About Focus, Morale and Honing Skills
Consider building a gattling gun, Fallout lore.
Let’s roleplay a bit here - building an ultimate weapon, supreme in every way yet unobtainable should require a saintly ammount of belief in one’s abilities, hence the morale systems stepping up. Deploying sophisticated electronic components, utilizing cutting-edge power sources / modulators / distributors whilst experimenting with, already scarce, new-age materials is undoubtedly a task requiring monumental focus. The sheer drive, the ever-growing desire for building and maintaining weapons is simply a must, so there should be no doubt about knowledge level needed. Therefore, this sort of character should have house flies with mounted microlasers, and an AA gun stashed in the backyard, below the shed.
Now, for modifying this (CataDDA) system – you should invite some sort of experience rating. However, this modification is widely accepted, acknowledged and put to a test for as many times as you can imagine and, unfortunately, there are no “great unknowns” about it. As the matter of fact, it only recognizes morale modifiiers that directly affect primary character abilities, so it deals with far ends of the scale (“depressed”, “elated”). It cares very little for concepts such as focus, skill rust, even recipes.
The experience system dwells on two main principles:
- it goes to show just how much the character has “grown” into the fantasy setting, therefore adventuring;
- it’s a pointer for accomplished class-driven characters, and their roles in chosen organizations or governments.
Now, let’s reconsider that gattling gun.
Being that CataDDA is based upon skill improvement and streamlined progression through survival, there should be a hat and a cap to suffice. If this was true, the game would acquire yet another piece of the realism puzzle. If an ordinary character was to obtain a blueprint for a prototype-gattling-gun, he’d fail to make any sense of it. However, this sort of possesion would be a prized one, only to a party whom it concerns. Therefore, our character would face a true end-tier item piece that actually is a challenge to follow, or trade for something of equal value (to his/her character build).
If the “hat” was at 10/99, meeting all the requirements in order to begin with such a grand-scale project should be considered an eleven (11). I’m not gonna dork the night away with details, because it considers skill expertise. The prototype weapon is only built after successfuly creating all the components after a series of testing and upgrades made to advanced pieces of weaponry and tools. Once the last piece of the puzzle is there and the gattling gun is unveiled, the skill clock shows midnight (12) – and the character has mastered the skill.
Or, we could have it vanilla. Let’s gather the i(ce)deas before the icecream melts. 
Maybe I’ll find my old post and read what I said back then. It has been quite a while.