What's Your "Sweet Spot" for a Skill system?

[Committed Hero]

That's cute.

The question still stands.

 

[niklinna]

The question still stands.

Indeed. I find few things drain tension faster than extra rolls.

 

[Distracted DM]

For a DnD-like, 13th Age's backgrounds were my favorite skill system. Instead of skills, you'd have 8 points you could distribute among as many backgrounds as you wanted, a max of 5 points in one.

An example: Kasarak is a 3rd level adventurer, and he has to spend a nighta lone on top of a mountain waiting for a griffin courier from the Emperor. The GM decides that even repeated castings of light spells aren’t going to help Imperial Mage make any difference, and asks Kasarak to make a Con skill check using his Wild Mountain Tribe background to avoid being damaged by a night of exposure on the cold slopes. Kasarak says, “Well, yeah, this is no big dealt o my people, but I’m even better than you’d think at waiting in terrible conditions because that was part of my training with the Black Wyrm; the most important part of being an assassin is being able to wait until the moment to strike, and often you have to wait in the worst places where no one expects you.”
The GM buys it and tells Kasarak’s player that Kasarak can use his Black Fang background, so the player rolls a d20 and adds +3 for Black Fang, +3 for Kasarak’s level bonus, and the half-orc’s Con mod of +1, a total bonus of +7 vs. the normal adventurer tier environment DC of 15. If the GM thought the mountain was particularly nasty it would be a hard check, a DC of 20.

From the SRD:

Backgrounds represent pieces of your character’s history that contributes to your character’s history as well as their ability to succeed with non-combat skills.

Each character has a number of points to allocate to a set of backgrounds. These are broad categories of experience (cat burglar, for example) rather than specific implementations of that experience (climbing and hiding).

Backgrounds don’t sync to a specific ability score, though some backgrounds obviously may get used more often with certain ability scores than others.


When you roll a skill check to find out if you succeed at a task or trick, the GM tells you which ability score is being tested. Then you choose the background you think is relevant to gain the points you have in that background as a bonus to the skill check.

Most skill checks require you to equal or beat a Difficulty Class (DC), set by the environment you are operating in, to succeed.

To make a skill check, use this formula:

D20 + relevant ability modifier + level + relevant background points

Vs.

DC set by the environment

You can’t apply multiple backgrounds to the same check; the background with the highest (or tied for highest) bonus applies.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Indeed. I find few things drain tension faster than extra rolls.

Then you aren't doing it right. Fear and uncertainty sets the atmosphere.

 

[Emberashh]

The point is that if it isn't somewhat obvious to the player what the stakes of a test are, then there is a risk that from the players perspective everything is cloud cuckoo land where nothing has a rhyme or reason.

So for example, "I fail at cooking, therefore bandits arrive", makes no sense and while it does propel forward events it doesn't make for a narrative or a dramatic story.

By contrast, "We are being pursued by bandits. Should I stop to prepare a meal to help us recover or strength or push on to avoid losing time?" does make sense. It's the same test but now the stakes of the test are made clear. Now we actually have events tied to the narrative and we actually have a story and a dramatic choice for the player to make.

But, this is the rub. If that's really what we are doing, then "Failed at cooking, bandits show up" still makes absolutely no sense. Because if you imagine this situation, even if the players is failing at his cooking, what the consequences of that failure are should ultimately be predictable to the player. So the player might burn the dinner, in which case they don't get the full benefit of a meal in terms of fortifying the party. Or the player might take too long to make the dinner, in which case the player gets the choice to say, "Well, the hour we allocated to our break is coming to a close, we need to decide whether or not to extend the break or break camp without finishing dinner."

The problem in my experience with the Nar perspective that too often GMs are going, "What would be the fun in finding out whether or not the meal is well cooked? I know, we can have bandits show up!" And that's not actually collaborating on a story together.

This is a conundrum I found gets solved by the Tension Pool (and similar). This cooking check would be considered Reckless, so it prompts a Complication roll.

I've also come up with my own idea through my Exploration system, though its only for certain traversal related tasks. You'd receive a prompt to respond to that basically asks you to introduce your own scene, with the idea that it efficiently emulates the nature of Attractors without needing to preplace any in the gameworld. If you pursue the prompt, you're off on an adventure and so on. Some prompts actually have you signal to the GM to introduce a Complication, others ask you to make up your own.

And as part of the design of both of these options, you explicitly get the results of the actual check itself, whether it passed or failed. Your actions still lead to the potential Complication, but the reason you rolled has nothing to do with that.

 

[niklinna]

Then you aren't doing it right. Fear and uncertainty sets the atmosphere.

Yes, and extra rolls drain fear and uncertainty and replace them with boredom.

 

[Emberashh]

Yes, and extra rolls drain fear and uncertainty and replace them with boredom.

Thats not necessarily true, at insofar as the statement 1+n=boredom goes.

I think whats at the heart of that perception is feedback. The mechanic needs to produce meaningful feedback and that can be reduced considerably as more and more actions are required to complete the task.

But that doesn't imply that one action is ideal. After all, exploding dice would go against that implication; each die that explodes produces a meaningful and positive feedback, and due to how it works it actually self-regulates, making excessive explosions increasingly unlikely over time.

But beyond that, in a conventional dice roll, you can also find cause for multiple to be involved in a row, and the boredom effect diminishes if those are split between players rather than lapped onto one person.

Depending on the actions' themes though, you could see the effect disappear as well. There's real time dice games for example that really put that on display. I can't recall the name but theres a dungeon crawler game that uses real time dice rolling and as a result of the theming for each dice roll, its basically impossible to be bored despite rerolling dice approximately once a second for several minutes or longer.

The underlying action isn't any different in a slower paced game, but the real time theming changes the dynamic considerably.

Real Time in general, as a matter of fact, is probably the best way to combat the effect, short of just playtesting to determine the right amount relative to the task. (I can anecdotally observe, for example, that to-hit mechanics are just bad for just this reason, and damage vs defense roll offs feel a lot better)

I haven't had the opportunity to test it, but I've theorized that my Sequence roll mechanic could be used in tandem with a real time timer to basically emulate certain real time activities like lockpicking or bomb defusal. Having to redo the roll if you fail isn't as big a consequence to entertainment in a real time context.

 

[aramis erak]

The better on is at cooking, the more likely one is to achieve success when trying to cook. That's not confused, or illogical.

The result is representational: it represents what happens when the declared action is attempted. In this case, a cook tries to cook; and the cooking is unsuccessful, because interrupted by bandits. That's not confused, or illogical.

It's an improper causality, however, for simulationism at most levels.
The proper causality is that the bandits showed and interrupted the cooking. That should not be triggered by the failed cooking.
Many people take huge offense at the idea that rolls failure modes can be non-causal in normal play.

 

[aramis erak]

The GM should call for rolls for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being to keep the players guessing.

I've found that doing that actually REDUCED the tension over any given roll.
It was even worse when it was concealed GM rolls. After a few session, it became just noise... and no tension.
Which is why I've entirely quit doing so. Every roll I call for has a consequence. After session, my players will sometimes ask what they were for, and that keeps the tension when I roll without immediate obvious impact.

 

[Thourne]

It's an improper causality, however, for simulationism at most levels.
The proper causality is that the bandits showed and interrupted the cooking. That should not be triggered by the failed cooking.
Many people take huge offense at the idea that rolls failure modes can be non-causal in normal play.

I'd agree for more trad players/systems, completely.
For several other games, it would be normal play.
I can't understand why some of the people who prefer trad games can't grasp that.
It is ok to dislike it and not play those games, but I have trouble understanding how they don't understand it.
*(Not implying you don't. Just a generalization)