I actually missed that it was resetting every round, and assumed it was permanent. I agree that having it hard to change is better.

I had made it changeable based on the comments in A Very Particular Set of Skills, but looking back I see it was just SingularByte that asked for that, and probably only because it wasn’t clear how the Skills and Flaws were going to work at the time.

I don’t view it as useful to make it so expensive to change skills. It’ll essentially mean that only a few people a round can swap, which means there’s going to be little point in adding new subsystems that sit on top of new skills. They’ll either be unused due to the cost, or overpowered to make up for it (especially when counterplay will likely involve new skills too which will again be expensive to swap to), and so it’ll be unlikely to be voted for.

Maybe once we have a variety of skills then it’ll be more palatable, but it’s too early to lock things down right now.

The main reason it’s desirable for changing skills to be expensive is so that players don’t just take the best short-term option every time. In particular, some skills are likely to be better for Guards and some better for Burglars, and if you can switch for free it means that you can always pick the skill that’s best for whichever side you’re on at the time.

re SingularByte: I do think that actually doing preparation actions is a bit hard right now, but we can always rework that

I think a difficult decision (“I could take a Skill now for free and start using it, or stay Skill-less and use my free pick later”) is more interesting than an easy one (“I can just pick anything, maybe another player will tell me what to pick”), and it’s a good thing if the proposal play on new Skills and effects is partly guided by the decisions people have already made.

If you think taking an early Skill would be a suboptimal choice, don’t take it and leave your opponents to.

I’d missed that the first skill was free. CoV