So a house rule I implemented in my latest game allows a character to buy up a skill group to a certain level at chargen, then raise a skill within the skill group up as many points up to the cap for only 4 BP per point.

For example, Runner A takes the Firearms Group at 4, (for 40 BP), then decides he wants to specialize, as it is, in Pistols, so he raises the pistols skill to 6 for only 8 BP, for a total of 48 BP compared to the...84 points it would cost to do it the standard way. The downside is that you can't specialize in a skill within a skill group in this way. If you wanted to specialize in Pistols (Revolvers), you would have to either take the skill seperately, as per RAW, or take the specialization after chargen.

Is that broken, or illogical in some way? Overly twinky?

We've always houseruled that. Basically its breaking skill groups in chargen. The book claims it leaves it open for abuse, I really don't see it as being the worst game break in existance.

I like that it provides a better rounded character without penalizing them. I want to be a Lone Star officer, that usually uses an automatic, but I have been trained in the use of other firearms. So I have pistols and longarms at 2, and automatics at 4. According to the book this is 32 BP, but if I take it as a group of 2, and 2 more ranks in automatics, its 28 BP. I only save 4 BP, and it reflects better the way my character was taught. Just remember that once broken a skill group cannot be raised anymore. That and I prefer characters to have a wider variety of skills, not just select maxed skills.


A skill group at 4 will usually save you 8 BP (3 skills) or 24 BP (4 skills). But these BP are only considerably if the character will be using all those skills a majority of the time. If your character will be doing swimming, running, gymnastics and climbing on every mission then athletics is very profitably for saving 24 BP, but likely you'll be doing minimal swimming, and climbing will probably not be always usable. So this is actually costing you an additional 8 BP, because your getting skills that you won't be using as often.

From the SR4 FAQ



I always allow it.

I needa check the FAQ more often.

How on Earth do you get a normal cost of 84? Rasing 2 skills to 4 and one to 6 should cost 56 BP. Even if there were 4 skills in it it costs only 72 BP. Also I personally feel that it's reasonable to allow breaking skill groups at char. gen. The use of skill groups is limited enough as it is.

Seems only the devs think breaking up groups in chargen is prone to min-maxing...
We tried this rule once, stopped using it during the same chargen session because it seemed we were min-maxing more with this rule in place...

I think the ability to break groups is 100% min-maxing. Not saying that is a negative, but just making the decision to buy a group or not has a person comparing the group versus the individual skills and which costs more to get. Seeing that you can break the group later to specialize or up them individually makes buying a group after char gen almost non-existent.

And if you go by RAW, the training time for a group is monthly...so you are pretty much looking at a couple months spent training to ever raise those scores. Compare that to the weekly training time for individual skills... I think outside of a cost discount at char gen and maybe wanting to get a rating 1 in a handful of skills after char gen, groups are just a RAW-approved way to min-max.

Yeah, there's an argument that having the option of groups (plus a specialty on one of that group's skills, at least) encourages minimaxing. After all, if you can't choose, there's nothing to min-max .

I can't figure out what the goal was in making chargen a different system to character improvement. Has that been discussed by the writers, ever?

I think it was to allow a starting character to have more abilities, using less points. By having flat improvement costs at the beginning they don't have to start you with a ridiculous amount of points (which leads to even higher min-maxing), just so you could create a balanced character. By having a increasing difficulty post char-gen it makes the time it takes to improve longer, and makes the character playable longer without topping out.

Just theorizing...

I see your point but the linear-at-start/pyramid thereafter just screams "specialise" to the minimaxers and penalises the growth of those who start of generalists. The extra cost for topping out helps a bit, but it's far easier to build a char with starting 5s and add the 1s and 2s later than it is to get all the 1s and 2s and get the 5s with Karma. I suspect that this disconnect is well appreciated and means that the designers were encouraging specialisation at chargen.

Really?
I see people raising skill groups all the time...
My current character is upping the cracking and electronics groups to become a decent decker...
Our covert ops guy is upping stealth, athletics and firearms as groups...

