The setting has many NPCs with tons of Refresh and skill points, but it doesn't have many with sky-high skill caps. Usually an NPC with a huge pile of skill points has a whole lot of skills at Fair or Good.
Indeed. Now, my main motivation to extend the power levels scale up to doubling its reach is to provide a serious boost to the refresh points pool if wished, since too little of that constraints character creation too severely for my tastes. There are far too many valid and interesting character concepts, including the one being discussed in this very thread, that simply can't be done effectively or at all with 10 refresh. Expanding the skill points pool by a comparable amount is a nice secondary benefit that should be done to some important degree to keep things balanced between powers and skills, since they are often supposed to be complementary. In comparison, exceedingly high skill caps aren't anywhere that important or useful for my tastes, although I think an extension to unlock Fantastic may be appropriate past a certain point.
You're going by what's in the New Power Levels thread, right? If you are, and you want to stay faithful-ish to the novels, I would recommend raising the skill floor to Average instead of raising the skill cap to Epic. Maybe also reduce the skill point count a bit, since a higher floor is effectively a huge number of free points.
Indeed I'm going to use the scale in the New Power Level thread, with a few minor tweaks, such as changing a few names and extending it just a bit past 20 Refresh. I have no problem with limiting the raise of the skill cap to Fantastic even for the highest levels of the scale. However at first glance I'd rather keep the skill points pool at 70 for the highest levels rather than raising the skill floor to Average b/c it seems to me the latter would worsen one of the problems of the skill pyramid system. I loathe narrow ability niches and specializations, especially if the game system tries to make them any mandatory, and I'm usually sympathetic to generalist and hybrid-archetype character concepts to some serious degree, but everything has limits.
I really dislike how past a point the pyramid system may force you at high power levels to sink points into skills that are alien and contrary to the character concept, useless even as possible backups, and/or a distraction. If the character has been optimized in terms of powers and skills for magical and unarmed combat (already giving them a backup method), there is no point at all to make them any proficient in guns or melee weapons just to keep the base of the pyramid large enough. If the concept includes the character being horrible with technology, driving, or the fine arts, one should not be forced to put points in the associated skills for the same reason. Since I'm always in favor of high-powered playstyle regardless of game system, I'm usually enthusiastically supportive of free points regardless of reason, and nothing stops me from combining the two approaches but the above issue makes me a little hesitant to embrace the raised skill floor idea. I need to think more about it, and the skill pyramid system is an headache and half to puzzle out and manage as it stands.
