'Bastards 0.2 - Attribute/Skill Change Discussion - Feedback Wanted.

[nemedeus]

1. Stats

I think, keep them as they are now.

Why? Tying Stamina and Strength together actually maks a surprising amount of sense. As it stands, you can have someone with Strength 1 and Stamina 6, or vice versa - something that is basically physically impossible in real life due to how tied together these things are. As I mentioned before, there is a reason why people who run long distance in the Olympics lift weights as part of their training. Hell, I would be tempted to shift Speed into what is currently considered Brawn rather than Agility, and call the stat Conditioning instead - these three aspects are rarely different enough from each other to justify even a single point of difference on even a 1-10 score.

how about this:
--use Willpower where Stamina used to be in Skill checks.
--Rename Stamina to Toughness, to make it more clear that it is more like an abstract stat representing how hard to kill you are, instead of describing your endurance. I always found Stamina a bit of a strange name anyway (no hard feelings, Agamemnon).

Speed is kinda both reflexes and physical velocity the way i understand it. As Benedict and I suggested, it's problems are easily fixed.

[thirtythr33]

So a lot of stuff has been talked about, and instead of repeating a lot of great points I'll just point out the few I think are most important and the ones I didn't see anyone else raise.

The thing I would least like to see is a permanent link of attribute and skill. Using a different attribute based on the situation of the skill roll is a great mechanic I would be very disappointed to see go.

All the other stuff (increasing size of skill pools, changing how many attributes there are, DR = BRWN/2 etc) I am rather indifferent about (assuming the dead levels are filled somehow, and the Obs for attributes and skills stay the same).

The core issue appears to be that SAs have too large an effect on Skills compared to Combat Pools. Most of the suggestions have been to modify skills and attributes somehow. I would prefer to see this problem tackled from the other side; by modifying SAs.

In the floating city game, SAs have been trampling every challenge I throw at them. They seem to fire all the time and there is no drawback to using them. Increasing the Obs to assume players always have an SA firing makes attempting a skill without an SA firing too hard.

I think the best solution to all of the above is to throw out individual SAs and add another way to spend them. It would look something like this:
Any SAs earn't all go into 1 pool, to a max of 25
You can spend 1 SA to boost your effectiveness for the rest of the conflict.
This mode can only be used in conflicts where you have an SA directly related to that conflict.
You get +2 dice to any non-combat pool (ie, skills, attributes or derived rolls like KO resistance) and you get +4 to any combat pools.

This gives the correctly proportioned bonuses to skill rolls and combat rolls. It streamlines the mini game of "wack-a-SA" by making them flat bonuses instead of variables. It means SAs won't be used on every trivial task because players won't want to spend valuable SAs on them; they will save them for when they are most important.

And this whole d6 thing is so crazy I don't know what to think.

[nemedeus]

So a lot of stuff has been talked about, and instead of repeating a lot of great points I'll just point out the few I think are most important and the ones I didn't see anyone else raise.

The thing I would least like to see is a permanent link of attribute and skill. Using a different attribute based on the situation of the skill roll is a great mechanic I would be very disappointed to see go.

All the other stuff (increasing size of skill pools, changing how many attributes there are, DR = BRWN/2 etc) I am rather indifferent about (assuming the dead levels are filled somehow, and the Obs for attributes and skills stay the same).

The core issue appears to be that SAs have too large an effect on Skills compared to Combat Pools. Most of the suggestions have been to modify skills and attributes somehow. I would prefer to see this problem tackled from the other side; by modifying SAs.

In the floating city game, SAs have been trampling every challenge I throw at them. They seem to fire all the time and there is no drawback to using them. Increasing the Obs to assume players always have an SA firing makes attempting a skill without an SA firing too hard.

I think the best solution to all of the above is to throw out individual SAs and add another way to spend them. It would look something like this:
Any SAs earn't all go into 1 pool, to a max of 25
You can spend 1 SA to boost your effectiveness for the rest of the conflict.
This mode can only be used in conflicts where you have an SA directly related to that conflict.
You get +2 dice to any non-combat pool (ie, skills, attributes or derived rolls like KO resistance) and you get +4 to any combat pools.

