Just involved in an interesting conversation with <urbanfrog2002> on the dragwars message board, where he makes the following interesting point on learning new skills:

“I love it that to gain a particular ability etc often a character will need to find a teacher. So much more sense than mystic raises a rank and gets new powers – what do they come in his.her sleep…needing to find a teacher adds essential narrative drivers to engage the roleplay essence of the game. With this approach your assassin who ended up in albion might never develop his other trance techniques without finding another assassin to teach them…one can blend characters to…a knight who learns the smoke jar technique from a rogue assassin…endless possibilities ala savage world style…”

He was referring in particular to Wayne Imlach’s take on skills in Dragon Warriors, a document that I’d seen before but hadn’t really given much thought to. Time to change that.

Earlier I had posted the following regarding helping the players to choose their skills and edges:

“One possible approach, given the inexperience of the group, will be to leave the upgrades open on level-up and to start with at least, let the players choose Skills and Edges as the situations arise so that they’re choosing things that they’ll actually use.”

Actually, I think something like that is actually suggested somewhere in the rulebooks.