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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5771730" data-attributes="member: 54877">It is a loose concept from modular design ideas, with implications for user friendly controls and understanding. Let's say that you want to support roughly these five options in a system: <ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">No "skills"; use ability checks to resolve skill attempts (ala early D&D).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Use ability checks for main adventuring stuff, but something like "non-weapon proficiencies" for isolated things that not everyone would know (ala later AD&D).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">A handful of simple skills (ala 4E) geared toward adventuring; a few "feats" to supplement.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">A more expansive list of skills covering a lot of what a character could do, but still in relatively simple, coarse terms; more feats; possibly some simple extensions for crafting and the like (ala 3.5).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">A detailed list of skill meant to cover what characters can do, in detail, with all kinds of special rules for enchanting, alchemy, training animals, etc--probably beyond what feats can support (ala some weird Rolemaster/RuneQuest supplement to 3E).</li> </ol>Now, obviously, you could write five complete skill systems, make sure that all of them work with the way you do ability scores, magic items, etc. But that is going to be a bear, quickly, for you to test and for the players to grasp. (And even with a dial, might be too much. It is only an example.) The dial says that you find the common factors, factor those out into a core piece. And then you find extraneous stuff that isn't really part of the dial, and you put it to the side.  This means that none of these options is going to work exactly as it did in the cited examples. So don't read "non-weapon proficiencies" as exactly like the late AD&D thing, but something roughly similar in scope and weight and detail that works with the base mechanics. With a game on paper, there is only so far you can go here, but you can vastly simplify the decisions for the DM/group. For example, you may have a huge list of skills, feats, etc. to cover 4 and 5. But they don't tell you to go through that list and pick out the ones you want. Instead, if you set the dial to "3", use the ones marked for that setting.  Also, keep in mind this is probably an example that is way too ambitious. That setting 5 is too much, too far. You can see that everything needed to support that is almost useless for everyone else, where as people might be quite happy to blend 2 and 3 or 3 and 4. So stuff like those details doesn't belong on the dial, most likely, but would exist as a modular option to replace the whole skill system (if you did it at all).</blockquote>

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