@crashdown
"You aren't proposing a UE cost for atristry mastery, but you are proposing a penalty for everything else not used with the artistry field as a default. That isn't the case for weapons. You can choose to improve your weapon skill with specialization and get a bonus. If you don't, you aren't penalized for it across the board. You aren't restricted to one or two types of weapon within one skill choice (like you don't have to choose just to mastery 10mm and submastery poppop but then can't get skill penalty deducations for all other pistols you're using).""I expressed my concerns of this and its benefits to combat characters above and earlier. Yes, there's multiple types of unique weapon skills. And yes, we have to invest UE into separate weapon skills. But within each of those weapon skills are a number of weapons to choose from and each may or may not have their own benefits or drawbacks based on the weapon type. But we don't ask firearm users, for example, to choose between mastering sniping or standard same room shooting and whichever one you master in then you submaster in the next and automatically get a skill penalty that's always applied, regardless of any other context or what you're using."
I don't think this is a fair comparison, nor am I entirely certain why combat skills even a part of the debate beyond the fact that I suggested "masteries" as being similar to weapon specializations. I suppose I can see where you are coming from if you focus entirely on the difference between how weapon specializations are applied versus how I proposed masteries function, but I never intended for it to be a 1:1 comparison between the two. Combat gets no 'benefit' from the proposed concept, as the skills are entirely independent of each other, and do not interact.
Let's take a step back from the focus on weapon spec vs proposed artistic mastery. Artistry, a single skill, encompasses a wide range of disciplines. The investment for this skill is time and occasionally consumable objects. Investing in artistry provides you the opportunity to apply that UE investment universally across all artistic disciplines. Combat is not a single skill, it is a combination of several skills. Depending on what route you take, you may have invested UE in as many as four. We won't bother to bring associated stat investments in for this comparison. The investment for combat related RP is time, related equipment (weapons, armor, drugs, other consumables), cyberware, and medical.
So, eliminating the factor of spec vs mastery, we have a character who has heavily invested in one skill: Artistry. Available utilizations of that skill are: painting, sculpting, performative arts and other media, tattooing, tailoring, and miscellaneous applications of the skill that aren't necessarily mechanically supported, but staff might choose to roll on depending on the RP taking place. Currently their ability to distribute themselves across these disciplines is unrestricted. There is no penalty. This skill has no relative dependency on other skills. Now let's build a combat archetype on the basis of 'related, but not necessarily the same' skills. This combat archetype will have the following skills: Brawling, Pistol, Dodge. The archetype cannot achieve the same level of mastery with those three skills as a character focused on artistry would. Therefore, we end up with One primary combat skill, one secondary combat skill, and dodge. Reasonably, they could also invest equally into the two combat skills and sacrifice dodge, but they are making a choice to degrade performance in one aspect in favor of another.
So, apples to apples comparison of the two archetypes, without consideration for stat investments, and ignoring the idea of specializations or masteries… Combat naturally incurs a "penalty" to secondary skills, as a result of necessary UE distribution and limitations. Artistry does not.
Now we will add in weapon specializations vs the proposed "masteries" concept. Weapon specializations require a further UE investment. Characters may choose not to take a specialization at all. Making the investment into a specialization does not necessarily benefit them, because they are choosing to invest UE that could be distributed in other stats or skills, into a single, very specific weapon object instead. I will add here that combat skills that haven't been invested in at all simply do not function, as all rolls will fail. The proposed idea of "masteries" for artistry would allow one discipline to mechanically function at 100%, another to function less effectively, and all other disciplines to continue to function, but be less mechanically valuable (i.e. if you don't master/sub-master painting, you can still paint, but its coded value will not be as high as those who selected it for mastery).
So now we put the two together with a broader view, instead of a singular focus on "specialization" vs "mastery". We have combat, which requires the player to distribute a finite resource between multiple skills, ultimately resulting in one (or more) to function less capably than others. Weapon specialization selectively allows you to apply a "bonus" (there is no exact description of what it does), for more UE. The UE applied to a weapon specialization could be applied in other ways, so you are choosing to invest that UE in a specialization, for one specific tool, of one specific combat skill, which ultimately means you have less UE to apply to secondary combat skills, which will suffer as a result. By comparison, an investment in artistry requires considerably less UE, as it is single skill (versus the 2+ required for combat), and the proposed concept of "masteries", does not require any more UE investment, leaving you able to invest that UE into other skills.
"It also gives the question.. who watches if people are sticking to their mastery of dancing/writing, or their penalties? (besides crowd reactions now)? Do we police that as a playerbase? Does staff police it?"
The goal of the concept is to tilt the potential mechanical reward/acknowledgement toward players who have chosen to invest in the skill, and in a particular art, versus being a jack of all trades. I have no interest in telling players "you aren't a master of painting, so you need to stop acting like you are!". They will simply not render a painting at a coded value comparable to someone who has chosen to master painting.
The one thing I would hope from staff is that they would offer preference for IC roles to those who have chosen a mastery suited to that specific role. This would probably present as an admin command that would allow them to specifically roll against artistry subsets for success or fail. In other words, someone who has chosen mastery in performative arts would be preferred for IC roles such as scriptwriter, or actress over those who chose mastery in unrelated disciplines such as painting/tailoring.
@batko
"I feel like even with how popular the skill is, it's still difficult to find people willing to do more challenging work. I am not crazy about more limitations for the skill, though I do agree some players can do better about not being a polymath."
I'd argue this has nothing to do with the implementation of the skill itself. Players who do not actually want to fulfill the obligations of the role/skill are unlikely to do so, with or without this change. It's certainly a pet peeve of mine when I go to an artist and they ask me to "sketch" out what I want (effectively asking me to give them something to copy and paste into the game), but that's a whole other discussion.
