D&D 5E Skills in 5e

[sheadunne]

The reason so many other systems include attacks in their skill system is because it makes sense. Once you have a unified resolution mechanic, such as d20 + modifiers, not having a unified representation of skill is absurd. Having attacks be a separate mechanic only serves to add unnecessary complexity.

It's not the end of the world, of course, but it still annoys me.

It annoys a lot of people and why people think D&D is all about combat. And maybe it is. Skills used to be separate actions or reserved for individual classes (thief). I think it made more sense back then. NWP in 2nd edition started the ball rolling toward the 3e skill system which just made the entire thing look a little more ridiculous.

5e could certainly go back to the older system which had more of a subsystem for skills (ie they weren't really skills but things to do) or we can try and figure out how to make it work beside the combat system and spell system. One methods was the 4e system and that works for 4e, but it doesn't rub everyone the right way and I think it might look a little funny next to what we've seen in 5e.

I don't know what it should look like, but it's important enough to me that I don't want them to mess it up.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

At least for my part, I'm not saying that gonzo spells & combat combined with gritty skills must be a problem. But I agree with sheadunne that it means that skills will tend to get crowded out or overshadowed over time. Whether or not that's a problem is a matter of taste, but as I've said I don't personally understand the aesthetic of gonzo combat and spells + gritty skills. I don't see what it adds in terms of verisimilitude, fantasy tropes, ease of play, immersion, or any of the other standard aesthetic criteria for fantasy RPG.

As usual Pemerton makes the most cogent observation. I expressed it in terms of consistent rules, but he's brought it back down to the issue at heart in the NARRATIVE. Why should the mighty wizard who can cast Demogorgon into the pit and seal him there for 1000 years with a single spell not be able to trivially pass a lock made by a peasant? Would such a lock have stopped Gandalf? No, he says a Word of Power, the foundational magic, and the lock is open. Only when he faces something like the ancient magic of Celebrimbor himself at the Hollin Gate of Moria is his power thwarted.

 

[sheadunne]

As usual Pemerton makes the most cogent observation. I expressed it in terms of consistent rules, but he's brought it back down to the issue at heart in the NARRATIVE. Why should the mighty wizard who can cast Demogorgon into the pit and seal him there for 1000 years with a single spell not be able to trivially pass a lock made by a peasant? Would such a lock have stopped Gandalf? No, he says a Word of Power, the foundational magic, and the lock is open. Only when he faces something like the ancient magic of Celebrimbor himself at the Hollin Gate of Moria is his power thwarted.

There isn't any reason, unless you think combat and spells, etc, should be scaled back, which many people do. It's all about finding a balance at this point. If the core of 5e (or for some reason basic as people are calling it) has a very simple combat, spell, and skill mechanic that balances the three, but then allows for a blossoming of options to take it from 1e to 4e, I'm fine with that. I think though, that the only way to do that is to either make skills more robust or ton down the other parts.
[MENTION=85555]Bedrockgames[/MENTION] got me thinking about NWP and how they're in many ways separate from the other types of actions that became skills in 3e onward, in much the same way that the thief abilities became skills. Maybe this direction is an option. An issue with 3e for instance, is that there are a few skills that are of far more importance than all the rest most of the time. Craft usually does not equal spot. Should they both be skills? Maybe the balance isn't in the mechanics themselves, but simply in the organization of what belongs in skills and what belongs as its own separate rules. If bend bars, lifting, etc, belong under strength, then why not climb? I don't know. But for some reason, I really want to take ranks in the cooking skill and other mundane skills and not feel like I'm making a bad choice.

This doesn't handle the issue of high level play, but I haven't given up hope that there's a way.

 

[Bedrockgames]

As usual Pemerton makes the most cogent observation. I expressed it in terms of consistent rules, but he's brought it back down to the issue at heart in the NARRATIVE. Why should the mighty wizard who can cast Demogorgon into the pit and seal him there for 1000 years with a single spell not be able to trivially pass a lock made by a peasant? Would such a lock have stopped Gandalf? No, he says a Word of Power, the foundational magic, and the lock is open. Only when he faces something like the ancient magic of Celebrimbor himself at the Hollin Gate of Moria is his power thwarted.

