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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 5522655">Usually I think about the kind of game I want to make in flavor terms. With TN the concept was gritty, mundane, real-world stuff, but light enough that you could focus on the characters, drama and RP without having to master a complicated system or look things up too much. So we made a list of all the things counter terrorism agents would need to be able to do, then we created our skill list from there. For example we had on our list that agents needed to be able to re-construct crime scenes, analyze evidence, build criminal profiles. These all became one skill: Forensics. In each group we were also aiming for 6 skills; but were willing to violate this rule if need be (which i think was important).  But we kind of developed the skill groups and the skills themselves organically all at once. It just became clear as we made the list that there were about 7 skill groups. In the end I think we hit a nice middle ground. Not too many skills, but not too few. For groups we settled on Combat, Defense, Physical, Mental, Specialist, Vehicle and Knowledge. In later games we eliminated vehicle and brought those skills into the Physical group.However I worked on a game many years ago where our goal was to streamline as much as humanly possible, and to have the whole game governed by a simple easy to remember set of guidelines that apply to every situation. In that game we had a total of 6 Combat Skills and 6 Non Combat Skills, with four attributes. It was much leaner and it worked well for what we wanted to achieve. In that case we took a more mechanical path to our skill selection. We knew each skill would be fed by two attributes (so your final score was Skill Rank+Attribute 1+Attribute 2. In the end we knew this meant 12 combinations, so 12 skills.</blockquote>

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