Legends & Lore: Skills

[AbdulAlhazred]

For situation where the focus of the action isn't on searching, I think the right thing to do is to just "say yes" and give the PCs the treasure from the monsters they just killed.

When the situation is focusing on searching for clues or exploration, I adopt a skill challenge approach where - on each search roll - the player gets a search roll and a chance to guess where the clues are. Each place they look, I tell them about the clue they find. If they ultimately succeed in the skill challenge, I tell them the other clues at the location. If they ultimately fail, they only get the clues they were able to find in the meanwhile.

Notably, this works best in a real mystery game where there are a large collection of clues to be gathered from an individual scene.



I think the objective is to allow the players to apply their own skills to the game, while also providing a roll for their character's skills to also be relevant. Yes, a more clever or observant player will be better at using their character's skills, but that's no different than a more tactically minded player being more effective in combat. Personally, I wouldn't want to play in a RPG where player skill at role-playing, problem solving or tactics wasn't relevant to the outcome of the game.

-KS

Interesting. I agree that player skill is simply inevitably going to play a role in any significant scene, and eliminating that isn't either possible or desirable. It is desirable to allow a player to have a PC that is more adept in something than the player is (that is probably the normal case for most PCs and most situations really). So the clever rogue who's tossed 100 rooms in inns in the course of his larcenous lifetime should be pretty adept at doing a quick thorough search, in general. He's probably got a pretty decent Perception check result to demonstrate that aspect of the character. What KS is suggesting seems like it would work fairly well. The character's talent at searching drives success and failure, but the player's creativity and ingenuity in knowing where and when to apply that talent is equally important.

On the other subject of 'Roll First', my theory is to do basically out of combat what naturally happens IN combat. For example in combat:

Player: OK, I am going to attack the orc using my Brute Strike. I roll an 8.
DM: OK, you miss.
Player: Gorgonzola takes a mighty overhand swing with his axe. The orc catches the blow at the top of the swing with his scimitar and they stand with weapons locked together!

Note that the DM could as easily narrate this, but naturally you simply cannot perform this narration before the attack roll is resolved, it makes no sense. The player can't say "I attack with Brute Strike, my axe cleaves into the orc's helmet!" and THEN roll an 8 and miss...

What I notice is that out of combat this is often exactly what happens, something like:

Player: OK, I am going to make an eloquent speech about duty and honor to try to convince the Duke to help us.
DM: OK, make a Diplomacy check.
Player: I roll a 4....

Why is his (presumably high CHA character) making an eloquent speech and failing? There could be reasons, but maybe it would be better like...

Player: OK, I want to convince the Duke to help us.
DM: OK, make a Diplomacy check.
Player: I roll a 4...

NOW he can describe his ham-handed attempt to browbeat the Duke. The player is going to have to engage with his PC's and the Duke's psychology to do that, it might be a whole dialog with the DM taking part of it, or the player might just explain it in 3rd person, or whatever.

Exactly what gets decided before and after the check may also vary a lot depending on the situation.

Yes, it may give the player some agency in some cases. However since the DM probably does the RP of the NPC (in this example) it isn't likely to get out of hand. If the NPC is not well defined, a minor character for instance, then the DM can easily give the player as much rope as he wants, perhaps suggesting some reasons for the success or failure etc. The real point being they each KNOW that the result is either success or failure already and can guide their RP and descriptions based on that. It is pretty hard to do that ahead of the check. It can work, but it often excludes some interesting RP possibilities.

 

[Herschel]

I think that 4e doesn't provide enough weight to the player's role-playing or thought process in skill resolution. Typically, I give a +2, +5 or +10 bonus to the roll, which sometimes effectively generates an auto-success with a skilled character. I think the balance in a game like D&D should be to weight the player's actions (and skills) approximately equally to the character's abilities when determining success or failure.

I completely disagree. One of the things that really drew me to 4E was the non-combat 'role play it out and here's a general skill to apply if you need it' . For example, a player is searching the room. Where is the player searching? If he/she doesn't search in the right placeor the object is hidden, then a passive or active perception check/role comes in to play.

There's also a sliding scale DC for easy/medium/hard if you want to apply a bonus for role playing items.

 

[mudlock]

1) I prefer the "skill ranks" model of 3e to the Trained/Untrained binary switch of 4e. Though the modifications Pathfinder makes are even better.

Bleh!

Sitting around allocating skill points is the worst thing about character creation in 3e and PF, a problem which is (literally) multiplied when making higher-level characters. Burn it with fire. Let me pick my about-four out of less-than-a-score any day over portioning 120 skills points.

Plus there's more than enough spread between characters without making it degrade further at the rate of a full point per level; it's kinda nice that my warlock still, every once in a while, has a CHANCE of beating the shaman on a perception check.

