Why I Hate Skills

[pemerton]

I always thought skills came from saves?

They can also be seen as building on thief abilities, secret door detection, rangers' tracking ability, etc.

 

[Andvari]

I know some use saving throws in B/X and BECMI D&D as resolution mechanics. For example, if you try something dexterous or agile, you save vs. breath weapon to succeed. The point of doing this instead of for example, rolling under your ability score (which other DMs use, and is how the optional skill system in BECMI works) is that your ability scores do not improve as you level, but saving throws do.

 

[VHawkwinter]

Meta? Good lord. Some people will throw that word around at the drop of a hat.

Just when it applies.

everything in most RPGs is an abstraction to some extent.

It's about the distance between the decision making that is made by the player and the decision making that is made by the character; and being able to make your decisions in-character, with your out of character knowledge matching up with the in-character knowledge, vs out of character, or needing to try to separate your out of character knowledge from in character knowledge more to compensate for a large disconnect between the two. The more "Meta" gameplay, I don't particularly enjoy as a player. Never have.

That makes none of it meta.

That doesn't make sense. If the entire game is making decisions out of character, that makes ALL of it meta. One example of a game like that would be Chess. No part of Chess' game mechanics are in-character. FATE came a little too close to that for me, same with Savage Worlds, and 4e. In those, too much of the game was out of character decision making, which to me, just misses what I am playing a TTRPG for. If I'm a player, I'm looking to stay in character as much as possible. As such, I don't enjoy games built around meta currency exchanges, stepping into the GM chair for scene editing, 'compelling' other characters 'for drama'; and my interest in miniature-skirmish combat in a TTRPG is also kind-of low. Those make for a very different feeling game.

Worse, I think trying too hard to avoid being "meta" can actually (translation: "probably will") make the game less fun.

I suppose I will have to see how other people feel about that in my game when I get to playtesting. Much of my attempts at reduction of meta elements is because I found them actively unfun in other games over the past 25 years. If they were not things that made games actively less fun* in other games, I wouldn't be seeking to avoid things in my own game. * Less fun for me, yes I know, sample size of 1, I have had people review them and give me their thoughts, but haven't had much chance to playtest the thing at a table yet.

These seem to be pretty similar ideas.

Definitely

A world where events occur with the regularity of a metronome is just as "meta" as the OotS world.

Abstractions can be more abstracted or less abstracted. More abstracted is more likely to be over the threshold of aggravatingly meta. I have yet to see a TTRPG with realtime combat. If one comes along though, I'd give it a try to see how it plays. I assume that would require videogame combat (first-person ARPG combat maybe, or over the shoulder if the combat is more martial-arts-y), and the players would have gamepads or mouse and keyboard to control their characters, or something, and then afterward it drops out of combat back to your typical GM Narration-based gameplay? No idea how good that would be, but that doesn't sound inherently any worse to me than using minis. I'd give it a try if someone made that.

No more weird than someone calculating that the incidence of random meetings is structured around 2 hour intervals.

Well, the number of encounters per 2h interval could be none, or several, really. But sure, I could improve that by varying up the number of rolls per day. I will grant you that I am only addressing the day in 15 minute blocks, rather than down to the subsecond of granularity. It's a TTRPG afterall, not a videogame. It would be wildly impractical to try to handle subsecond time tracking.

All gameplay involves imposing structure on events that - within the fiction we are imagining - are not subject to that structure.

True. Sure. I can agree with that.

Because it gets you to the same game play more easily. I mean, the decision that (say) there is a 1 in 6 chance of finding a secret door if you spend 10 minutes (1 turn) searching in the right 10' x 10' area of wall is pretty arbitrary. What is gained by (say) changing the detection chance to 1 in 12 but declaring that the search only takes 5 minutes?

- "What is gained"
The 5 minutes is gained (which might be important). Possibly also character differentiation. If you're in a hurry, you can take lower odds to try to rush and finish faster. And If your character's skill level is high enough, you may still have a good chance of success, moving from 95% success odds (clipped) (or just autosuccess) to say, 80% success odds at half the time. Meanwhile, your character, less specialised on detecting magic hidden doors, may only have that 1/6 odds per 10 minutes, and if you want decent odds, getting it to 2/3 odds, you might need 30 minutes (assuming your failure rate halves every doubling of time and vice-versa, as your example seems to); which (in the 10 minute random encounter roll environment people were describing) could mean three monster attacks before you get it figured out. If your party expert is incapacitated, or if you simply have a different party composition and lack the magic-door-finding-expert, the threat analysis leads to different choices being the high or low risk options, with different character designs influencing the type of gameplay which occurs and the choices players make. That answer of what is gained certainly may not matter to your gameplay tastes - but it kind-of sounds like the difference between 5e skill mechanics (there's not a ton of difference between characters, skill specialisation effects on gameplay are small) vs 3e or GURPS, where the difference between characters can be quite large, to the point of being in some instances more like the "you have this particular spell or class feature that does a thing, or not".

