Road's Scholar

Something I've always disliked in role-playing games is that there was no way to advance other aspects of your character beyond the established rules for advancement. If I wanted my warrior to be a history buff, I had to waste valuable experience or skill points on his knowledge skill rather than putting them towards something more appropriate to his role in the party. To remedy this I have included mechanics in Renaissance to allow for characters to learn skills without having to obtain them with xp. That sounds foolish, but let me explain.

Off hand I don't recall where in the rules it appears but I wanted a way to represent learning new skills from simple study and training rather than being forced to go adventuring in order to better yourself. After all, it doesn't make sense for a blacksmith to only advance his blacksmithing skills by dungeon delving, nor for a scholar to do so for his K: Mathemathics.

I toyed for a while with trying to represent the amount of experience a given day would be worth, but found that left the gate wide open for characters to NEVER go adventuring and just spend their days soaking up xp and then spontaneously mastering a variety of combat skills. So, I devised a means by which characters gain an easily calculable percentage of the governing attribute in the skill they spend learning each day. Characters who are more naturally gifted in a given attribute learn the skills associated with that attribute faster. For example, a character with a high Str score is going to be able to learn climbing, blacksmithing and a variety of weapon skills more quickly than someone with a low Str score. Likewise, a character with a high Int will be able to advance their Knowledge skills more quickly than someone of weaker intellect.

In my own games I like to allow players to use this rule to advance skills of their choice while traveling. Each day of the journey, assuming they are able to travel at a leisurely pace, I allow them to specify a single skill that they are working on during their breaks or in the evening and gain skill in it according to the governing attribute. Some players use this to further advance their combat skills but I've found that for the most part they use this opportunity to advance non-combat skills in order to flesh out their character's uniqueness. I've had warriors learn performance skills, wizards take up leatherworking and rogues take up an interest in history - along with other more role-normal skills.

There's still room with this system of learning for players to attempt to abuse it and spend their days in down time learning combat skills and powerful combat spells. However, it is more efficient and rewarding for them to go do something and get xp and treasure and use that xp to raise their combat skills etc. Because it is more efficient for them to go work for their xp I only really see players taking downtime to bone up on their combat skills when they have come into a large amount of wealth and can afford to sit on their laurels for a while. And as the GM, if you don't want them doing so, you can always throw adventure hooks at them in the form of thieves who've noticed the vast wealth the characters possess!