The rest of your points I can get behind, but not this one.

 

[drothgery]

Bleh!

Sitting around allocating skill points is the worst thing about character creation in 3e and PF, a problem which is (literally) multiplied when making higher-level characters. Burn it with fire. Let me pick my about-four out of less-than-a-score any day over portioning 120 skills points.

... especially since making higher-level characters (especially multi-classed characters) made things even worse (I got to the point where if my PC died, his replacement always started as a single-classed character whose Int never changed and had all of his skills maxed out).

• changes to Int did not retroactively grant skill points, so you have to remember exactly which level you changed things at
• when multiclassing, only the class skills of the class you were currently leveling in were class skills

I always thought the 3.x skill system was a bad fit for the rest of the 3.x game; it was a really fine-grained subsystem in a game that wasn't that fine-grained anywhere else (in a pure points based game ala M&M, the d20 skill points system isn't as disconcerting).

 

[Dragonhelm]

Once, I was playing in a campaign with an otherwise very good DM. I was playing a Genasi Swordmage with a very strong lightning and storms theme. We encountered a trap that was basically massive static charges flinging from one rock to the next. We had to figure out how to disarm it so we could safely rest in the area.

I asked the DM if, being an elemental being of lightning, I could use Endurance to try to simply absorb the shock. "No," he told me.

"Okay," I said, "can I use Arcana to try and nullify the energy?"

"No," he told me.

And then the halfling monk said, "I use Thievery," and he rolled a 16, and the DM said, "You succeed."

Had I been DMing that game, I would have said, "Okay, that's just too cool. Make a skill roll and let's see if you do it."

Players should be encouraged to give creative answers, particularly ones that fit in-story and add to the fun of the game. Skills should enhance your ability to do that. They are not a straight-jacket. And there should be varying degrees of success. That's why I'm not a huge fan of 2e's on/off system for skills.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Bleh!

Sitting around allocating skill points is the worst thing about character creation in 3e and PF, a problem which is (literally) multiplied when making higher-level characters. Burn it with fire. Let me pick my about-four out of less-than-a-score any day over portioning 120 skills points.

Plus there's more than enough spread between characters without making it degrade further at the rate of a full point per level; it's kinda nice that my warlock still, every once in a while, has a CHANCE of beating the shaman on a perception check.

The rest of your points I can get behind, but not this one.

Yeah, while technically it is true that there's a 5 point difference between trained and untrained there are a LOT of ways to get bonuses to various skills. There are also a lot of ways to get conditional or one-time bonuses as well. Obviously being trained will make character X 5 points better at skill Y, but in practice it is neither true that trained PCs are always 5 points better than untrained ones, nor that an untrained character won't be very good at a particular skill. Chances of being best in the party at something you aren't trained in is low, but you can easily end up quite competitive. An untrained skill on a good stat where you happen to also have a +2 or even +3 from other sources is not at all unusual. So I don't see a strong need for small incremental training bonuses. Between background and theme alone you can easily be "a little better than average" and background is pretty much a gimme.

 

[LightPhoenix]

You could even design them exactly like normal powers! The "attack" line is just replaced with the "Skill" line, and instead of vs. a defense, it's vs. a DC.

Why limit it to DC? To use Mike's example: his diplomacy charm power could be an at-will with the Attack line Diplomacy vs. Will (for example).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The only actual reason this doesn't work now is A) +5 for being trained is a bit too large for combat uses, and B) there simply aren't items that give an 'enhancement bonus' to skills, the skill bonus items just weren't designed for that.

B could easily enough be rectified, but if skills were going to be truly merged seamlessly into the combat system then training has to be changed some. The issue there is many skills have little or no actual combat applicability (I can't see using History vs Will as an attack, it would certainly be quite unusual!). The existing skill training feat system works pretty well for something that won't be used in combat, so do we just end up with some skills being shifted over to an implementation that is more like your attack bonuses? If you change them all, then a lot of stuff has to change a bit.

I think in the long run it is a good design concept. It probably won't fit in really with 4e, but 5e could perhaps run with it. I think one thing that would make it easier would be ditching ability score bumps. I really was never fond of that little bit of 4e design, and I think it actually is the root of a lot of the 'math issues'.

 

[vagabundo]

Why limit it to DC? To use Mike's example: his diplomacy charm power could be an at-will with the Attack line Diplomacy vs. Will (for example).

See Starwars Saga Edition for why this is not a good idea.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Why limit it to DC? To use Mike's example: his diplomacy charm power could be an at-will with the Attack line Diplomacy vs. Will (for example).

Well, in that case, Will becomes the DC.

We can already do this a little with Intimidate, but it requires a bloodied enemy and they get a huge bonus, making it very impractical.

But yes, powers like that are basically already at use in my home games.