NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 8133354" data-attributes="member: 32740">IMO the problem with all skill systems for D&D (that I've seen) is that nobody considers anything but a SINGULAR resolution mechanic, regardless of the actual kind of skill or sort of actions being performed with it.  The assumption is that if it's a skill at all then it's EXACTLY like every other skill in your chances of success/failure based on a single governing attribute, and regardless of what kind of action that USING the skill actually involves.  Some really need lots of modifiers, others none at all, and some actions permitted by skills should need no check whatsoever - simply having the skill AT ALL permits doing whatever the skill is.But actual skills just don't work so simplistically and that's why skill systems tend to suck.  Since 1E AD&D skill systems have wanted to insert themselves into D&D gameplay and make USE OF SKILLS the driving focus of the game.  In the 1E DMG they were actually just a list of about 20 which were labeled as "Secondary Skills", and it was left up to the DM to actually decide what HAVING a particular skill would allow a character to do.  They were a means of developing some depth, especially background, for a PC and not something generally perceived as being able to leverage into common gameplay advantages.Furthermore it places all skills on a value par with each other.  That is, a character gets skill points to spend, but all skills improve in the same way, at the same rate and at the cost of improvement of another skill.  Put skill points into... sneaking and you can't improve your basketweaving, or diplomacy, or anything else.  And all those skills are treated as being of EQUAL value and equivalent time and opportunity for improvement.  You only get limited choices for improvement of skills regardless of what a given skill would really require in time, effort, practice and study in order to get better at it.  That's all fine and well for making skills an important element of gameplay that can then be kept regulated and controlled, but it's not how things really work - which makes the skill system feel unrealistic, artificial, and clumsy (because it is). Some skills are important and critically useful on a routine basis, others are NOT important and seldom, if ever, really come into play.  That makes those varying skills UN-equal and thus less useful as a game mechanic for ongoing character development.Tell me you're going to develop a skill system that kicks them back to their place of decidedly SECONDARY importance and I'll pay much closer attention.  Otherwise it strikes me as just rearranging deck chairs. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Tell me each INDIVIDUAL skill will be treated individually in all respects - what makes a PC good at it, how they can get better at it, what you can/can't do with it, what your chances of success are of doing this or that with it, whether its results are binary - success/fail - or that you actually have degrees of success/failure in utilizing a given skill, and I'll be far more interested than if you're trying yet another way to make skills homogenous both mechanically and descriptively, especially just for the sake of making ability scores more equivalent to each other.But that's just me and I'm old and cranky.</blockquote>

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