Skill Systems

[Summer-Knight925]

As I am currently working on a game system, I have hit the skills section and would like to hear some feedback from the people it is being tailored for.

So if you would please talk my ear off about your skill system preferances, why you like them, what makes them great, and why so-and-so's sucks, please, it would help me to help you.

 

[nomotog]

I guess I can babble on for a bit. I like it when skills have good solid rules on what you can do with them. Like how skills worked in D&D 3e where they out right told you this is your blanacne on snow, this is your balance on a beam, and this is your balance on a snowy beam. Might not be the way that everyone likes it, but it's the way I like it.

 

[TKDB]

The main thing I like to see in a skill system is a rough parity in value of each skill. When a skill that's largely just a point of flavor and is more or less irrelevant to the overall course of events costs the same amount of XP (or whatever your currency of advancement is in the system) as the skills you'll be using countless times throughout the campaign and often determines whether your character lives or dies, there's a problem. You shouldn't need to think too hard to come up with how a skill will be frequently and significantly useful to invest in. It's ok to have skills that are only useful to certain types of characters (such as Perform for bards in 3.x), but make sure every skill has the potential to offer a good return on your investment. This often means that more general is better -- while it may be more realistic for two (or more) related skills to be distinct, if you'd need both of them combined to equal the frequency and/or urgency of usefulness as other skills you could invest in, it might be better to combine the two into a more general skill. Otherwise you're essentially investing twice as much for no real gain.

Also, I'm a big fan of skill synergy mechanics. Even when it's obvious that a given task would rely on a certain skill, there are often other skills that would plausibly play a role as well, and I like it when those related skills can contribute. Ideally, I'd like to see a skill synergy mechanic that scales with how much you advance the contributing skill, so investing more heavily in a related skill gives a greater bonus to the primary skill.

 

[steenan]

My main advice is: aim for simplicity. Unless you want to make the system very tactical, light ruleset will works better than a complicated one.

What does it mean for skills? Just a few ideas (not necessarily to be used together):

1. Binary skills. Either you have a skill or you don't. If you have it, you always succeed in actions that fall under this skill when not in a high-risk situation and you make a check with a reasonable chance of success when you are in direct danger. Without skill you always roll and your chances are low (or even zero, in case of highly specialized skills).
The most important part here is the automatic success in low-risk situations. It saves a lot of time in play and lets people feel their characters are professionals in whatever they are trained in.

2. Professional skills. Instead of dividing skills by actions performed divide them by profession that uses them. You have a "soldier", "scribe" or "sailor" skill - not "bladed weapons", "repair armor" and "use ropes". There is some overlap between different professions and it's a feature, not a bug.
"Professional" skills make character creation much simpler and more intuitive compared to "activity" skills. It also helps avoid situations where characters cannot do what they reasonably should, being who they are, because they can't take all the skills that fit.
Take note that the precise area of expertise that falls under each skill is left for the group to decide.

3. Player-defined skills. Instead of creating a long list of skills, let players define their own, maybe giving a few examples as a base. When two skills come in conflict, give the narrow one a bonus against the more general one - it creates a self-balancing effect and prevents players from creating "all in one" skills.

4. Skills-only system
Get rid of attributes, spells, special abilities etc. Make everything skills. This way, you can use one set of rules to handle much wider range of situations in play. If you use an abstract system, you may even use the same set of rules for each skill, no matter what it represents (so, of course, "fencing" is useful for something else than "cracking codes", but you roll for both in the same way and are balanced if they ever come in a direct conflict).

 

[Grogg of the North]

Allow for things to be handled without having to invest in skills.

For instance, lets say my character wants to open a brewery. Or he's a wine-snob. "How dare you attempt to pass this '38 Elven moon wine as a vintage '26 fey blush!"

In 3.X there's really no real way to do that unless you come up with a weird profession skill use or you dump into Appraise. (I personally don't like Appraise and never use it in the games I run.) Yet 3.X assumes that you're going to be raising your skills each level to help you in the dungeons and things like the above are kinda secondary.

So I guess the big thing is to let a character develop how the player wants without having to tax their skills or feats. I hope that makes sense.

 

[1Mac]

I hope you notice that so far the advice from any one post on this thread is at best only slightly compatible with any other post. That's fine; people have different ideas of what is fun. But my first bit of advice is don't try to please everybody! Whether you want skills to be freeform or codified, trait-like and binary or level-able and continuous; it's all fine, except you can't have it all and will have to decide what kind of skill system you prefer.

