New WotC Article - The Role of Skills

[Klaus]

Interesting - "tiers of competence" is winning an outright majority in the poll, even though no edition of D&D has had such a system*.

[SIZE=-2]*At least not explicitly. Functionally, it can be replicated in 4E by the combination of skill training and the Skill Focus feat.[/SIZE]

Y'know, you're right: "tiers of competence" are easily mimicked by Skill Focus/Trained/Trained + Skill Focus. Just remove the "training" requirement from SF and let it represent a "dabbling" in a skill you are not trained in.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Y'know, you're right: "tiers of competence" are easily mimicked by Skill Focus/Trained/Trained + Skill Focus. Just remove the "training" requirement from SF and let it represent a "dabbling" in a skill you are not trained in.

Might be interesting to reverse the bonuses but then assign additional capability to trained. That is, trained gives you +3 and additional capabilities not available to anyone else. Focus gives you +5 to whatever capabilities the normal person has.

 

[KesselZero]

I'm kind of stuck on the emphasis on auto-successes we've been hearing about from playtests/seminars/etc. There was a playtest report somewhere that said, in effect, "Our rogue's Sneak skill was higher than the kobolds' Perceptions, so he snuck around without making a single roll!"

Does this worry anyone else? I already have to deal with Passive Perception and Insight in 4e, which I think gives players (my players, at least) a bit of a sense of entitlement that they deserve to find all hidden things and detect all lies. (That's an exaggeration, of course, but they often just say to me, "Passive 17!" and expect me to give up information.)

Having all skills work "passively" seems self-defeating. It seems such a system could go in one of two ways in-game. Either I as the DM set the difficulty below the PC's skill rank and they auto-succeed, so there was no point in having a skill involved at all-- or I set it above and they have to roll, so there was no point in having an auto-success rule. I'm not necessarily arguing that there should be no auto/passive mechanism-- I know how dull it can be to roll Perception every five feet down a hallway checking for traps. But it's equally dull to just tell the player where all the traps are. Why even bother putting traps in, then?

Thoughts? Am I missing something about how this system would/should work?

 

[Kingreaper]

Interesting - "tiers of competence" is winning an outright majority in the poll, even though no edition of D&D has had such a system*.

[SIZE=-2]*At least not explicitly. Functionally, it can be replicated in 4E by the combination of skill training and the Skill Focus feat.[/SIZE]

4e is missing the bottom rung, and I quite like the idea of adding a rung below Trained personally.

It's less open-ended, and less fiddly, than skill points, while still more flexible than the 4e system.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Thoughts? Am I missing something about how this system would/should work?

To work well, it probably needs a bit more care around the margins, but a wider array of challenges, than what we saw in either 3E or 4E. This means that it becomes a question of which ones you get for free. Maybe the DCs range from 10 to 20 in a particular adventure, the party is routinely hitting 15 on rolls, but passive bonus has been shrunk enough (by about 5) that only the lower end of the scale is automatic for anyone. Getting another +1 in the skill may mean that the 12 DC is automatic, instead of only 11 or less, but you still have to deal with 13-20.

That is, passive perception and insight in 4E are partially blown up by being fairly generous values mixed with someone in the party having the +5 trained bonus + ability mod, and thus the range of DCs becomes less meaningful.

Also, some of the automatic success would not necessarily be passive. It's more like 3E Take 10, where an active check does not require a roll. You stil need to know to do it.

 

[Kingreaper]

So a dwarf may be really good at smithing, but he still needs to be a MASTER smith to compete with a human master.'

But this may be too complicated for what WotC is looking for here.

To me, that sounds like exactly the sort of thing the Tier System would allow.

Skill points means you have to come up with an arbitrary cut-off for each thing, and people under a certain level can't be that good. With a tier system, there are 3 or 4 options for what is required (pick a tier) and that's it.