Because not everyone views the game through the lens of narrative or fiction. Some people very much want there to be a way to chart gandalf's lock opening ability seperately from his ability to perform other feats. They want a clear dilineation of what each character can and cannot do. Maybe gandalf doesnt have any magic to open locks, and maybe he doesnt have any mundane talent for picking locks. If that is the case, then he shouldnt be able to brush aside a simple lock simpy because he is gandalf. If the magic that gandalf has enables him to do so, that is fine, but he shouldnt be able to do it just because he can also go toe to toe with a balrog or puff himself up and scare a hobbit.

 

[pemerton]

for me the reason to ground skills in something grittier is because they are pretty mundane things: climbing walls, crafting goods, recalling historical information, etc. for me, this helps ground things in a believable setting. I guess i just find it important for certain parts of the game to feel like they are touching something real.

I don't think "feeling like they are touching something real" is a touchstone in this conversation, because I haven't seen anyone say that they don't want parts (if not all) of the game to feel like they are touching something real.

is a wizard slashing with a knife really that gonzo?

At 20th level, the wizard has +10 to hit, and with a +2 dagger does 3 to 6 points on a hit. In AD&D, 3E or 4e that is a virtually guaranteed hit and kill against any commoner. In the meantime, the wizard has (in AD&D) probably around 40 to 50 hp, and in 3E or 4e around 90 to 100. It's a commoner blood bath. I personally find it hard to imagine someone capable of exerting that much physical prowess in combat, but unable to do a running jump over a 10' chasm.

The notion that you espouse in your post, is why have a gritty skill system and super-heroic combat. This is how D&D is mixed, this is the natural state of D&D from the beginning.

What do you mean, from the beginning? There is nothing in B/X or 1st ed AD&D to suggest that high level fighters aren't able to jump over 10' chasms. Nor that they are able to. This was left to individual groups to adjudicate.

2nd ed AD&D has hints at gonzo/gritty (via the NWP system), but it is really 3E that codifies it. And 4e departed from it.

 

[pemerton]

never I said that non-combat tasks should be gritty for everyone, only that I like them to remain gritty for those PCs which never bother to invest in them

My puzzlement was over why this should be so, when combat is not handled the same way (contrast eg Rolemaster or Runequest or Classic Traveller, where combat ability is handled the same as other skills).

A combat system where all PCs get roughly equally better by level at fighting, is probably the easiest way to ensure that everyone has something to do in combat. I would not mind a game where a PC who doesn't bother getting better at fighting, ends up lagging behind to the point of not being able to fight, but I would hardly expect another person at the same table to share the feeling. That's because in general when there's a fight, everybody fights, at least in the broad sense (i.e. "healing others" and "controlling the battlefield" qualify as "fighting" for me).

OTOH non-combat skills are most of the time (not always, but most) individual efforts.

And this is the answer to my puzzlement. Thank you.

I personally tend to prefer situations both in and out of combat that engage the whole party - social ("In the court of the duergar king!"), physical ("The temple is collapsing around you!"), etc.

whether the game allows characters of the same level with a large spread of their effectiveness at something.

4e certainly allows this. At 20th level, the lowest skill bonuses in my game (poor stat, no training, perhaps an armour penalty) are around +8 to +10. The highest skill bonuses (good stat, training, item etc) are +20 to +29.

I don't like the image of getting at a locked door without a Rogue in the party, and the players think "who cares, the cloistered/bookworm Cleric healer can do it anyway". I like to get there and think "damn we should have had a lockpicker here, what do we no now?".

The Thievery (= lockpick) skills for the 5 20th level PCs in my game are +7 for the paladin in plate and shield, +8 for the invoker in hide armour, +13 for the fighter, +15 for the ranger in hide, and +16 for the chaos sorcerer, or +18 with his tools (he is the only the PC to carry thieves' tools).

That's a non-negligible gap before we even get to the effects of training or items (none of the above PCs is trained in Thievery). Arguabyl it's too big a gap! I gather that 3E was even worse for scaling gaps, but those gaps can make it hard to set group challenges, though the DC charts and group check rules do their best to work around the big numbers.