 

[Thomas Shey]

I know some use saving throws in B/X and BECMI D&D as resolution mechanics. For example, if you try something dexterous or agile, you save vs. breath weapon to succeed. The point of doing this instead of for example, rolling under your ability score (which other DMs use, and is how the optional skill system in BECMI works) is that your ability scores do not improve as you level, but saving throws do.

Is wasn't uncommon Back in The Day to see people doing early skill prototyping by using an attribute and adding the character's level to it. This didn't make any distinction as to class as far as it went, but largely worked because thee was pretty heavy compression of level most of the time, so you'd get some improvement but not severe changes.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Is wasn't uncommon Back in The Day to see people doing early skill prototyping by using an attribute and adding the character's level to it. This didn't make any distinction as to class as far as it went, but largely worked because thee was pretty heavy compression of level most of the time, so you'd get some improvement but not severe changes.

I would argue that the only ways discrete skills make the games better is that some players enjoy both the character building aspect and they like imagining themselves as especially good at something. But the actual math isn't important/noticeable.

As a thought experiment: if you were playing on VTT and it looked like you were getting all your bonuses when rolling skills, but really the software was reducing any high rolls on the d20 by your skill bonus before displaying the result, so that the bonus was negated, most people would never notice anything wrong.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I would argue that the only ways discrete skills make the games better is that some players enjoy both the character building aspect and they like imagining themselves as especially good at something. But the actual math isn't important/noticeable.

As a thought experiment: if you were playing on VTT and it looked like you were getting all your bonuses when rolling skills, but really the software was reducing any high rolls on the d20 by your skill bonus before displaying the result, so that the bonus was negated, most people would never notice anything wrong.

I think "most" is doing some heavy lifting in this response. In my experience, the kind of people I've played with would very much notice it over time.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I think "most" is doing some heavy lifting in this response. In my experience, the kind of people I've played with would very much notice it over time.

We will have to agree to disagree. I think it is an exceptionally rare person who would pick up on that, unless it was a skill (like combat bonuses) that was used heavily in bursts.

I mean, it's possible that your whole gaming group is that sort of person, but if so then you have a far, far outlier group.

 

[Thomas Shey]

We will have to agree to disagree. I think it is an exceptionally rare person who would pick up on that, unless it was a skill (like combat bonuses) that was used heavily in bursts.

I mean, it's possible that your whole gaming group is that sort of person, but if so then you have a far, far outlier group.

The latter is entirely possible; among other things I passively preselect for at least fairly gamist players (who are thus sensitive to such things) and have for--a very long time.

(Note: this was assuming the players would know what kind of results they should expect; if the mechanics are largely invisible from the get-go that'd be a different situation, but then, most of them would have a problem with that setup anyway).

 

[VHawkwinter]

I would argue that the only ways discrete skills make the games better is that some players enjoy both the character building aspect and they like imagining themselves as especially good at something. But the actual math isn't important/noticeable.

I am likely again be an outlier here, but the math makes a big difference to me. The fact that you cannot be mathematically great at the thing you "specialise in" in 5e relative to the people who don't specialise in the thing, and don't end up with a fundamentally different and harder list of tasks you need to roll for and not autosucceed at, as the character who is supposedly great at any particular skill - was the first thing I found I hated in 5e, and the first thing I overhauled via houserules when I ran 5e. God do I hate 5e's noncombat "gameplay" - I don't really like 5e's combat gameplay either, mind you, but it's less terrible than the noncombat gameplay.

As a thought experiment: if you were playing on VTT and it looked like you were getting all your bonuses when rolling skills, but really the software was reducing any high rolls on the d20 by your skill bonus before displaying the result, so that the bonus was negated, most people would never notice anything wrong.

But even in spite of my gripes: That is probably true for a lot of players. A lot of players seemingly don't actually care about the actual game being played at all, they're just there for the collaborative storytelling social event. It doesn't matter if the game itself is good or bad, they're just showing up for the company; and wouldn't ever consider filtering what campaigns they're interested in joining based on what system the group is using, because they don't have any strong opinions on which systems were fun or not fun and why. I would guess they're probably the largest demographic of players.