This gives the correctly proportioned bonuses to skill rolls and combat rolls. It streamlines the mini game of "wack-a-SA" by making them flat bonuses instead of variables. It means SAs won't be used on every trivial task because players won't want to spend valuable SAs on them; they will save them for when they are most important.

Thumbs up to literally everything here.

The thing regarding SA bonus is btw what i meant when i said this:

While i'm not with Korbel on the "SA give TN decrease" (i said numerous times, i like "SA give exploding dice", although i'm also planning to use d6 instead of d10), i'm not sure that you should automatically assume that, just because that's how TRoS did it, you need to do it too.

Although i could have worded it better.

This mode can only be used in conflicts where you have an SA directly related to that conflict.

This is basically what we concluded in the Attribute/Skill/SA thread, isn't it? If so, i'd definitely include "when no SA firing: exchange rate halved (1 for 1, 1 for 2 in combat)".

And this whole d6 thing is so crazy I don't know what to think.

I know right? I mean, due to my very specific tastes i'm kinda prepared for this, but... i was not prepared for this.

[Agamemnon]

The thing I would least like to see is a permanent link of attribute and skill. Using a different attribute based on the situation of the skill roll is a great mechanic I would be very disappointed to see go.

It is, at least for my tastes, the one big down-side to switching away from the X+Y route.

The core issue appears to be that SAs have too large an effect on Skills compared to Combat Pools. Most of the suggestions have been to modify skills and attributes somehow.

One of three core issues, anyway.
1) SAs overpowering skills.
2) Skills being maxed out at character creation, making those characters relatively shallow for advancement compared to combat-based (or eventually magic-based) characters
3) Ability scores are generally a better investment for skill characters than skills are, which is the opposite of how it should be.

I would prefer to see this problem tackled from the other side; by modifying SAs.

In the floating city game, SAs have been trampling every challenge I throw at them. They seem to fire all the time and there is no drawback to using them. Increasing the Obs to assume players always have an SA firing makes attempting a skill without an SA firing too hard.

I think the best solution to all of the above is to throw out individual SAs and add another way to spend them. It would look something like this:
Any SAs earn't all go into 1 pool, to a max of 25
You can spend 1 SA to boost your effectiveness for the rest of the conflict.
This mode can only be used in conflicts where you have an SA directly related to that conflict.
You get +2 dice to any non-combat pool (ie, skills, attributes or derived rolls like KO resistance) and you get +4 to any combat pools.

This gives the correctly proportioned bonuses to skill rolls and combat rolls. It streamlines the mini game of "wack-a-SA" by making them flat bonuses instead of variables. It means SAs won't be used on every trivial task because players won't want to spend valuable SAs on them; they will save them for when they are most important.

The version of this I championed (and people didn't at all seem pleased by) was to make SA points a pool which people could simply burn for extra dice for the remainder of the conflict at a 1:1 ratio - it didn't seem worth it to make it work at different levels for different kids of conflicts, as players themselves could decide how much they felt the need to gamble on the given roll (to a maximum of +5). SAs naturally become self-regulating and rare.

The rub, of course, is that having the bonus dice because your SAs are firing is fun and one of the more defining features of the game.

From a more mechanical perspective, individual SAs having their own 1-5 trackers

• Directly connects player-involvement in a specific SA to their benefits from it, incentivizing players to stick with their SAs from some time to get benefits from them rather than using them as quest markers and switching them whenever a new plot thread opens up.
• Makes it obvious when an SA is not getting any attention or might need to be replaced because it's not something you're following.
• Helps combat player resource-hoarding tendencies, as you will hit your 5 cap within a couple sessions if you aren't spending them.

And this whole d6 thing is so crazy I don't know what to think.

It changes surprisingly little, on the mechanical side of things.. save that dis/advantage becomes more powerful/useful, TNs don't shift every wound level, and that slow actions are 2d6 instead of a d10 -- which is actually for the best given that the complaint before was that d10s are often the better option tactically.

On a less mechanical note, d6s are easier and cheaper to acquire in bulk easier to store, and we can get custom 'Bastard d6s printed up which I think is incredibly cool.

