Not sure if this has been addressed but why are attributes cheaper than skills to increase?
As we know attributes increase all the skills under it which is pretty good going for 100 x new rating.
I presume until they diverge, expertise & focus are the same?
Not at my book but yea skills are pretty expensive.
Once you have gotten the selected talents you want and capped your attributes the only thing left is expertise and focus. Arguably if you have a good attribute and expertise already focus could be the more important of your skills. Never missing could be nice but I like the bonus momentum for rolling under your focus.
200 xp for new skill rating in expertise or focus. Going from 4 to 5 melee focus would be 1000 XP!
100 xp for attributes up to new rating. Going up to 10 str would be 1000xp!
That’s at least 10 four hour sessions of play unless you get some extra xp.
Edit auto correct evils
Attributes are X100 xp, from current level. So If someone wants to raise its Brawn from 8 to 10 it would be 900 xp to get Brawn to 9 and an additional 1000 xp to get it to 10 for a grand total of 1900 xp.
Thanks for your response Mogge! I know the xp costs involved, what i,m asking is why attributes cost less than expertise & focus given that attributes put up all skills under it. Perhaps those costs should be reversed? If i,m missing something then please enlighten me!
Thanks
I haven’t run a long campaign, and have yet to see these design principles in action, but this is how I “square” the imbalance you see here:
An average Attribute score is much, much higher than any one character Skill or Expertise. I know everyone knows this, but, for the sake of argument, let’s say that you’re advancing an Attribute, on the low end, from 7 to 8. It would cost 800 xp, then an additional 900 xp to go on from there, etc.
Now let’s say you want to increase a (relatively) high skill from 3 to 4 - 800 xp. Sure, 4 to 5 then costs 1000, but you could instead raise the Focus. In my view, you can “focus” on preferred Skills quite a bit more quickly and advance them to formidable levels—especially after, once the cost rises too high, you start building your Focus along similar lines.
Finally, if you still consider this an imbalance, remember that Attributes cap at 14. Skills (as far as I know) do not. In a long campaign, I suppose you could slowly raise all Attributes to 14 and only after this resort to raising individual Skills.
You also have to take into account that the higher the expertise a skill has, the less the associated talent cost. If you have 1 expertise in Melee, then to obtain No Mercy would be 175xp, but if you have 5 expertise, then No Mercy would cost only 75 XP. There is your saving in experience.
As for focus, 1 rank gives you only a %5 chance for a Critical Success for double momentum where 5 ranks gives you 25% for the double momentum.
It makes sense for the attributes & skills to be more expensive than talents - they are in the root of every roll and provide the major boost - better target number (TN) and focus. And those effects apply on every roll.
Talents on the other side are not like that - many are situational and if some apply in many cases like the Riposte (I think this was the name 
) you have to make a roll to get the benefit. Therefore the way the designers organized the XP costs is great. You can go with various approaches in character build and progression.
Search ‘Long Term Campaign’, some good advice there.