Why I Hate Skills

[SkidAce]

Some issues I have with that:

• I'm personally not interested in roleplaying suspicion or confidence; I want the players themselves to experience suspicion or confidence and, perversely, if the roll is especially low they will know with certainty they failed, and I don't like to put players into the position of "Knowing X but expected to roleplay not-X".
• It's still not actually a consequence. No player his going to hesitate before committing to the attempt because they might end up objectively worse off than not having rolled.
• It also still leaves the difficulty of coming up with the 'consequence'...the bad knowledge that could lead to actual consequences...when an adventure says, "Anybody who passes a history check knows that the statue is of...etc."

Fair points.

Note; I leave the roleplaying or not up to the players. They seem to "enjoy?" sometimes acting on potential bad info.

"Yargrim offers the king a pizza with pineapple on it, as he recalls thats the king's favorite"

 

[Bill Zebub]

Fair points.

Note; I leave the roleplaying or not up to the players. They seem to "enjoy?" sometimes acting on potential bad info.

"Yargrim offers the king a pizza with pineapple on it, as he recalls thats the king's favorite"

Oh, definitely. I also sometimes have fun leaning into pretending to have bad (or no) knowledge of something.

Look, I realize I'm being somewhat of an uncompromising, unrealistic idealist in all of this. But I think it's worth interrogating some premises and assumptions.

 

[SkidAce]

Oh, definitely. I also sometimes have fun leaning into pretending to have bad (or no) knowledge of something.

Look, I realize I'm being somewhat of an uncompromising, unrealistic idealist in all of this. But I think it's worth interrogating some premises and assumptions.

Nah, you're cool, good convo!

 

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

In the approach I'm describing checks need to have risk. There needs to be a downside to trying, either because it costs you something to try (such as using your turn in combat) or because failing has a cost (of which falling to your death is an extreme but illustrative example). In other words, the decision should be a non-obvious choice.

Many games sidestep this problem by encouraging the GM to just skip rolling on checks where there's no consequence for failure and no external pressure. But that isn't going to stop inexperienced or particular GMs from just saying "well you're climbing, and theres a climbing skill, make me a roll" every single time.

Ironically one of the best ways around it was Taking 10 and Taking 20 in D&D 3rd edition - since they put the "skip this pointless check" button on the player's side of the screen rather than the GM's.

I'm not exactly sure how I would set this up, but I like the idea that if you translate them incorrectly then something bad happens, although I'd want some in-game reason the characters would know this.

Not exactly what you're looking for (since its not always 100% diagetic), but PBTA does a pretty good job making sure every roll has stakes. A Failed Roll in PBTA means the GM can make a Hard Move to naughty word up your day, and their move does NOT necessarily need to follow from the triggering action in any way. The GM can introduce a new threat, make the situation worse, inflict harm, split the party, etc - regardless of what the triggering action was. There is never a roll without threat of consequences.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Many games sidestep this problem by encouraging the GM to just skip rolling on checks where there's no consequence for failure and no external pressure.

When running other people's adventures, which I like to do, this results in a lot of the content (except combat) essentially being skipped, or trivialized, because so many of them are written with the assumption that making players roll dice is how the games are meant to be played.

A great example is the adventure I just ran. It was written with the assumption that some things wouldn't be spotted, and some locks wouldn't be picked, and therefore the players would wander through the dungeon. If everything is spotted, and all locks are picked, the PCs pretty much go straight to the final boss and kill him without ever learning the whole story.

Not exactly what you're looking for (since its not always 100% diagetic), but PBTA does a pretty good job making sure every roll has stakes. A Failed Roll in PBTA means the GM can make a Hard Move to naughty word up your day, and their move does NOT necessarily need to follow from the triggering action in any way. The GM can introduce a new threat, make the situation worse, inflict harm, split the party, etc - regardless of what the triggering action was. There is never a roll without threat of consequences.

Well, yes and no. In my experience trying to run PbtA games the GM still has to improvise those consequences, which isn't always easy/obvious (at least for me). And I personally don't like the part about the GM move not necessarily following from the triggering action. That means that from the character's point of view the action is risk-free, but the player knows there's an unrelated consequence that occurs if the action fails. Which feels...off.

So I find PbtA good scaffolding for "risky" dice rolling, but it's a framework, not a solution.

 

[pemerton]

Got it.

I personally don't find that interesting in the absence of understood threats/risks. I can certainly think of ways to add threats/risks to that scenario, but as described it's just RNG determining which way the party goes.

