There's no single right answer for that question. Both things you suggested are fine, and there are other ways. The question is, where do you want to go with the game?

At the level of realism where Warrior Mages run around throwing frostbolts, I think I'd mostly prefer getting generic skillup points and picking what skill I want.

Shadowrun had a good system for this. Basically there was a skill tree for each stat. The lower down the skill tree the more expensive it was to increase but the greater the impact.

So you might have a section of a skill tree that looks like the following:

Strength
- Melee Combat
-- Edged Weapons
--- Exotic Swords
---- Katana

Increasing Strength by 1 point would give you a 1 point bonus to all skills that inherited from it. While 1 point spent in Katana would only provide a bonus when using Katana.

So assuming you had an active skill system where you usage increase ability in a skill you could push the experience gains back down the tree in the same way.

So gaining 10 Katana Experience would flush down the tree like below.

Katana +10
-Exotic Swords +5
-- Edged Weapons + 2.5
--- Meelee Combat + 1.25
---- Strength + 0.625

Quote:

Original post by Kylotan You could build another layer of attributes on top of them, eg. Violin Playing might be 1/5 Strength and 4/5 Dexterity. Consider these the practical abilities that always require a mixture of the more abstract abilities. If you do have layered attributes or skills I think you need to be careful to keep the 'tree' quite shallow and predictable...

This. I think I was going to say something like that, but I was too tired to figure out what I meant and how to say it. I think I would use a two-tiered tree with all basic skills on the same level, from strength and dexterity to nitty-gritty specifics of different specialties. For example, Violin Playing would be something like 1/6 strength, 1/2 dexterity, and 1/3 some new violin-specific skill, to represent the specific knowledge needed to manipulate the violin. All these skills would be pretty much logically equivalent; some are just more widely used. A similar idea would be applied to the ice attack which would be composed of the skills of "magic use" and "magic ice creation" or something.

You can only take this so far. It might be unwieldy to also add to "Violin Playing" the skills of rhythm, music reading, bowing, and fingering techniques so that playing the violin also helps your piano, cello, and guitar. But in a restricted domain like that of a combat system, this sort of thing would probably be manageable.

Haven't really read anything but the title, and a lil quick peak at the op.

But here's what I was thinking. Yes and No. Yes if the skills are related. Say you have a warrior with a sword skill slash and and a sword skill hard slash. Where you get hard slash through slash (kind of like in a skill tree). Using hard slash should raise your slash, or vice versa, depending on how you think it should.

No if the skills are... slash and jump. Since they aren't connected in any real way. Not even the primary limbs being used.