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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5460878" data-attributes="member: 42582">As has been pointed out, it has 17.Rolemaster has between dozens and hundreds of skills (depending on edition).HeroWars/Quest has an infinite number of skills/attributes, because of its free-descriptor approach to character building.Until you tell me what the point is of your skill system, and what principle you've used to determine how many skill there are, I have no idea whether it's good or bad.And if your answer to that question is &quot;I want to reduce all possible areas of human excellence and activity to a manageable number of categories&quot; then you're already presupposing purist-for-system simulationism.For the same sort of reasons that HeroWars/Quest has simple and extended contests.It's to do with pacing, complexity of conflicts, handling complications, etc.It about making the mechanics serve the metagame, rather than making the players of the game subordinate their metagame priorities to the mechanical system. I posted about this in detail upthread (#246).This is true, but not the whole truth. They also structure resolution in important ways (to do with pacing, injection of complication, etc). The example in Rules Compendium is a very good demonstration of this feature of skill challenges (although WotC don't actually explain what it is demonstrating, but leave it as an exercise for the reader - for example, the example involves a GM injecting a complication as a result of the skill challenge where the complication does not result from that failure via any ingame causal process, but nowhere does the rulebook actually talk about using this sort of metagame-heavy technique for resolving skill challenges).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 5460878, member: 42582"] As has been pointed out, it has 17. Rolemaster has between dozens and hundreds of skills (depending on edition). HeroWars/Quest has an infinite number of skills/attributes, because of its free-descriptor approach to character building. Until you tell me what the point is of your skill system, and what principle you've used to determine how many skill there are, I have no idea whether it's good or bad. And if your answer to that question is "I want to reduce all possible areas of human excellence and activity to a manageable number of categories" then you're already presupposing purist-for-system simulationism. For the same sort of reasons that HeroWars/Quest has simple and extended contests. It's to do with pacing, complexity of conflicts, handling complications, etc. It about making the mechanics serve the metagame, rather than making the players of the game subordinate their metagame priorities to the mechanical system. I posted about this in detail upthread (#246). This is true, but not the whole truth. They also structure resolution in important ways (to do with pacing, injection of complication, etc). The example in Rules Compendium is a very good demonstration of this feature of skill challenges (although WotC don't actually explain what it is demonstrating, but leave it as an exercise for the reader - for example, the example involves a GM injecting a complication as a result of the skill challenge where the complication [I]does not result from that failure via any ingame causal process[/I], but nowhere does the rulebook actually talk about using this sort of metagame-heavy technique for resolving skill challenges). [/QUOTE]

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