In a (fairly traditional) dungeon, which way the party goes is all about threat and risks, though. That's what rumours, detection magic, listening at doors, and the like are all for.

"Can I roll to see if I can read the runes?" is an example of an obvious choice. Why wouldn't you try?

Because the magical feedback might blast your soul?

Or (depending on more details of the resolution system) they might give you really bad news?

 

[Bill Zebub]

In a (fairly traditional) dungeon, which way the party goes is all about threat and risks, though. That's what rumours, detection magic, listening at doors, and the like are all for.

Uh, yeah.

I'm puzzled that you think you need to tell me that. I'm wondering if you are at all understanding my critique of skills systems.

Because the magical feedback might blast your soul?

Yes! That's a great example. Although:
a) I would want the players to somehow, diegetically, know that's a risk.
b) Can only use the same thing so many times.

Again, I'm not saying I'm incapable of thinking up consequences in some cases. I'm pointing out that so much of the RPG world seems to make skills consequence free.

Or (depending on more details of the resolution system) they might give you really bad news?

AS LONG AS THERE'S NO MIND CONTROL!!!!

 

[Fenris-77]

Yes! That's a great example. Although:
a) I would want the players to somehow, diegetically, know that's a risk.

I loathe gotcha traps, so yeah, this. If they radiate powerful magic or some shizz and the players still decides to read them then that's on them. I pretty much refuse to get players to roll when they don't know at least something about the cost of failure.

 

[Bill Zebub]

In a (fairly traditional) dungeon, which way the party goes is all about threat and risks, though. That's what rumours, detection magic, listening at doors, and the like are all for.

Let me try this a different way...

Let's say the party is at a fork in the road, and they have divined/listened/sniffed etc., and have determined that going left leads to chocolate cake, and right leads to brussels sprouts. As it turns out, the villain is from the Elemental Plane of Chocolate, and they have learned the villain is vulnerable to vitamins. So clearly they want to go right first in order to stock up on missile weapons. BUT! ALAS! There is a LOCKED GATE in the way. WOE BE THEY!

Fortunately the Rogue has +7 in Lockpicking, so he opens the gate. Or, maybe not, because he still has a 10% chance to fail.

I really don't see how the RNG on the lock...a 10% chance they will have to think of another way to open a locked gate...adds anything interesting/worthwhile to the game.

 

[pemerton]

I'm not really talking about skills here, I'm talking about dice rolls, checks. Clearly skills can be compatible with this approach. My beef with skills is that they tend to undermine this gameplay, because instead of going through all the trouble of defining a goal and an approach, and having the GM come up with risks/consequences, that skill on your character sheet....Lockpicking, Stealth, Arcana, Hunting, whatever...becomes a tempting shortcut to avoid the whole thing.

Well, if people want to just 'roll skills' then who are we to say otherwise. They're having fun. What they aren't doing is really playing the game at its full volume, if you'll excuse a clumsy metaphor. An issue that I think applies here is the lack of attention specifically in 5E to the fact that the conversation is the central vehicle for role playing. A lot of people come away from reading 5E with some predictable lacuna in the understanding of how RPGs work, generally speaking.

I don't have any sense of the 5e play culture, beyond what I read on these boards.

But the idea that there is a tension between having skill ratings, and players engaging the fiction, is fairly foreign to me.

I accept that a "pick locks" skill typically makes the fiction of how the tumblers are placed merely colour, in the same way that a "kill things with sword" skill typically makes the fiction of whether it's a cut or a thrust mere colour. (I say "typically" because there are exceptions in the combat arena - eg The Riddle of Steel, I think - and maybe there's a game somewhere that foregrounds the intricacies of lock-picking in the same way.) But the position of tumblers in a lock isn't the only fiction that players can engage - presumably, if we care about going through doors, then there's fiction around which door and why and how long does it take? and etc.

If the adventure is set up and/or adjudicated as a railroad, and yet there are lockpicking rolls required, that's a different matter. That seems like a mismatch between scenario design/expectations and PC build.

Or, alternately, "Eight". "No, you fail." And all that cool backstory/history the GM spent time inventing doesn't get appreciated by the players.

When the game will be better with the information in the players hands I see no reason to allow the dice to prevent that completely.

This seems like an issue of GM skill, at least to an extent. What I mean is, if your backstory matters then you should be able to convey it to the players - instead of them getting it in advance and using it to their benefit (on a success), you bring it out as part of the bringing home as a brutal consequence (on a failure).