Skill Decay?

[Gary Ciaramella]

This being the most posted on pure Hero System board, I decided to ask my question here, although the campaign in question is a Fantasy Hero campaign.

 

Have you ever come up with house rules for Skill Decay? My magic system is going to be skill based, so I wanted to see what some of you may have come up with... I am not certain I want to worry about skill decay, but if I can come up with something clean and elegant, I may give it a go.

 

So... Skill Decay, anyone?

[assault]

Not relevant unless the player wants to swap some points around.

[sinanju]

Unless you're running a Special Ops game (and probably not even then), I wouldn't worry about skill decay. Just assume that a character practices enough to keep his skills sharp (barring long hospitalizations, imprisonment, and the like). They're heroes. Presumably, that's their primary focus in life.

 

At most, you might apply a short-term penalty to the use of skills that a character hasn't had a reasonable chance to practice. But really, I think worrying about skill decay is taking simulationism too far. Yes, in the real world SpecOps soldiers' jobs are basically to practice, practice, practice all day every day and then occasionally use the skills in the field, then practice some more. But that would be boring to play and a major pain to keep track of even if it's assumed to be happening when the "camera" isn't following the PCs.

[kahuna's bro]

i'm with sinanju on this

[Cassandra]

Why not purchase a Extra Characteristics like INT or DEX, but with a Charge?

[Asperion]

The main time that i would worry about this would be with EXTREMELY long-lived beings (such as immortals).  then it would only apply to skills that they do not use freq (such as horsemanship and swordmanship).  even here the decay would take game-years to take place, not the sort of thing that would happen suddenly.

[Lucius]

Asperion makes a very good point. The idea of skill decay helps explain why for example an Elf character that's been around for centuries might be built on the same points as a Human character just beginning what is, from the Elf's point of view, a very short career as an adventurer.

 

This also ties in, in my mind, with the more general question of character decay in general - the Human will not be as strong, fast, and durable after forty years of adventuring. But few games run long enough for this to matter unless there are factors at work that accelerate aging.

 

I do think there should BE rules for character deterioration, but I'm not aware of any formal rules of that type for Hero.

 

I have written up power constructs that have Limitations "must keep in practice" or the like, so that the ability would not be usable right after recovery from an injury or a period of confinement.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

anentropic palindromedary

[Greywind]

The closest there was to such, were the Age modifiers to NCM.