Opal

'Finite' - the current skill system allows you to spend unlimitted numbers of points on skills simply by defining skills more and more narrowly. For instance.

Doctor:
2 PS: Doctor

vs

3 Paramedics
3 PS: Doctor
1 Perk: liscence to practice medicine

vs

3 Paramedics
2 PS: Doctor
1 Perk: liscence to practice medicine
3 Analyze: illness or injury
3 Science: Medicine
2 Science: Speciality
2 KS: Speciality
2 KS: Pharmecopia
2 KS: Legal requirements & Hospital Policy
2 KS: Anatomy & Physiology
2 KS: DSM4
2 KS: History of Medicine
2 KS: Famous Doctors
2 AK: Hospital
3 Contacts: other doctors you did your residency with

etc...

The more detailed you get in thinking about what a fairly ordinary person might be able to do, the more points you can spend on them. An ordinary normal might be represented well enough by everyman skills, or you could go into excruciating detail with job skills, hobbies, trivial knowledge skills (breaking his home town down into neighborhoods so he can have different levels of knowledge of each), etc...


The purpose of a Finite system is to limit that. It wraps up every skill you could ever have to accomplish something in one point expenditure. If you want more detailed skills, you limit that universal skill down, or you take a specific skill. If you take enough specific skills, you eventually bump up against the cost of buying the aplicable universal skills, and you have to think: Do I really want a character who can do anything, or am I just going overboard in buying specific detail skills?

Under the Finite System, if you wanted to play a doctor, you'd buy:

5 Doctor

That's it, you're done, you can make any roll a doctor should be able to make. INT to diagnose, PRE for bedside manner, DEX to suture a ruptured artery, etc.. If you want to be particularly good at some specialy, you buy levels in it:

5 Doctor
4 +2 with all Doctor rolls
3 +3 with brain surgery

There, you're a brain surgeon.

If you wanted to play a brilliant physicist who was also a brilliant biologist and a brilliant engineer, you'd just buy the universal 'Scientist' skill, and you're done - and you're also a geneticist, chemist, and whatever else within the limits of science as it exists in the campaign (rather like that crazy old guy on Fringe, really - or Mr Spock, for that matter).

I've had this idea kind of floating around for a long time. It never really came into focus, though. I'd been running my campaign in Sidekick, because 5th had started to intimidate my players, and, I was getting wistful for the relative simplicity of 1st ed skills - there were only a handful, they all cost 5 points (except Accrobatics that cost 10 because it gave you a DCV bonus).

Now, I'm thinking a system with a small number of expensive skills that cover 'everything,' that you can limit or parse down to cover less, rather than a potentially infinite number of player/gm-defined skills of indeterminant granularity, might be a pretty good aproach.