[dysjunct]

I don't have a lot of really insightful things to say, just my reactions to the conversation as it's evolved over the past few days. In no particular order:

- I would be sad if we lost the ability to combine stat+skill. I understand the drawbacks of players arguing about it, and general vagueries. But it's such a useful way to get a lot of mileage out of a small number of stats and skills.

- I would be neutral to mildly happy if the dice became d6s. It doesn't affect me financially; as a longtime gamer I have dozens or hundreds of both d10s and d6s. But I think d6s are more elegant and have a lower handling time.

- I would be happy if the number of attributes (and skills) went down. Make them broader; use the expertise system to differentiate the special snowflakes as needed.

- I don't think division is a big deal as long as it's in chargen.

- I don't think naked dwarf is an issue and it wasn't really an issue in WFRP. As has been mentioned, the system assumes active and aware opposition. People who are aware, active, and hard to kill are not unrealistic. Maybe the rules should be clearer on that note.

- SAs have always been a problem in the TROSlike family. Which is unfortunate because SAs are what makes the family great. But you can have multiple valid interpretations of the SAs, and end up with radically different games. Primarily around when they fire and how often. They need to be less powerful but more frequent, and above all more strictly delineated as to when they fire. I would not like the approach that the BW family takes, where you have a debrief at the end of the game session and give out hero points. That is great for the BW family but to me the TROSlikes are about firing in the middle of play whether you have hero points or not.

[Agamemnon]

SAs have always been a problem in the TROSlike family. Which is unfortunate because SAs are what makes the family great. But you can have multiple valid interpretations of the SAs, and end up with radically different games. Primarily around when they fire and how often. They need to be less powerful but more frequent, and above all more strictly delineated as to when they fire.

Alternatively, being less frequent but of similar power would also solve the thing. I don't think anyone has a problem with SAs coming up in a climactic moment and being the push that gets you over the edge -- it's when they render every single task an automatic success. Then again, maybe the problem here is simply that the characters in some of these games aren't being pushed hard enough. When the characters are wounded and haggard and their TNs are bumped up, even the +5 dice don't guarantee a victory.

I would not like the approach that the BW family takes, where you have a debrief at the end of the game session and give out hero points. That is great for the BW family but to me the TROSlikes are about firing in the middle of play whether you have hero points or not.

Agreed. I don't mind that approach, but it makes the game into one more explicitly about resource management which isn't quite the same spirit.

[nemedeus]

The version of this I championed (and people didn't at all seem pleased by) was to make SA points a pool which people could simply burn for extra dice for the remainder of the conflict at a 1:1 ratio - it didn't seem worth it to make it work at different levels for different kids of conflicts, as players themselves could decide how much they felt the need to gamble on the given roll (to a maximum of +5). SAs naturally become self-regulating and rare.

I can see this go two ways:

Option A, your variant: with 1 for 1, it makes sense to me that one may burn up to 3 SA points on conflicts.

Option B, 33's variant: with 1 for 2 (1 for 4 in combat), it makes sense to me that you can burn only 1 SA point in a given conflict.

I'll here propose an Option C that i've been pondering on for a while now, and i'm still not entirely sold:

We keep individual SA values, and you do get the value as a bonus, however, to GET the bonus, you must burn a point.
In other words, make them work same as Edge in Shadowrun.
two ways to go about this one too:

Option C.1: you burn 1 point and get a bonus equal to the SA's value NOT INCLUDING the burnt point -> SA range 1 to 5.

Option C.2: burn 1 point, bonus equal to the SA's value INCLUDING the burnt point. -> SA range 1 to 3 (i don't want to say 4 because it ironically would be a quite an ODD number to show up in the game).

As i said, i'm not completely sure on this myself. I'm feeling inclined to option C.2, but overall, i think i like option A most, actually.


And as per usual, i will remark again: SA firing => Exploding Dice. Even more so if we are switching to d6.
It just makes so much sense in my mind, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy and on fire and exploding.

we can get custom 'Bastard d6s printed up which I think is incredibly cool.

That would be Awesome!

[thirtythr33]

This is basically what we concluded in the Attribute/Skill/SA thread, isn't it? If so, i'd definitely include "when no SA firing: exchange rate halved (1 for 1, 1 for 2 in combat)".