Yeah, I hate that too, if I'm making a character in SR, I find myself going for high karma targets before the "he should have this" things...
Like my face, when most of chargen was done, I was assigning scores to Perception, Dodge and Pilot ground craft...
Perception was going to be high (even worked into the background), so I put it on 4, same with dodge, put to 4...
Which left me 8 BP and no Pilot ground craft...
I eventually ended up putting them in perception, since I was planning to buy up perception anyway once the game started and, while it would make sense to be able to drive a car, I can live with having to wait one session before I get the skill to drive a car (which I never do because other people just drive better than me...
In fact, it's come to the point with us that we talk about a difference between a stat at 1 that is going to stay 1, and one at 1 that will be raised to 2 or 3...
Again, my face has STR and Body 1, but reaction is a raiser, meaning, it started at 1, but has been upped to 3 by now...
This might seem like twinky behavior, but it isn't, my character has a bunch of BPs wasted on background things that will never be used in game, but are needed to make her real, but she has, in my mind, CHA 7 and REA 3, if I cannot get both at chargen, you bet I'm going to lower REA first, it being easier to buy up...

ArkonC, what kind of downtime does your group run with? I only ask because my group doesn't do much downtime "fast-forwarding". If there are a couple days without a job, the group is looking for one. Which normally means waiting a month or two in order to train skills up just really doesn't happen.

We don't do a lot of downtime either, but we use those skill training time rules for skills that are trained off screen, skills that you constantly use (and thus earn karma with) should be able to be improved by that karma, and getting the 25 karma to raise a group to 5 takes a while, especially since it is very tempting to just spend 10 to raise dodge to 5...

I don't want to totally derail, but I've been wanting to do this with the system as well. Do you limit how many skills a character can actually train at one time? Thats the only place I'm running into difficulties, is how many skills can a person train in during a week or a month? Just fishing for some suggestions.

I ran into this same problem. And I have been using the following house rule:

You can train an amount of skills equal to your Logic per week, with a brand new skill costing 3 points. A logic 1 or 2 can still train brand new skills, but that is all they can do.

It has worked well for our table.

*SNIP* I like it, will have to add it to my list.

Just a thought though, do they get a bonus on number of "points" per week if they are not running, or otherwise unoccupied?

No, I let this be all background tracking. I let the players do this training regardless of anything else that is going on during the week, whether they are running or not.

When it comes to skill groups, I'd like to get rid of the "breaking" and "forming" mindset entirely, and make skill groups perfectly flexible.

In other words, if your character bought up three skills that are part of a skill group, then the third (lowest-rating) skill is bought at half price. Any additional skills in the same group are bought for free, in terms of BP or Karma cost, though the character must still spend the time training the skill.

Note that this is equivalent to normal costs for groups, but is far more flexible in implementation, while still having everything essentially cost the same in the end. Well, it would, if BPs and Karma didn't force you to spend differing amounts for the same skill ranks.

I'd like to keep skill groups as a separate entity that couldn't be "broken". I think having clear pros/cons and having to stick with the decision to group or not group makes for a richer char gen experience.

And I think it makes groups into a silly artificial construct, which forces people to either take all their skills at the same level or pay extra for the "privilege".

In my mind, skill groups exist to mimic the variable defaulting modifiers in SR3. Back then, you could default to a related skill and have a slightly lessened penalty than if you were defaulting to a bare attribute, because the skills themselves were related. The SR4 dice system, being sharply more limited than SR3's variable-TN, variable Threshold system, can't really do this as well. So instead you get a discount on buying up groups of similar skills, under the reasoning that it should take less effort to buy up a skill if you've already spent effort buying up a bunch of closely related skills.

This idea that somehow skill groups have to be kept at the same level and unspecialized, that somehow the skills stop being related when they have different levels, is mystifying to me. So, my character knowing how to use a computer (Computer skill 3) somehow makes it harder to learn Data Search, Software, and Hardware (Electronics group level 1) than the guy who doesn't know a thing about computers? Why?

I wish all the skill groups had the same number of skills. If they all had 4 skills you could easily do
Highest skill costs regular cost to raise, all others cost half.
For build points this would be 4 + 2 + 2 + 2 = 10
For karma this would be Skill x 2, Skill, Skill, Skill = 5 x Skill

But since we have skill groups with 3 and skill groups with 4.. That doesn't work, but wishful thinking someone might be able to work with.

This is probably how they brought it over from SR3, but they don't have variable cost groups. 8 BP for a skill group of 3, 10 BP for a skill group 4 (4 karma for skill group of 3, 5 karma for skill group of 4) And the reason for this is if it was set up this way, people would see it as buy 2 get 1 free, instead of buy 2 get 1 half price, or buy 2 get the next 2 at quarter of the price.