Offline
Greetings!
This is just food for thought, at first, but what do you think about the relevance of the combat skills in settings where they are not so relevant?
Let's say you want an investigative game, but not a pulp one. Like X-Files... Would BoL be a good choice for this? I'd say YES, but the Combat Skills become less important.
So, what do you think it should be done? Remove them? Change them for partial bonus based on Careers? Keep them and simply ignore them?
Brainstorming here, people. No matter how ridiculous the idea sounds, I think we should cover all fronts.
Online!
Well, keeping the combat skills as they are has no detrimental effect on Careers. If you really want to push things away from combat then perhaps allow 6 instead of 4 points to be spent on Careers. I still think that the Combat abilities should be retained - they may not be as important in an investigative game but they still might be needed on occasion. Once the characters have been created it's up to the players how they spend their Advancement Points - that alone should skew things the direction you want.
Offline
Maybe reducing the amount of points a player could spend to 2, and raise the Careers' points to 6 could handle this... :-/
Offline
I'm with The Git on this one.
Marcelo, you used the example of the X Files, but in that the 'PCs' were very combat capable. In the real world FBI agents would be trained in unarmed combat and pistol shooting, as well as other firearms skills. Agents would be required to practice their pistol skill on a regular basis. The characters in the X Files were also combat capable, so I wouldn't downgrade any PCs combat skills.
Adding extra points for Careers, or adding Boons would be the way to go (rather than loosing points from combat abilities) if you think that that is necessary.
Offline
Interesting... So we can consider the 4 Combat Abilities' points as a "hero-level default" for the setting. I like it.