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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9753446" data-attributes="member: 907">One of the most common pitfalls I see in skill-based games is skill inflation: too many skills, at least in games where the baseline is incompetence. It's easy as a game designer to see a situation and go "Oh, we don't have a skill for that, and it doesn't fit neatly into one of the other ones, so let's add another skill." I'd rather see fewer and broader skills, with the option of adding specializations on top of that to reflect narrow competencies.It's less of a problem in a system where characters are assumed to be reasonably competent at most things, and where skills or the equivalent are bonuses on top of that baseline competency. One example of the latter is Star Trek Adventures, where each character has six attributes (Control, Daring, Fitness, Insight, Presence, Reason) reflecting your baseline aptitudes usually rated between 8 and 12, and six disciplines (Command, Conn, Security, Engineering, Science, Medicine) reflecting broad levels of training and rated 1-5. When doing a task, you normally roll 2d20 with each die showing at or below the sum of one attribute and one discipline, as determined by the task, being a success and a 1 being a critical = two successes. So you probably don't want Beverly Crusher at the helm when flying through a debris field pursued by some Romulan Warbirds (Daring 8, Conn 1), but at least she has a fighting chance. Worf would be better though (12 and 4).So far it's pretty simple, but your character can also have Focuses, which are areas of more focused training. When doing something where one of your Focuses apply, any roll equal to or lower than your appropriate Discipline is a crit. For example, Lt Cmdr LaForge has Reason 12 and Engineering 5, so when he can apply his big brain to thinking about some engineering problem he rolls at a very respectable 17. He might be working on repairing the phaser banks or something. But if something happens with the warp core, he can apply his Focus of Warp Engines. He'll still roll at a 17, but now any roll of 1-5 is a crit, not just a 1. In a system like this, it's fine to have a bazillion different focuses available, because they're an add-on to what is expected of the system.On the other end, you have something like GURPS. GURPS has literally hundreds of different skills. Sure, you can use them with defaults, but those defaults tend to be very low – in the realm of stat-5 (so if you're good at a stat you probably have like 12-14, giving you a 7-9 or lower on 3d6), and that's before applying penalties for unfamiliarity (which would usually apply another -2 to the default). So unless the thing you're trying to do happens to be just the thing you're trained for, you're probably going to suck at it. And adding more skills to a system like this just means there will be more things at which to suck.I've seen some roll-under systems using fractions of your skill for various special results. RuneQuest (at least RQ3, which is the one with which I am at least passingly familiar) used skill/5 or less (on d100) as the threshold for a Special result, and skill/20 or less for Critical. I think many other BRP systems are similar. Alternity did the same with a d20-based system: half your skill or less was a Good result, and a quarter or less was Amazing.These days, I think it's more common to tie such results to the roll itself, because that way you don't need to do math. For example, in The Troubleshooters you get Good or Bad Karma on a roll if you roll doubles on your d100 (11, 22, etc) – Good Karma if it's a success and Bad Karma if it's a failure. Karma isn't necessarily a critical success/failure, but can be a stroke of good/bad luck that just happens to coincide with the roll (you drive across the railroad just before the train comes, forcing your pursuer to wait for it to pass and giving you a good head start).</blockquote>

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