The version of this I championed (and people didn't at all seem pleased by) was to make SA points a pool which people could simply burn for extra dice for the remainder of the conflict at a 1:1 ratio - it didn't seem worth it to make it work at different levels for different kids of conflicts, as players themselves could decide how much they felt the need to gamble on the given roll (to a maximum of +5). SAs naturally become self-regulating and rare.

I was initially against this proposition because I think a 1 SA for 1 dice ratio is too low. If it gave you 2-4 dice, I think it is a workable system because the player can then expect to make a profit of SAs by entering into voluntary conflicts. The idea has grown on me and to me is certainly preferable to having fixed attributes for skills.

One of three core issues, anyway.
1) SAs overpowering skills.
2) Skills being maxed out at character creation, making those characters relatively shallow for advancement compared to combat-based (or eventually magic-based) characters
3) Ability scores are generally a better investment for skill characters than skills are, which is the opposite of how it should be.

1) Can be solved any number of ways by changing SAs rather than skills.
2) I don't see how tier 5 skills are any more maxed out than attributes or social class at tier 5. Proficiency is the only one that can't be maxed out, but even that is because it is uncapped and attributes and skills are not. Why is proficiency uncapped anyway?
3) Can be fixed by tweaking how many attribute points or skill points and expertise points you get per tier. Slightly bump down attributes and bump up skills and it won't be economic to become a skill monkey with attributes. Alternately, instead of a fixed 3 expertise, you could get 1 expertise per tier you take in skills.

It changes surprisingly little, on the mechanical side of things.. save that dis/advantage becomes more powerful/useful, TNs don't shift every wound level, and that slow actions are 2d6 instead of a d10 -- which is actually for the best given that the complaint before was that d10s are often the better option tactically.

On a less mechanical note, d6s are easier and cheaper to acquire in bulk easier to store, and we can get custom 'Bastard d6s printed up which I think is incredibly cool.

Going d6 with a wound table with results like NA/NA/BTN5/BTN5/BTN6 combined with DR and AV = BRAWN/2 dead levels and rounding up could end up with some seriously wonky interactions.

Option B, 33's variant: with 1 for 2 (1 for 4 in combat), it makes sense to me that you can burn only 1 SA point in a given conflict.

There's no reason you couldn't also spend SAs on the other things like Grin and Bear it, In the Nick of Time or Yes, But...

[nemedeus]

Option B, 33's variant: with 1 for 2 (1 for 4 in combat), it makes sense to me that you can burn only 1 SA point in a given conflict.

There's no reason you couldn't also spend SAs on the other things like Grin and Bear it, In the Nick of Time or Yes, But...

My bad, i meant you can only gain the bonus 1 time per conflict. As in, the bonus doesn't stack with itself.

On a sidenote, we could give this a name like Grin and Bear it, Not Quite Dead etc., actually. got any ideas? "Determination" or something...

[Agamemnon]

I can see this go two ways:

Option A, your variant: with 1 for 1, it makes sense to me that one may burn up to 3 SA points on conflicts.

Option B, 33's variant: with 1 for 2 (1 for 4 in combat), it makes sense to me that you can burn only 1 SA point in a given conflict.

I'll here propose an Option C that i've been pondering on for a while now, and i'm still not entirely sold:

We keep individual SA values, and you do get the value as a bonus, however, to GET the bonus, you must burn a point.
In other words, make them work same as Edge in Shadowrun.
two ways to go about this one too:

Option C.1: you burn 1 point and get a bonus equal to the SA's value NOT INCLUDING the burnt point -> SA range 1 to 5.

Option C.2: burn 1 point, bonus equal to the SA's value INCLUDING the burnt point. -> SA range 1 to 3 (i don't want to say 4 because it ironically would be a quite an ODD number to show up in the game).

As i said, i'm not completely sure on this myself. I'm feeling inclined to option C.2, but overall, i think i like option A most, actually.


And as per usual, i will remark again: SA firing => Exploding Dice. Even more so if we are switching to d6.
It just makes so much sense in my mind, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy and on fire and exploding.

I was initially against this proposition because I think a 1 SA for 1 dice ratio is too low. If it gave you 2-4 dice, I think it is a workable system because the player can then expect to make a profit of SAs by entering into voluntary conflicts. The idea has grown on me and to me is certainly preferable to having fixed attributes for skills.