Now for some more incongruous advice on skill systems:

-Try to use similar rules for similar skills. I find it cumbersome to, for example, have different sorts of modifiers for balancing, jumping, or riding, when similar conditions would impact all those skills. For my own amusement I recently reworked the Pathfinder skills and discovered I could group skills by type (e.g. movement skills, social skills, knowledge skills, etc.) and use general rules for each type, then describe how each individual skill uses those general rules or varies their application. I found it makes the skills chapter shorter, more cohesive, and easier to understand; and is much better than if each skill is its own subsystem.
-I echo TKDB's point that each skill should have roughly equal value. That value will be somewhat subjective, but something like the classic Profession (underwater basket weaving) will never be used as often as Acrobatics or Bluff. The corollary is to make sure skills have a good, common in-game use. Leave flavorful stuff for another mechanic, if you bother with a mechanical representation at all.
-Make it easy for the GM to adjudicate skill uses by providing generic modifiers to the difficulty of a skill check, though you can also provide some specifics. Something like: "Significant hazard (such as a slippery surface, or blustery wind): +5".
-A neat rule from Iron Heroes: If you use subskills (like the various Perform or Profession skills in d20 games), consider not tracking each skill individually. Rather, let the player buy one point for each subskill, then let each subskill advance at the same rate. For example, a player could spend one point to get Perform (percussion), another to get Perform (strings), and another skill point to advance both subskills by +1.

 

[Wik]

Okay, this is going to be a bit lengthy, but bear with me.

First, skills need to be non-boolean. What I mean by this is that they cannot just be either a flat "succeed or fail" mechanic, but have to have some degree of varying successes - critical successes and failures. I really like savage worlds' version of this, which is simple and the concept of "raises" is perfect. If you can trade in these degrees of success to do things, like make your skill take less time to accomplish, or have a better effect, the more the merrier.

Second, I like the skills to be of two tiers. The first tier are skills that everyone is going to take - things like perception, melee attack, or whatever else. The second tier of skills are things that round out your character and are useful only in certain situations (hacking, bribery, etc). By doing this, it lets you make those cool forger characters without being totally gimped at doing the things that the game revolves around.

Third, I like games that have a quick and easy skill system - no looking at a table to find the DC for the check, no applying fiddly +1 or +2 modifiers, or any of that BS. Something quick that the GM can throw at the group without having to fiddle with the book. And no having skills that have uses set in stone - I don't care if the book says you can use intimidate to terrify bloodied enemies... you're not using that skill on the iron golem!

Fourth, extended skill tests are a great feature of games that have them, and I wish we saw them more often. Essentially, a way to use skills over a period of time that doesn't hinge on one success. Shadowrun does this - you have a certain number of successes, and each success brings down the craft or repair time by a certain incrememnt of time. Love it.

 

[nedjer]

Not that keen on widespread use of skill tests or challenges throughout play - as imo beyond a certain point it means more looking for all the solutions inside the rule set instead of outside the box.

However, in a 'why not include ascending and descending AC?' kind of way I've been testing a slot-in or -out, Old School-ish/ loose skills system for about a month. It's more a sub-subclasses option than a full covers everything 'modern' approach.

Anyway, it's another approach, so by all means have a look. Any comments welcome From here.

 

[Michael Silverbane]

I'm going to talk about some things that I dislike in skill systems, and (hopefully) some ways that those things can be remedied...

I do not like lists of skills with a lot of very similar entries... Knowledge (arcana), Knowledge (history), Knowledge (planes), Knowledge (tactics)... is no good. Instead, I prefer skills with clear, single word names... Cosmology, History, Occult, Tactics...

I do not like for there to be skills that do not have at least a few clear uses. If you're going to bother putting a skill onto a list, at least be good enough to tell us what you (the game designer) think that skill can be used for. For instance, I've seen a lot of skill lists with tactics in it, but not a whole lot of descriptions of how that skill can be used.

I do not like for skills to be a straightjacket delineating what can and cannot be accomplished in the game world. This is more likely to become a problem when there is a clear list of things that can be done with skills... Whether intentional or not, listing the types of things than can be done implies that other things cannot be done. A discussion, with examples and guidelines should be set forth about going outside of the rules as written for skills.

 

[Kannik]

To build on some of the points already here, as my preferred skill type system:

a - ditto on the "Margin of Success/Margin of Failure" aspect of a skill system vs simple pass/fail.

b - design a system that avoids swingyness. Put another way, values should cluster together in such a way that a player has a good sense of what they can do on average with great regularity. A good starting point might be:

A "competently trained" character should succeed on a "moderately challenging" task under "normal" circumstances 75%+ of the time.

I prefer dice systems that generate results that cluster around a particular value. That way you know that taking the value that the dice generate, plus your static modifiers, equals an expected value you can compare to the target numbers for easy, average, extreme, etc checks. You'll usually hit that number, with rare ups and downs -- it makes me feel competent and skilled and lets me plan risk better.

c - use the dice to your advantage: rather than many +s and -s, if you can use the dice (adding, subtracting dice, using different dice types, etc) to account for the modifiers then that's cool. You can also design a system where +/- 3 is the largest modifiers, then it'll keep things simple.

Interested to see what you come up with!

peace,

Kannik