When Good is Grand..

The how good is good thread posed a side question for me, that is: when skills exceed level 6 having a single specialization feels limiting. Should multi specialization be allowed?

Eg. A master armor crafter who already has focused on Mail, might be able to continue to add focus to Scale?

Or is this too munchin, or too open to abuse for skills like Parma?

I think older editions even had new specializations as twilight effects?

Cheers
IBT

Specialisations are a topic that is pretty murky. I don't think there shoulkd be multiple specialisations because specialisations are free.

There should be some rules to change specialisations though.

But I think specialisations should be changeable each time someone gets a new level (or each time someone gets xp that do not come from exposure).

Multiple specialiations doesn't work... after all, you're not really specialized if you're focused on multiple things.

This is what we do in my saga's and it works fine. To use the original poster's example, a master armorer who was focused on mail improves his skill and becomes focused on scale.

Same here. We force the character to take some effort to change specialty, though. If you have an astronomy specialization in artes liberales you are not going to get a change to Trivium unless you actively pursue Trivium studies when earning XP in that field.

On the one hand, i barely use specialisations, on the other hand i would like to have the option for multiple ones...
And the result of that wish is mostly a lot of attempts to draw up rules for it that simply dont work well at all.

IIRC, the most interesting i could come up with was allowing characters to spend 5 XP(possibly requiring a Minor Virtue as well, i´ve forgotten) to get an additional Ability at Score 0 that only covers a specialisation. It works at least halfway to decent, but it´s still open to some abuse if SG isnt careful. If used for a super useful specialisation it can increase the final score far too much, at the same time, most are not quite that good so it becomes a hard choice wether to increase the parent skill or a specialisation, and like that, it´s a fairly good option.

Another workable variation was that you could spend XP like in an Ability to add more specialisations like the usual ones to an Ability. So if you placed 15XP you could get an extra specialisation or two, depending on how you count the original one or not. This one is almost impossible to really abuse and still useful so it´s probably the best one overall.

I think this works well as a HR.

I would add that the player should give an in-game justification as to why the new specialisation was appropriate. This would usually be related to the source of some of the XP received since the last level, or what the character had been doing with the Ability recently, or possibly what other Abilities or Arts have increased recently. For example, if the character has recently increased his Craft: Swordsmith Ability, it would fine, I think, when his Area Lore Ability increases to change the Area Lore specialisation to swordsmiths.

It's not a big deal, so I wouldn't be too picky as to precisely what the justification was --- just has to be a bit plausible.