Skill Synergy

[BattleJenkins]

Something I've been kind of thinking about for a while - a lot of skills, especially the trade skills, seem to have a little bit of conceptual overlap, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that a lot of our skills can be sort of 'grouped' or paired together:

Jeweling / Blacksmithing
Tailoring / Leatherworking
Cooking / Brewing
Herbalism / Chandlery (Or Herbalism / Medicine?)

Dodge / Footwork
Parry / Block

Unarmed / Improvised (If we're keeping improvised?)
Mace / Axe
Staff / Polearm
Whip / Flail
Dagger / Throwing

Hide / Sneak (But these might be getting merged anyhow)
Haggle / Consider

Forage / Tracking

I think it might be neat if having one of these skills already trained would help you train similar skills a bit faster - a little bonus to your pool accrual if you have the 'synergy' skill paired with it trained up about X amount of ranks higher - so if you're at 36 tailoring and get started on leatherworking, you pick it up a bit faster, since a lot of the techniques and tools used are the same. It wouldn't make raising the skills any cheaper XP-ways, of course - just be a nice little boost to the learning speed to represent being able to carry over similar knowledge from another skill.

[Kinaed]

For the most part, we've taken the time to balance skills and how long it takes to master them, etc. I'm not sure that this plays well into our paradigm,

[Applesauce]

-1

i like the idea, generally, but practically there's already not enough to spend XP on once you have had like 1 long-term character. We already have IC superpowers because the players have been on this version of TI since it first spun off, if you cut the XP spend then it would be even easier to reach that untouchable status.