I have seen people use house rules where some skills cost more than other skills. A house rule that I have seen over at the Ronin Army (the new forum for Green Ronin that replaces the Atomic Think Tank) is that all skills cost 1/3, but Close Combat and Ranged Combat still cost 1/2.
Getting it to 1/3 is the easy part. You go to the Configure Hero and select that. Easy.
But setting Close Combat and Ranged Combat are also easy to do.
My house rules are the only rules to be used, so what I did was I made copies of those two skills and then I did "Replace ID" for their originals. If you do this, DO NOT give them a source, so that they will always replace it and not make a mess of things when you want to load pre-made characters (as they might not have your special source checked).
You can put it in the same Eval script that is already in those skills, but I made an additional eval script for each.
Traits Calculation, 15000
Code:
~This makes Close Combat cost 1/2 regardless of other skill cost
this.field[PPCost].value = 0.5 * this.field[TotalPerm].value
Note that I
did not use +=. In my case I wanted to replace them with 1/2 cost. This way they will
always be 1/2. regardless of the Configure Hero choice.
I just wanted to share this as I think that I am one of the few people that makes rules mods for Hero Lab for Mutants and Masterminds.