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What's Your "Sweet Spot" for a Skill system?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9204035" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Oh that's a good point as well. When I outlined my main considerations for a skill system one of them was that I wanted the system to be "space spanning" - which I defined as you did as "whatever the players attempt should have some sort of skill that covers it". But merely being discrete, space spanning, and independent isn't enough to make a skill system good and precisely one of the ways that space spanning can go wrong is if the slice of the skill space were highly inequitable so that a skill that covers a vast range of common tasks is weighted the same as a skill that covers only a rare and narrow specialty. I can think of examples of that in so many published rules sets, and it's a horrible bit of dysfunctionality that just becomes a trap.</p><p></p><p>A good example would be "photography" in the Call of Cthulhu game whose use almost would never come up in any game and yet the rules treat it as if it were a skill of equal rank to everything else - even making it a common professional skill. And of course there are a lot of other examples in BRP as well. GURPS - a system whose skill design I have mocked elsewhere - is filled with that sort of crap. It shows up in the WEG Star Wars system as the fact that every single thing you might want to fix has its own separate repair skill. It even shows up in "skillless" systems like 1e AD&D in the form of things like a dwarf's percentage chance of detecting sloping passages taking up space on a character sheet but basically doing nothing.</p><p></p><p>So yeah, ideally when you start cutting up the space of tasks into separate skills that cover those tasks you try to make all the pieces of the skill pie somewhat equal.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 9204035, member: 4937"] Oh that's a good point as well. When I outlined my main considerations for a skill system one of them was that I wanted the system to be "space spanning" - which I defined as you did as "whatever the players attempt should have some sort of skill that covers it". But merely being discrete, space spanning, and independent isn't enough to make a skill system good and precisely one of the ways that space spanning can go wrong is if the slice of the skill space were highly inequitable so that a skill that covers a vast range of common tasks is weighted the same as a skill that covers only a rare and narrow specialty. I can think of examples of that in so many published rules sets, and it's a horrible bit of dysfunctionality that just becomes a trap. A good example would be "photography" in the Call of Cthulhu game whose use almost would never come up in any game and yet the rules treat it as if it were a skill of equal rank to everything else - even making it a common professional skill. And of course there are a lot of other examples in BRP as well. GURPS - a system whose skill design I have mocked elsewhere - is filled with that sort of crap. It shows up in the WEG Star Wars system as the fact that every single thing you might want to fix has its own separate repair skill. It even shows up in "skillless" systems like 1e AD&D in the form of things like a dwarf's percentage chance of detecting sloping passages taking up space on a character sheet but basically doing nothing. So yeah, ideally when you start cutting up the space of tasks into separate skills that cover those tasks you try to make all the pieces of the skill pie somewhat equal. [/QUOTE]
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