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<blockquote data-quote="Ratskinner" data-source="post: 6089609" data-attributes="member: 6688937">Yes, that's what I was suggesting. Here's the problem with a Musician skill: &quot;Which skill does he roll when he's playing his lute to persuade somebody? Musician or Persuade?&quot; Now, that may not sound like much of a problem, but it immediately leads into &quot;skill stacking&quot; or &quot;synergy&quot; as d20 called it.Basically, when a character attempts something, you have two ways of building the roll: The D&amp;D way is to layer on modifiers from 3 or more various types of character trait, and the....other way(?) The D&amp;D way is much harder to balance, and has the additional burden of making sure that the various traits remain orthogonal to each other within the group and that the groups remain orthogonal to each other. In this system, a character's skill rating is generally seen to represent their amount of training in a certain activity, not their ability to perform that activity. To me, it sounds like you want to go the other way. That is, a relatively small number of skills, each of which covers a lot of ground, but are all orthogonal things that a character might want to accomplish. In this way, each skill represents a character's aggregate ability to accomplish a task. The tweaks just add some variety and spice.Cortex Plus as seen in the Marvel game is the only one I know of that successfully does both. It uses some very unusual dice mechanics, though.As an old Fudge GM, I'm familiar with the problem. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink&nbsp; &nbsp; ;)"&nbsp; data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Since you're planning on having Perks, anyway, I'd leave the specialization burden to them.Taking a step back. I don't know what your motivations are. Is there a reason you aren't adapting FATE or Savage Worlds or some other generic system? It sounds to me like your kinda trying to redo the d20 system &quot;right&quot; to genericize it...and that sounds rather like a fool's errand to me. (Also, to some extent or another, already done with M&amp;M.) I mean, you're kinda re-inventing the wheel, here.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ratskinner, post: 6089609, member: 6688937"] Yes, that's what I was suggesting. Here's the problem with a Musician skill: "Which skill does he roll when he's playing his lute to persuade somebody? Musician or Persuade?" Now, that may not sound like much of a problem, but it immediately leads into "skill stacking" or "synergy" as d20 called it. Basically, when a character attempts something, you have two ways of building the roll: The D&D way is to layer on modifiers from 3 or more various types of character trait, and the....other way(?) The D&D way is much harder to balance, and has the additional burden of making sure that the various traits remain orthogonal to each other within the group and that the groups remain orthogonal to each other. In this system, a character's skill rating is generally seen to represent their amount of training in a certain activity, not their ability to perform that activity. To me, it sounds like you want to go the other way. That is, a relatively small number of skills, each of which covers a lot of ground, but are all orthogonal things that a character might want to accomplish. In this way, each skill represents a character's [I]aggregate [/I]ability to accomplish a task. The tweaks just add some variety and spice. Cortex Plus as seen in the Marvel game is the only one I know of that successfully does both. It uses some very unusual dice mechanics, though. As an old Fudge GM, I'm familiar with the problem. ;) Since you're planning on having Perks, anyway, I'd leave the specialization burden to them. Taking a step back. I don't know what your motivations are. Is there a reason you aren't adapting FATE or Savage Worlds or some other generic system? It sounds to me like your kinda trying to redo the d20 system "right" to genericize it...and that sounds rather like a fool's errand to me. (Also, to some extent or another, already done with M&M.) I mean, you're kinda re-inventing the wheel, here. [/QUOTE]

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