm pretty sure there's no elegant way of doing what I want in Hero Designer, but I just thought I'd ask in case I'm missing something... Anyway, what I want to do is have a character buy a skill with limitations on only some of the skill ranks. Specifically, it's a custom Magic skill used as an RSR for certain powers (spells). This character bought the Magic skill normally as a 3/2 skill, and bumped it up a few ranks. But I also want the character to have a higher rank in the Magic skill if she's using Gestures or Incantations, and a still higher rank if she uses both. The logical way to do this would seem to be to buy the base skill, and a few extra +1s, without Limitations, and then buy a few more +1s to the skill with the Gestures limitation, and a few more with the Incantations limitation. That way the character may have, for instance, a 20- Skill Roll if she doesn't use Gestures or Incantations, a 25- with one or the other, and a 30- if she uses both. (Those may seem like really high Skill Rolls, but (a) the powers this skill is used with have an Active Point penalty to the Skill Roll of -1 per 5 Active Points (which can really add up, since some of those powers have a lot of Active Points), and (b) this is a master villain NPC; she's supposed to be powerful.)

Okay, first of all, although this isn't really related to Hero Designer, per se... this is legal according to Hero 5E rules, right?

Second, is there a way to do this elegantly in Hero Designer? I can buy the skill (either as a skill or as a power) multiple times, some with the Limitations and some without, but then each instance gets treated as a separate skill; they don't add together. And buying it as a Skill Level won't work, since it would only be a 2-point skill level and therefore ineligible for Limitations. Am I missing something?...

[Simon]

It is legal...it's actually something which came up only recently and was clarified by Steve.

Skill Levels are not the way to go. Steve is intending to change the wording on the 2-point SL to read "+1 with a Characteristic Roll" (note: no "or Skill").

I'm going to be addressing this in a more "elegant" way in v2, but for now, your best bet is to use a Custom Skill to purchase the levels. Set the cost to whatever you it should be (easy enough on a 3/2 Skill) and add in whatever Limitations you choose.

You can also do all of this on the Powers tab if you want to group them all together into one "unit"....just build them all into a Compound Power.

Hope this helps!

[Smeazel]

Originally posted by dsimon
I'm going to be addressing this in a more "elegant" way in v2, but for now, your best bet is to use a Custom Skill to purchase the levels. Set the cost to whatever you it should be (easy enough on a 3/2 Skill) and add in whatever Limitations you choose.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I was leaning toward doing if I couldn't find a better way. Good to know this is something that's going to be addressed more thoroughly in v2, though. Thanks for the reply!