The two main issues with the "burn SAs for dice" thing are:
1. Burning SA points to get dice to win conflicts to get SA points seems a bit like a zero sum gain, especially if you wind up spending additional dice in the conflict.
2. It turns the SA thing from a bonus to a kind of resource-management game. The dynamic changes from a "you perform better when following your motivations" to "do stuff to earn meta-currency so you can afford to be awesome later." It was something that was kind of meh in Burning Wheel and even worse in Fate.

2) I don't see how tier 5 skills are any more maxed out than attributes or social class at tier 5. Proficiency is the only one that can't be maxed out, but even that is because it is uncapped and attributes and skills are not.

Attributes vs. Skills is an interesting point of discussion. At first blush, it would seem like there's a parity there, but there really isn't.

Tier 5 in attributes gives you 20 points to spend (+1 free grey dot). Tier 5 in Skills got 31 points to spend (+1 free grey dot).

At this level, Attributes need to be spread out among 8 scores currently, giving you an average score of 3.5 in each (the first dot is free). Maxing out any one attribute at character creation is still a decent expense. Andrev wound up looking like: 5, 3, 5, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4. He has room to grow, if he wanted, but he already fits his concept pretty well. Attributes tend to be pretty static, as a whole, as you're encouraged to buy the character you actually wanted in this way. Attributes tend to be more central to who the character is as a person than their skills are, because skills are something you can learn and change. Mechanically, Attributes are among the most expensive single thing you can purchase with advancement.

Skills, on the other hand, are relatively cheap and easily advanced. While their 3s and 4s you get at character creation seem relatively balanced against the average 3.5 for attributes, there is no set requirement on number of skills you need to have (nor is one really desirable). If I decide my concept is thief, I really need: Athletics, Larceny, Legerdemain, Manipulation, Stealth, and Streetwise. With a Tier 5, I can get Athletics 4, Larceny 6, Manipulation 4, Stealth 5, and Streetwise 3 -- in addition to my 3 free expertises. Out of the gate, this character is at his maximum capacity for what the concept was looking for.

Through play, they are going to keep earning SAs if they are playing properly.. but where will they go? As the thief player, I'm now either required to constantly burn for narrative effects or start broadening my concept to buy additional skills or combat ability just as a points sink.

Of course, if one were gaming the system, the most optimal thing then for a skill character is to go Tier 5 attributes, max out the attributes you are going to use most (probably agility and cunning), and then build my thief on a tier 4 skill setup. Slightly fewer skill points (25 instead of 31) but 5s in agility or cunning are worth way more than 5s in any one or two skills I might take, and the latter are much cheaper after character creation. This is going to be the case any time you make 1 attribute point = 1 skill point on a roll. It will always make attributes more valuable than skills at character creation.

Social class is a whole different issue for two reasons.
1. There's no such thing as being maximum social class. You can always get more. More land, more money, more power. I'd argue that this exact thought is the driving force of much of human history. Even if you start as a greater noble, you can fight your way to being king. Even if you become king, you can try to become an emperor and conquer other countries. The maximum social class is "Conquered the world," which is a far cry from what you can actually purchase at character creation. In addition, the primary benefits of that selection are social and economic, both of which can be gained and lost through play, unlike skills and attributes which don't go backward.
2. You can't upgrade your social class through SA expenditure after character creation regardless, so "maxed out" is irrelevant.

Why is proficiency uncapped anyway?

On another note, is there an upper limit to proficiency? At character creation you can go up to 11, and the number 12 comes to mind for some reason. I ask because the old skill + attribute total dice pool and the new skill dice pool should have the same range as proficiencies. Maybe that's just a desire for consistency. The automatic-successes-if-you-have-more-than-ten-dice rule suggests that the intended maximum dice pool is 10, though.

As written, the current limit for proficiencies is really just established by how many points you can physically put into them at max-SA cap. That said, I'm not as worried about proficiency ranges and skill/attribute ranges falling into line for three reasons.

