Approaches to Skills - Ideas Thread

[Balesir]

In another thread, some ideas about the skills system for D&DNext - starting with the version in the playtest and moving from there - cropped up. This discussion is rather peripheral to the thread itself, though, so I'm starting a new thread for it here. Here are the most relevant (in my view - please quote more if you think I've missed something out!) post sections so far:

Obviously, "perception is everything", but I really don't see the skill system presented in the playtest as different from 4e's except that the "trained" bonus is lower. You have a list of skills (including a set that are just the "default" of the attribute modifier) to use for all "skill based" rolls.

The real issue I forsee with the skills as presented I don't think will come up in early playtests - and maybe not in any playtests. It's that the skill "list" is unbounded - if you need a skill for a background, you just make one up. I think this risks not only skill "bloat", but also the sort of issues evident in 3.X and 4e with feats. I think in time we will see "obsolete" skills and "overpowered" skills and all that stuff, as well as "skill bloat". In a limited playtest (sub)set, though, this will not be evident at all.

This is an issue in any system that allows natural language descriptors to be brought in as mechanical elements.

HeroQuest revised has good advice on how to handle this - namely, first ascertain the breadth of a descriptor relevant to the total pool of PCs descriptors, and second relativise DCs to that ascertained breadth. So when a caber needs to be tossed, the PC with a "Strong Descriptor" faces a higher DC than a PC with a "Champion caber tosser" descriptor.

Because this is overtly metagamey, though, I don't think D&Dnext will use this sort of system.

If they are going for a finite list instead, though, then I for one would like to see Natural Lore, Wilderness Lore, Survival and Animal Handling merged - partly, at least, if not completely. These are needless points of distinction in a system where each PC has only a handful of skills.

Yes, that's an alternative - or just have a skill give +1, +2, +3 or +4 (say), depending on how "broad" it is.

Another alternative is the way PrimeTime Adventures handles backgrounds. Here, you can describe any sort of background, skill areas and things like contacts that you want, but there is a hard limit on how many times you get to use the bonuses from them in an "episode". In D&D this would translate as the use of skill bonuses being a "vancian power" - i.e. you can use the bonus only X times, with those "slots" recharging when you rest (extended rest or maybe some recovery on a short rest?). This would work well with the "roll a characteristic" system we see in the playtest, actually, since you get your attribute bonus anyway - it's only the +3 skill bonus that you have limited uses of. It also keeps things balanced between skills (you could name skills, backgrounds or even contacts and resources like laboratories and spy networks as potential "advantages"). Rogues could get extra "slots" per day to use. Just a thought.

If they are going this way [editor's note: meaning "using an unbounded skill list"] (and it sounds like they may not be) I would prefer them to go "all the way", as it were. So rather than your background giving you a list of skills at +3, your background is your background, and you get a +3 to any ability check in which your background comes into play.

So if your background is "Trained in the grand army of Karameikos", then any time that is relevant - pitching a tent, palling it up with Karmeikian NCOs, etc - you get to add +3. If your background is "Apprenticed as a wizard of the Spiral Tower", then you have a different backstory to draw on to get your +3.

One advantage of going this way, I think, is that players who push hard to broaden their skills will also have to give the GM the necessary backstory narrative to hang that on - which then gives the GM new material on the basis of which to introduce complications or challenges for that PC, and the group more generally. So it is at least a bit more self-regulating as far as balance is concerned.

I have played five or six systems that do this now, and tbh they not been a huge success.

We had a lot of problems over deciding what activities should or should not be part of a background, often because in D&D its quite fantastical so words can be taken different ways. Is a 'Spy' M'Lady or James Bond, or even both? Should they have knowledge of explosives?

The other problem we had was players just not asking for bonuses because they had much more limited view of what the background meant. So to my mind, a 'Pirate' is probably good at climbing, they spend a lot of time at height with no hand holds. So when making a climb check it should probably grant a bonus, but the player did not ask for one because they were not on board a ship.

You can obviously work through all this, but having a few set examples of what a Background entails seems a much better starting point from my experience.

