I'm trying to build a trade off between how players train skills. I've got about 40 general skills, things like Gunnery or Science or Survival, and each has a number of specializations which enhance the general skill. So Gunnery might have Light Arms, Science might have Biology and Survival might have Arctic. I'd like the player to choose between putting resources toward the general category or specializing in a part of it.

My question is what the bonus should be for specializing and how it should work. Initially I was just going to make specialization a cheaper way to add a +1 or +2 or whatever, but constrain it to a specific category, but that's pretty dry. Another thought was to remove critical failures, but again that wasn't very inspired.

I should note that skills are meant to be tested against the general category only, so that someone with the appropriate skill level should pass a test regardless of specialization, but should get a more favorable result for specializing. Skill levels are open ended, requiring geometrically more resources each time you gain a level in the skill, though without the more lazy +1, +2 etc I'm not sure about specializations.

Any ideas? What should you get for putting the effort into Light Arms as opposed to just Gunnery?

Let's limit examples to gunfight skills.

What should you get for putting the effort into Light Arms as opposed to just Gunnery?

 
First and foremost, there must be a supply of Light Arms, or the specialization is a wasted investment. Can the player predict how and when skills are going to be useful?

For Light Arms specialization to be a real choice, there must be other useful specializations (e.g. Sniping) and their corresponding weapons (e.g. a large caliber rifle). Are you including useless skills? Does the player know that they should be avoided?

Third, there must be a way to win the game with any choice of specializations, forcing you to avoid, among other things, unavoidable fights that are much easier with one skill choice. For example, you should allow the player to infiltrate an enemy base either through Light Arms friendly sewers and secret passages or by Sniping friendly extermination of guards from nearby buildings; offering only one of the two battles requires precognition on the player's part. Is character customization worth the difficulty tuning complications?

The best system that springs to mind is the Shadowrun (PnP) skill web system. It actually went 3 tiers deep with General Skill / Concentration / Specialization. In that system, increasing General Skills cost more because everything under that skill benefited from the skill level increase. Concentrating in a group up sub-skills costed fewer points since to increase since that level up only affected some sub-actions, but not all. Specializing costed even less than a skill concentration since it raised only one action directly related to a specific weapon or action.

So it often happened that a Firearms skill would be at 4, Pistols skill would be at 6, and Baretta 9mm skill would be at 8.

In that case, to raise the skill levels, you would have to spend:

8 points to raise Firearms from 4 to 5 (2 x current level)

9 points to raise Pistols from 6 to 7 (1.5 x current level)

or 8 points to raise the Baretta 9mm from 8 to 9. (1 x current level)

(Each line is paid for and advanced independently after character creation.)

Consider that if you pick a favorite weapon, you can get deadly with it fast without being completely useless with everything else.

Or if you knew that your favorite weapon won't be available for a while, or would rather remain versatile, you can stay generalized, but less effective than a specialist.

So to summarize my answer to your question:

You should get more rapid advancement by specializing over the versatility of generalizing but at the added cost of being less diverse.

I actually rather like the idea of eliminating critical failures, assuming that critical failures are actually painful to the player. In many games it's just a single bad attack or damage roll, and that quickly gets lots in the thousands of attack and damage rolls you make in the game.

Are specializations a one-off cost? You either have it or you don't? Or is it a separate and more focused skill rating a la the Shadowrun system Meatsack described? If the former, then you can create unique abilities unlocked by each skill - for instance "Headshot" for sniping or "Lead Storm" for automatic weapons. However, if they are scaled abilities you'll need to keep the benefit more tame and scaleable. Increasing damage with the specific weapon category, or success chance, or whatever.

Hard to give more suggestions without knowing more about the specifics of your system. As a more general statement, I'd try to use the specializations to make the skills more unique and really give the player a reason to use them.