• Proficiencies aren't really rolled against obs. You can technically use them as a skill check for something related to that proficiency, but it's such a niche use that I'm not worried about it.The reason one would want to put a cap on skills or attributes is that the ob scale becomes meaningless if everyone can run around with 15 Agility and 20 Larceny.
• A corollary to the above, proficiencies are only really interesting in reference to the proficiencies of the other characters, and the mechanics of combat are such that you're splitting your dice anyway.
• You can only kill someone so dead. At a certain point, there are diminishing returns. Yes, you could theoretically get to Prof 36 in Longsword, but even if we assumed you maxed it out at character creation (11 with a priority A), you've spent a staggering 611 SA points to do so. At a rate of 3-4 SA points earned per session, that's 174 sessions worth. Even played weekly, you've spent two years doing nothing but making this character a better longswordsman -- and now? Uh. They can .. fight three people at the same time comfortably, I guess.

One could set an arbitrary cap in there somewhere, but I'm not sure it's strictly necessary.

Going d6 with a wound table with results like NA/NA/BTN5/BTN5/BTN6 combined with DR and AV = BRAWN/2 dead levels and rounding up could end up with some seriously wonky interactions.

1. Impact still happens on every wound level, just as before. You're just ticking boxes slightly less often.
2. Mathematically, if DR/AV mods were Brawn/2 then it would be mathematically identical to what we're doing now, as Brawn only exists if we're doing a 1-10 scale of attributes. If things are rolled in pairs then we have to keep both strength and stamina in order to roll strength in the first place (which seems more silly every time I say it). If it were Brawn/3, then the effect would be even less of an issue. This is an issue that is completely independent of whether we are operating on a d6 or a d10, as is any issue of dead levels.

[dra]

I'm not a fan of that approach at all. The numbers have an inherent meaning, even in proficiency scores. 1-4 is someone dabbling in the thing. 5-6 is a competent amateur. 7-8 are professionals and trained military. 9+ is going into Truly exceptional characters.

Players should be able to guess what someone's proficiency level is by what they know about a character. If I have Prof 11 from character creation, I should know for a fact that I'll have a higher raw proficiency than 95% of people I will encounter in the game. It is by design that players can start off as more skilled and exceptional in their chosen path than the majority of the game world they will encounter.

Well, we're exactly at the same page. I like PCs to be highly valued proffesionals in their field. "95% of the people" still leaves some room for that bloke in the end (doesn't have to be human at all) that makes them sweat. And you don't want to kill them by making him (it?) too powerfull to overcome.

Than again. Why would players be in life-death conflict with 95% of population?

The GM should be setting the stats of NPCs in accordance with the fictional reality of those NPCs, not to compete with the players. Same goes for Obstacles.

Agreed.
At the same time, I think challanges for the players should become bigger and bigger as they become more influential, powerfull, equipped within the game world.
If they discover a political plot and smite mook running it, they will only find out, that this thing reach wider circles that they thought. Once they reach those wider circles, they will find out about unnatural influence behind the scenes... once they start uncovering that...

I think mass effect 1 would be an ideal representation what I am talking about. You start as some tough soldier becoming a glorified police cop. Your first task - to find Saren. And than you discover , that Saren is just a tool really of much bigger and more powerfull entities that are way deadlier than himself.

This is not a game about overcoming challenges. It's a game about making hard choices and taking risks. Those choices and risks lose much of their meaning if they can't rely on the fiction as a source of information about how dangerous that risk could be.

I see it no reason for them not to know

That's not to say there shouldn't be challenges, but there are more interesting ways to challenge a player than "how hard is it to take this guy in a fight?"

They are indeed.
Than again, why play tros/bob if you do not want to use those great combat rules

[Korbel]

The rules as written now don't pretend to cover every combination of attributes you might need, we just have the ones codified that you will most likely need.

Multiplying Ax2+B eight times seems like a mess to go through in order to avoid division. I'd have to think on the dice bloat issue. The higher the ob range is the more arbitrary the choice becomes on any one ob you call and it completely breaks relatively elegant systems like surgery using the wound's level as an ob.

Encountering a new combination of Attributes would be rare, it's kinda hard for me think of any... Did you use any other combinations in your playtesting?
If this is really rare, it's not an issue.

Come on, 2A+B is only slightly more complicated than A+B. At character creation there is already some math involved.

Dice bloat? The "dice over 10 grant automatic successes" rule will be more used. It is fun.

