D&D bundle skills?

[radferth]

The lazy way to do this would be to bundle the existing D&D skills. For example, climb, swim, and jump are all covered under athletics; spellcraft, concentration, and arcane or religious lore (or both) are covered under magic-use. Characters would have max ranks (lvl + 3) in each bundle they chose. Of course, you'd get much less bundle points than skill points. If one were really wanted you use this, one could play with things like giving more bundles to each character but having merely their level in ranks rather than level +3. Maybe give them and extra bundle at the price of a feat. Kind of lame, but easy to do.

 

[Zoatebix]

There seem to be a lot of different ways to implement a concept like this. Iron Lore's method seems to be like TPs from HARP. The upcoming Summa Fantasia from Undead President's seems to have another bundle-like system. Even Castles and Crusades' primes, ability scores, and 'class related checks' seems to jive with the skill bundle concept.

Now, you could take this as far as something like Fudge, where you could have a potentially huge (even infinite, if you weren't limited by language) number of 'attributes' (or whatever their called) that a character could roll on to accomplish the same thing. Of course, I'm pretty sure most implementations of Fudge have some way to limit these things and ballance them against each other. It's been years since I read the ruleset, though, so I could be all off...

So back to d20. You could simply combine/narrow the number of skills. You could also keep something like the same number of skills but create a number of sometimes overlapping packages. You could even go so far as to put even more game mechanics into the realm of "skills" - attack, defense, saves, magic. Furthermore, you could even make it so that "skills" that aren't strictly trained only always advance at a minum rate like 1/2 per level or 1/3 per level like "poor" saves. With those minimums and a level structure, you could have a 'classless' or 'skill-based' game that retains the granular 'balance' of D&D/D20...

[slightly off-topic musings]See... in skill/point/dot based games, it can be hard to predict and design fun encounters because an optimized character can be SOO much better at something than another character of the same "point value". If you put some parameters into level-based maximums and minimums thwn you can try to match the assumptions of the (decent) CR/EL system that comes with D&D and - even better - work with the great analysis and tools that Upper_Krust, Bad Axe Games, Cheiromancer, Anubis, and others have created for and/or molder the CR system into.[/musings]

Actually - I am working on something like that. I'm just really interested in how these other guys are doing it, too.

I apologise for any rambliness - I have a fever.