I also like removing critical failures, but other ideas might be:

-Some weapons can only be used without major penalties if the character is specialized enough in that weapon's type

-Weapons and other equipment can be customized, and more or better customization is only possible if you've specialized

-The player gets a bonus related to the specialization but that isn't an attack modifier, i.e. specializing in Pistols lets the player notice more easily if an enemy has a pistol, or confers a defense or dodge bonus against pistols

-Special attacks become available through specialization, while generalization just adds a plain bonus like a +1 firearms attack

Re-reading this, it's pretty focused on gunnery/light arms. I could probably come up with some more diverse ideas with more examples of skills and multiple specializations within them.

You could custom-enhance general skills with the sub-skills, let's take gunnery as example:
1) accuracy(better hitrate or hitrate scales off slower at range, depending on your game)

2) Reloading(how fast do you reload a gun, very important)

3) maybe gun-maintenance(keep your gun from breaking down due to be worn out, or make it usable even in the rain, again depends on your game)

4) doublehanded(using two guns at the same time, on lower levels with big penalties, level up to cut the penalties)

5) and maybe a skill to increase the damage from guns(dunno whether it would clash with your level of realism)

For the record, I also like the idea of removing or reducing critical failures. If your system has a concept of critical successes, a specialist might also have an increased (but never guaranteed) chance of critical success.

Perhaps you need a larger score in a general skill to be able to use a weapon at all, while the specialisation allows you to use it more quickly, but obviously wouldn't be useful in other cases. For example, +5 in gunnery might allow you to shoot any weapon, whilst just +1 in light arms would allow you to fire a pistol but wouldn't help you out with a mortar.

I also like the idea of a specialisation providing the option of a special attack (or special usage/ability for non-combat) whilst a more general skill would just allow basic usage.

result = general + specialization

where specialization<=general, because how can one be highly specialized in arctic survival without knowing what this 'fire' thing is and that cold is bad and kills you.

This would also be realistic in a sense. When you have low general (learning how to aim a gun?), you cant really specialize much at that point. But when you master the basics, specialization is all you can do.

You could add some more depth by lets say having a specialization-tree with unlockables that require some level in the general skill.

My question is what the bonus should be for specializing and how it should work. Initially I was just going to make specialization a cheaper way to add a +1 or +2 or whatever, but constrain it to a specific category, but that's pretty dry. Another thought was to remove critical failures, but again that wasn't very inspired.

Any ideas? What should you get for putting the effort into Light Arms as opposed to just Gunnery?

Consider real world equivalents

Gunnery - you may have touched all the weapons you would commonly used and maybe fired it once to be familiar with it (my daya said in army they each got to fire a bazooka once in training (and he was in signal corp) just learning what the weaopon is used for and what it looks like and what its ammo looks like....

Light Arms - now actually firing many rounds and some aiming with each relevant weapon (going from competancy of hitting a barn door to some guy maybe 30 feet away with a few shots) basic handling/cleaning/familiarity

Specific weapon - intense learning and targeting with serious instructors (like a marine and his rifle) speciific weapon to be extension of the man.

Marksman goes beyond that (usually only people with suficient inbuilt skills)

Now in your system how do you set attributes to reflect those levels of abilities (and each attribute may have a different stepped curve for each of those levels)

Training is likely a geometric progression, but likely turns out effectiveness with specific weapon may be close to same geometric stepping (particularly with probability-of-target-hit at long range (short range is on a different graduated scale as just about anyone could hit something 5 feetin front of them if they can manage to actually fire the weapon -- loading it to get it into that firing state may be a different consideration)

What about a system where you buy specialized skills with training points that are all part of single skills branch. Your skill in that branch are determined by your total number of specializations. Each specialization unlocks a useful bonus in situations that use it but your success is primarily determined by the points you have in that branch.

For instance shooting at unaware target might require a 3 success to hit, but if you have the sniper specialization then 5 success means a head shot that kills non boss enemies.

Or in the electronics tree I might have:

Lock Picking

Ciphers

Alarm Systems

Knowledge of Ares tech

Counter Surveillance

Which gives me 5 points in electronics to be used in all tests but most of my big bonuses are all around security systems. I still might succeed at repairing a damaged laptop I'm never going to get any special bonuses for doing so.