tRoS starting tonight - skills question

[Brian Leybourne]

(this is also posted in the tRoS forum).

Finally, I'm starting a tRoS campaign tonight. After so much foreplay it's going to be nice to move onto the sex (so to speak).

Just a quick question to those of you who have played it already, regarding skills. It seems to me that a characters primary skills are going to be the ones he uses the most often (a thief-type character will be using his pick locks and suchlike all the time, for example) and it's not going to be hard for a character to use such a skill 3 times per session. Although the roll to improve the skill gets tricky at higher levels, it starts off pretty easy and takes a long time to get hard (and even then isn't too bad).

Now, for a long-term campaign, I can see characters skills maxing out pretty quickly. In almost any other system, you can keep just getting better and better at something (in d20 terms, for example, you can eventually get 30 or 40 or 50 in a skill if you want, and although that means you'll automatically succeed in any mundane use of the skill, there's still room for the "basically impossible etc). tRoS is different though, because the skill eventually maxes out at 3 and can't get any better. Theoretically, this could happen in 6 or 7 sessions too. If it happens to several of a characters main skills (likely, because he's using them all the time) suddenly he loses some of his drive because the stuff he can do that makes him him can not improve anymore.

Is this the case (Backed up by actual play), or am I worrying over nothing? Have people experimented with requiring 6 ticks instead of three (or whatever), or maybe only getting a tick when you fail a skill (because you learn through your mistakes) making it harder to get better the better you are? I can see my players getting titchy if their characters suddenly can't get any better at their primary skills after only 10 sessions or so.

Jake, your home campaign has been going over a year with only one death.. surely this has come up? Or are your players' characters experts at every skill by now?

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Brian,

For the future, note:

Cross-posting is heavily discouraged. If you're confused on where to post, try this: If it's about actually playing (this isn't), post in Actual Play. If it's about the Riddle of Steel in general (this is), post in the Riddle of Steel forum.

Thanks!