This is similar to the RPG Summerland, where a characters provide one word or phrase for their backstory/background. For instance "It was a dark night"
And during intense encounters, the PC can elaborate on his/her background to gain a benefit on the die roll, but then in so doing their backstory expands. For instance during a late evening, the PCs face off a pack of brigands, the character can expand his backstory to
"It was a dark night, and I was surrounded"

So he is matching current events with a particular backstory/incident...In Summerland your character is a drifter and has suffered some trauma or something bad in the past. Your goal is to obtain redemption - inner peace.
A character can expand on his backstory for a bonus to die, if he can fit the current setting with that particular moment in his past. As he does that he attempts to deal with his issues reaching him ever closer to redemption.

In a similar vein making a DnD character's backstory open-ended has the same effect - bonus to die. It suits Summerland more, due to the theme/mood, but if they were to implement something on these lines
it could get heavily abused and certainly some limits would have to be implemented to safegaurd DMs.

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

I don't know which systems have been discussed but I'll mention the Traveller (Mongoose) system here. The list of skills is finite (with the catchall 'Trade' skill to cover anything you think you might like for a character that's otherwise absent). You get a -3 penalty for having no ranks in a skill, but otherwise each rank adds +1. When you make a check, you choose which ability modifier to add to it.

This mimics the D&DN system under a finite skill list. The problem, as with any finite skill list, is that some skills are super awesome and others a waste of time. Some too narrow, some too broad. Some have subskills. Any finite system falls into the taxonomic trap of being infinitely subsettable - you have to decide where to draw the line as to what is a skill. This is in contrast to an infinite list of skills - you have to decide whether a given skill is relevant to a situation.

For a pen and paper roleplaying game, I am inclined towards the latter, infinite list of skills, with player/DM judgement making a call on what works when.

 

[RangerWickett]

Don't let skills be too broad. A friend of mine tried to humorously rename 4e's skills, and he started like this:

Stage One Revision
[sblock]Acrobatics -> Parkour
Arcana -> Wikipedia
Athletics -> Parkour
Bluff -> Cheating
Diplomacy -> Cheating
Dungeoneering -> Wikipedia
Endurance -> Bear Grylls
Heal -> Health Insurance
History -> Wikipedia
Insight -> Sherlock
Intimidate -> Batman
Nature -> Bear Grylls
Perception -> Sherlock
Religion -> Wikipedia
Stealth -> Batman
Streetwise -> Scum and Villainy
Thievery -> Scum and Villainy[/sblock]

And ended up like this:

Stage Two Revision
[sblock]Batman -> Batman
Bear Grylls -> Batman
Cheating -> Batman
Health Insurance -> Money -> Batman
Parkour -> Batman
Scum and Villainy -> Batman
Sherlock -> Batman
Wikipedia -> Batcomputer -> Batman[/sblock]

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I don't much care for either unbounded skill lists or widely expansive "traits as skills" system--although I admit my dislike is as much aesthetic as the utility of the design. D&D is particularly thorny on this question, because a clean design for skills is going to run into the problem of why weapon use, spell casting, etc. are not "skills," but they never will be in D&D.

Building off of pemerton's suggestion, where I'd start is to use the Background itself as an open-ended skill, but also have the Background give gives from a finite, clean, roughly equal list of specific skills (preferably a bit more wide than 4E but more coherent than 3E).

The Background skill is one you can use when you can justify it (i.e. requires DM approval, but is wide-ranging). The specific skills are ones you can always use when it makes sense (e.g. Perception). Background including traits and skills even provides a way to balance this out, if some sets of skills happen to be perceived as more useful than others. Give the deficient backgrounds better traits and/or acknowledge that some Backgrounds as skills have a wider reach.

Alternately, do something like the above, but have a mix of finite skills and open-ended skills given by each background (which also works as a skill). The finite skills are the ones that easy to pin down and balance (e.g. Perception).

Determine the list of the finite skills during the playtest, using the "college sidewalk technique" that I've mentioned before. An architect left all the sidewalks out when he built the new addition to the university. The authorities objected. The architect said, "Wait a year." Then when he saw where the students walked, he built the sidewalks there. Never needed a "keep of the grass" sign.

 

[nomotog]

I didn't think I would like this system with it being so unbound, but after I got my playtest I warmed up to the idea. I like the idea that skills can be added when you need them. Like if your running an item shop, or spaceship, you can drop in a bunch of skills related to running a shop or flying a spaceship.

