DW, being a "class" based system, does not easily permit skills and abilities fom one profession to be learnt by the member of another. Sometimes this makes sense but other times it really would be good to be able to differentiate the career of a character a little more by allowing them to pick up abilities from other professions, and there doesn't seem to be any reason why this should be allowed, apart from the mechanics.

I had a thought about how this might be made to work in some cases, however, and it all comes to sacrificing experience points. I haven't thought it out in great detail yet, but here goes, using use a knight learning alchemy as my example.

A player declares that he wants his knight to begin learning alchemy (in a plausible way, for instance from a sorcerer in the party). Whenever the character accrues experience points, he has the option to assign them not to the normal xp stockpile but to the alchemy score instead. This accumulates and in the same way as regular rank it improves at specific intervals. The points at which the skill "ranks up" should be set at some fraction of the normal rank escalation, say 20%, with a 'buy in' to allow rank 1.

Our knight, for instance, needs 6xp (20% of 30) to get to rank 1, then 6xp more to get to alchemy rank 2, 12xp to get to alchemy rank 3, and so on until 40xp are accrued, bringing alchemy rank 6, sufficient to brew the most basic potions.

Although this only works for certain skills and abilities, I can't see any obvious issues with it. Needless to say, I haven't actually tested this idea in any concrete way. Perhaps this is an old idea and I just haven't heard of it before. Thoughts?

It was fast to start a game in dragwars. I remember the number of times we wasted time creating characters in Palladium system. I think sometimes we had just the one session creating characters, maybe 1 hour of gameplay before we went home.