Obs... I imagine I would use 8 steps of difficulty (1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15).

Breaking the surgery rules is bad. Another hydra's head to deal with.

[thirtythr33]

The two main issues with the "burn SAs for dice" thing are:
1. Burning SA points to get dice to win conflicts to get SA points seems a bit like a zero sum gain, especially if you wind up spending additional dice in the conflict.
2. It turns the SA thing from a bonus to a kind of resource-management game. The dynamic changes from a "you perform better when following your motivations" to "do stuff to earn meta-currency so you can afford to be awesome later." It was something that was kind of meh in Burning Wheel and even worse in Fate.

1. This is why you have to get more dice per SA. If you enter a conflict you get 1 SA, and if you win you get 2. That's 1.5 or more on average, per conflict. To turn a profit, you then need to spend ~1 SA on average to win a conflict you could have otherwise avoided to make it worth while to enter. 1 dice for 1 SA just isn't enough for that. If you are getting 4 dice per SA, you can reasonable expect to earn SAs and it isn't zero sum. It is a positive feedback loop, with the excess siphoning off to character advancement.
2. If you want to retain the "perform better for following motivations" you can just scrap the SA cost. Just simplify SAs to be so they fire for a constant 2 for skills and a constant 4 for combat, instead of the variable 1-5. It's simpler and has the same feeling. The only problem then is putting some tighter restrictions on when SAs can fire. SAs firing all the time becomes routine. Ideally, I would want SAs to fire 30-50% of the time. To quote myself from the other thread:

As it stands now, it is very murkey where to apply the SA and where not. But it could be made explicit and simple, using the systems you already have in place:

A Story Aspect will fire only if there is something at Stake in the Conflict that relates to that Story Aspect. If a player invokes an SA and fails, any complications introduced will be related to that Story Aspect.

By linking it directly to the Stakes instead of the wishy-washy "directly further, uphold or defend" it makes it more firm. If it doesn't hurt losing, it doesn't fire. So instead of looking at the SAs as "does accomplishing this get me closer to my goal?" we look at it as "does FAILING this make it HARDER for me to accomplish my goal?". So now we see that if I have the SA "For Love of Gwen" and I am locked up in jail and the Stakes are "do I bust out without being seen?", then the SA doesn't fire because the Stakes have nothing to do with Gwen. If I am locked up and the Stakes are "do I bust out before the bandits take Gwen to another city?" then yes, the SA fires. If you fail with the SA "For Love of Gwen" firing, a complication involving that SA should be introduced... When you get to the rendezvous, Gwen is nowhere to be found. You could then even leave it up to the player to decide whether or not they want to turn on their SAs, since it is now a hard choice to make whether they want to risk those shitty complications for some bonus dice. The idea would be to make SAs firing less often and more important when they do.

[Korbel]

A Story Aspect will fire only if there is something at Stake in the Conflict that relates to that Story Aspect. If a player invokes an SA and fails, any complications introduced will be related to that Story Aspect.

I've probably said this before, but... This is a very nice approach.

[Marras]

I think I am in the minority when I don't shed many tears for X+Y. Personally I would have ditched even the starting level for skills based on an attribute. Having just a skill to worry about works wonderfully in general and I don't see why it wouldn't in BoB. In this case the skill represents the knowledge, actual performance but also possible financial trivia about it. I don't see the need to add an attribute to the roll. The current rule works but I think this one is an improvement. Besides even if the skill is based on a single attribute it is just a starting point and that's the end of the link. No reason to think about it during a gameplay only during character generation.

I would go even as far as remove attributes except for "derived attributes" that would be bought using points. Instead of attributes everyone is by definition average but edges/flaws (with ratings?) would tell how strong your character is, how smart he is etc. if that differs from average. The down side of this is how to do attribute checks but I think most often a skill check can be substituted with edge/flaw being a modifier. This would also remove the problem of "dead levels" that divisions can cause.

I really don't have an opinion about the die type. I suppose I have enough of both type to not complain Still, d10 gives a bit smoother grade for TNs.

As for using or not using dots on a character sheet. I created a character sheet for Cyberpunk 2020 quite a while ago. I just made two sets of 5 dots for skills and it is quite easy to read, even for skill rating of 8.