One thing I would like to see would be skills that do other things then add 3 to the roll. Things like giving you an advantage under different conditions or give you the ability to leverage your advantages to get better results. For example: I could could have a skill that gives me an advantage to my stealth roll at night then another skill that lets you run well you have the advantage.

 

[kuraban]

The problem I've always had with allowing for an essentially limitless skill list is that players will often (usually) opt for the broadest possible skill, and then try to use that bonus for everything... "I've got sailing skill, so I should know how to tie knots/climb ropes/walk on uneven surfaces/swim/catch fish/recognize flags, etc".

As much as it was a humorously themed game, I always liked the concept behind the Paranoia RPG skill system (bear with me, Paranoia uses 5% increments in skills). Everyone started with at the base level for every skill, no matter what the skill itself, 5%. Each step could then add an extra 5% onto that base skill, or could be used to then buy a next level skill from that skill tree.

As an example then, your first point could be used to buy the skill, Stealth. This would give you a +1 bonus to any check requiring stealth.
Your next point in Stealth could then be used to increase this to +2, or it could be used to buy Move Silently, which would again be at +1. This character would then get a +1 for hiding, but would get a +2 for Move Silently. Having a point in Move Silently, this character could then add their Move Silently skill to their movement rate.

I think it would take a lot of work to develop such a system with suitable rewards for specializing in skills. Perhaps a better method might be to say that adding a point to Move Silently would give the character +2 for each point. I think that this would lead dangerously towards that whole 'Point Creep' problem that was endemic to 4e.

I do believe that this system could end up quite complex, but I think it would give players that really wanted to specialize their characters a reward for doing so.

Just a thought...

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

It seems to me like they're trying to use the background system to fudge whether or not the skill list is "infinite." So while there's probably a lot of overlap between "wilderness lore" and "survival," you're not actually choosing between those two; you're choosing between "soldier" and "priest," which further guides the DM in exactly what the skills mean.

When you're picking those skills a la cart, this gets a bit trickier. I tend to think the skill list is "infinite" for the designers thinking up new backgrounds, but "finite" for players choosing a la cart skills in that they're probably limited to picking skills from existing backgrounds.

The reason this hopefully wouldn't cause too much "skill bloat" is that it's not in players' best interest for the list to expand too much. If I'm trying to design an optimized character, I don't want to take wilderness lore AND survival; I'll just pick one and try to apply it wherever the DM lets me. At the same time, the fact that the list isn't truly unlimited means that as long as nobody stupidly introduces a "batman" skill into core through some new background, the players are still SOMEWHAT limited in what skills they choose.

 

[Frostmarrow]

I'd like skill checks be friendly contests among the players for the opportunity to control what the DM is about to serve next. For instance if the DM is about to introduce a chest and calls for a Search check the player who wins the contest gets to role-play this little part of the adventure. This way players should assign their skill points in the sklls that represents what they enjoy the most in an adventure. If you, as a player, get a kick out noticing an ambush and act first then put your skill points into Spot. If you like to speak to NPC invest your background into Diplomacy. (Since dice will decide who wins sometimes you'll get the opportunity to do things you haven't prepared for.)

Now, this not the same as having a faceoff all the tme. Whenever your character takes the initiative to do something you will get to act. However, when the DM presents an opportunity to act on something the best character, not the loudest player, should get the spotlight.

Examples of stuff the DM can offer up:

* A piece of fact
* Heads up
* A climbable obstacle
* A merchant
* A lock
* A portcullis

 

[BobTheNob]

I liked the [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] post which stated you you just pick a background, and if the background is appropriate to the skill check, add the bonus. I like it because it allows that the capability of the character matches the expectation of the player without needing to go into minutae, and leaves both player and DM free to improvise.

FATE did something similar in the form of aspects, but you had many, and to invoke them you had to spend a fate point (the games limiting resource). It was actually really good.

I think it needs that the backgrounds are well defined though, but a solid paragraph or two per should cut it.

 

[GX.Sigma]

When I first saw this thread, my first thought was "Didn't Mike Mearls specifically say there would be a defined list of skills?" I looked for it but could not find it.

I found it.

https://twitter.com/mikemearls/status/208759333188665344

@mikemearls Do you think we will ever see a defined list if skills in ‪#dndnext‬?

@SharnDM Yes. We'd like to avoid a sprawling list that just causes confusion.