Too many skills...

[Maouse]

Ah, well if that is the case, I'd have to totally disagree.  If you have
the points and buy the skill you should get the same benefit that someone
who was not trained in ANOTHER carreer skill gets.  You went into the
forest, chopped down a few trees (axe of 2), spoke elf and faerry, and
learned how to shoot a bow and survive off the woods (all percentages
rolled of course).  An assassin learns how to kill people, why should this
be limited because he learned forestry first?  And if an assassin went
under cover in the woods (or grew up in the woods, or any number of other
explainations) and learned forestry skills, would he have just learned how
to shoot a bow? nope, don't think so.  He'd have learned the same thing
other foresters were learning...  It's like saying that since I'm a PC
technician, I can become a programmer, but I won't/can't learn all the
languages that other programmers learn... um, no, a degree still requires
the same things as it did before.

Alternately, you could NEED to spend bookoo points on bow to get to max EL
because you rolled less than the 40%.  That is to say that, sure you went
out with dad in the woods and learned how to survive & track, and you may
or may not have met an elf or faerry, and you may have even chopped down a
tree or two.  Unfortunately dear old dad doesn't carry a gun.  He never
taught you how to shoot one.  What the book is implying is that 40% of all
medival dads had guns (ie. bows) and taught the skill to their kids.  The
unfortunate MAJORITY of kids who's dad's couldn't afford or did not like
guns would have to go learn it elsewhere.  I don't think this system is
unreasonable... you perhaps have a group of adventurers who went out into
the woods together in their early days and shot squirrels...

-Marcel aka maouse

ps. the same applies to other subskills as well...