The three-tier system, to me, looks like "Apprentice/Journeyman/Master"

 

[TrippyHippy]

To my mind, the reason why D&D originally introduced skills (somewhat reluctantly) was in reaction to the convention established by RuneQuest (and to a degree, Traveller). When they were fully integrated, many people felt a sense of vindication or relief that they had finally been made official rules.

However, on reflection, I'm just not sure that they are truly needed in the game - and certainly not as a non-optional core rule.

D&D3.0 was too fiddly with it's skill ranks that took an age to calculate, made the character sheet ugly and were over specific (Use Rope, etc). 4th edition appreciably brought the number of skills down, but my question is - what is the point of listing, say, 12 broad Skills, when you can have an even shorter list of 6 Ability scores that cover pretty much everything anyway?

People say this is an abstraction, but then so are 'skill lists' (just a more complicated abstraction!). In the real world, we don't need to list our skills in numerical form, and neither do we need to do it in our fantasy roleplaying. D&D has always been a Class and Level based system, rather than a skills based one, and it would definitely bring back a sense of identity if it celebrated this concept rather than shy away from it.

If you have a central mechanic based in some way on integrating the Class choice + Level of the character + Ability scores, (as C&C did, kinda), then this would be the real innovation for D&D. It's not realistic (but then neither are elves and dragons), but it would be fast and fun, in my view.

 

[KesselZero]

@Crazy Jerome : Good points all around, thanks. It's true that part of the problem in 4e comes from the huge point spread in skills, and I do really, really hope that 5e closes the gap between trained/untrained (or however they want to do it) characters. That way a DC 10 Sneak could be automatic for the rogue, easy for the fighter, and iffy for the wizard-- but then the DC 10 Arcana is free for the wizard, easy for the rogue, and tough for the fighter (or something like that). In 4e it's either easy for the expert or impossible for everyone else, which does kinda lead to the Passive-entitlement issue (and the issue of everybody but one PC sitting out a skill check or challenge).

I also like returning to Take 10 as an active choice. I think it's really Passive that I have a problem with, like I have an obligation as DM to track players' skills and tell them when they're missing stuff they should be catching. If the player doesn't think to ask if an NPC is lying, I sure ain't gonna remind him...

EDIT: I wanted to give you some XP, but it said I have to "spread it around," whatever that means.

 

[Kingreaper]

This sentence alone:



is sufficient for me to not want to touch 5E with a 10' pole. Because, you see, in MY GAMES, I will never, ever handle the resolution system by means of ability scores alone. It's simply unacceptable. Ability scores are, in the grand scheme of things, only one component if you're trying to have at least a semblance of verisimilitude in the game.

Please, Rodney, tell me you mis-wrote that sentence. Please tell me that 5E will have an option to not use ability checks for everything.

They're talking about having skills as a bonus to ability scores.

Given as that's... umm... what skills are (in both 3e and 4e) I think you're seeing a far larger difference than is actually there.

All they're really doing is making it possible to have more than one skill list in the same game, by calling things "ability checks" and leaving it to the GM to decide if any skill the PC has is relevant.

 

[KesselZero]

[MENTION=27252]TrippyHippy[/MENTION]: I think the problem people have with going abilities-only is that it gets too general. You say "in the real world, we don't need to list our skills in numerical form," and obvious that's true. But I do know that as a trained guitar player, my manual dexterity is higher than average. I'm best with a guitar in my hands, then there's a trickle-down effect to other manual-dexterity things (for example, I recently busted out the N64 for a game of Goldeneye with two friends against whom I used to be evenly matched, ten years ago. I dominated, and our theory why was that while we'd all stopped playing video games in the meantime, I was still building/using manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination).

ANYWAY the point is to say that my Dexterity score isn't universally high or low. I'm a lousy dancer and acrobat, for example. So based on what we've heard of 5e skills so far, maybe I'd have an average Dex of 10, with a +2 to use my hands and a stacking +2 to playing guitar.