SegFaulty wrote:
Having people invest skill points in things like Polka, Nose-picking and Coffee Brewing is a potential minefield though. If people start making up exotic skills for flavour, they'll expect the poor overworked GM to somehow work situations that require them into the campaign
Speaking as a long-time GM, I have to say that those flavoring skills can be opportunities more than headache. Let's face it, if every encounter can be solved with "I deal more damage than the other guys," you're never going to get a rep as a very challenging or imaginitive GM. On the other hand, if a clever player uses his stupendous Nose-Picking skill to impress the ogres that opportunisticly joined the party's fight with a bunch of goblins, encouraging them to pick on the goblins and not the PCs, you get major kudos for working in flavor, and you give yourself an excuse to up the difficulty of the average combat encounter ("Well geez, guys, if you'd just thought to use your Nose-Picking skill, the cleric and the thief would still be alive today, and it
wouldn't be an unfair fight").
SegFaulty wrote:
For all its faults and idiotic complexity, hackmaster actually pulled this off reasonably well.
Ah, HackMaster. Not really all that complicated, just buggy (rolling a two to hit gets you the same K.O. chance as rolling a twenty or better in unarmed combat? WTF?). But it certainly is a prime example of a system that sucessfully mixes class and point structure. The anthropomorphic RPG Ironclaw is also decent at this, although the Ironclaw system itself is so simplistic as to make D&D3e look like quantum physics in comparison.
With regards to the GURPS argument, there's not a whole lot point caps can't do. For a heroic but still relativly down-to-earth campaign, I'd probably say "okay, you get forty points, plus up to thirty-five points of disads and quirks" or something along those lines. As to tailoring systems...it's an awfully slippery slope. Some things, it's true, just need changing (especially in White Wolf products). But disallowing a feat because it's too useful under the grounds that "it's munchkin" can get players' backs up reeeeally quickly.
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