A system like MHRP, for instance, scales only from d6 to d12 in ability - that's 4 steps (normal d6, enhanced d8, superhuman d10, godlike d12).

a note on the idea of interpreting the cloistered Wizard's high skill with locks (even tho she never picked one) as representing her other ways of dealing with the problem, e.g. through non-spell magic. It's a very smart way of handling the problem IMO, but once again it raises a gamestyle question, not dissimilar to that of abstracting hit points into "luck, and more", and that question is how much you like your game to explicitly connect mechanics with narrative vs how much abstraction you can take.

Related to what you say here is the following: when the group without a high lockpick rogue wants to get past a locked door, do you want the gameplay to be focused more on "What other mechanical resources, like crowbars or knock spells, do we have access to?" - a fairly classic D&D approach - or do we want the gameplay to be focused more on "What story can I tell about my PC that makes it plausible that s/he is picking this lock?" - which is closer to the MHRP approach.

4e is somewhere in the middle between these two approaches.

 

[Ratskinner]

Skills used to be optional. In 2E the NWP fit ontop of the abillity check system because both were roll under, with ranks in nwps having less of an impact (you might take one or two additional ranks). The problem in d20 is d20 plus skill rank plus ability modifier is objectively better than d20 plus ability modifier. You could simply inverse the roll under mechanic to retain the math 2E had here. For example your DC for a skill or abililty check could simply be 20 minus your ranks in skill and your abillity score (not your modifier). The sbtraction wouldnt be an issue because you o it before play and record your rating on the character sheet. So someone with Dex of 15, has a 5 DC for Dex based skills.

yeah...but 2e didn't use the same for thieving skills. I'm pretty sure sneaking shouldn't be exclusive to thieves anymore, so it'd be nice if they all went the same.

If we're going "roll under" again, I'd prefer that you just had your ability number + mod as the target for a normal check. harder checks are at target - 5 (maybe super hard at -10) and easy at target +5. I will say though, as a former Alternity GM, roll-under systems take some getting used to.

 

[Ratskinner]

Turning spells into skill bonuses works only for spells that involve skills. When I cast Polymorph Self, or Giraffeshape, I hope I don't need to have at least 5 ranks in Polymorph prior to casting.

True20 worked well for this by reducing magic to a smaller number of Talents. Casters got Talents like extra skills. I don't see that as a simple system for implementing in 5e, though.

 

[Ratskinner]

We need to get rid of the skill check. Rolling 1d20 to determine if a skill attempt is successful is the wrong way to go. In combat making a to hit roll is a great idea. For skills it does not do us any good. But, please bear with me, there is something else that really does work that we are not using today... In combat we first roll to hit and then we roll damage.
-The damage roll would be great for skill checks.

Imagine that all skill checks automatically succeed but the extent of success is determined by a success roll (comparable to a damage roll). If we do this we get a result that stacks, pools, extends, and contends. Think about it.

My lock picking skill might be 1d6 and the lock I'm picking might have 20 lock points. The quarry I'm tracking might be 25 points away and my tracking skill might be 2d6. The spell I'm researching might be 100 points occult and my spell craft skill might be 1d10, and my apprentice adds another 1d4.

Now, to make this exciting all obstacles must pack a penalty for not being overcome. At the end of the player round, if a challenge has not been bested the challenge itself will penalize the skill user in some way. The exact penalty obviously depends on the nature of the challenge; the lock will waste a minute of my life, the quarry will hide an re-add 1d6 points of distance and my researched spell will inflict 1d6 points of fire damage.

Interesting idea....convert everything in the game to ...what? "Obstacle Points" with HP being the combat version....hmmm.

For the sake of chases, would movement need to be wrapped into this system as well? I think I'd be okay with that.

 

[Manbearcat]

For the sake of chases, would movement need to be wrapped into this system as well? I think I'd be okay with that.

I hope not. Nothing bogs down the tension of a good chase scene more than having to deal with fiddly bits with multiple vectors like individual speed, speed relative to opposition, spatial orientation relative to one another, and mechanical resolution affecting the prior three incrementally. Argh. Easy, functional resolution with minimal handling time and mental overhead, fail forwards and success with complications interpretations and sensible, genre-logic narrative rendering all the way.