Skill Systems

[Yora]

I am actually a fan of the Dragon Age System: "Dice Roll + Ability" for any activity you'd call a skill, and you can get a +2 or +3 bonus to a specific skill if you specialize in it.

This is very simplistic, but I think it's a very good way to handle it for games which are about characterization, descision making, and exploration. For a game with lots of dice rolling it's certainly unsuitable, but it's a great thing for games in which you are not supposed to think about character builds and your character sheet.

 

[Ariosto]

I disagree with the necessity to have degrees of success and failure -- but you can easily make it so that those who like them can use them and the rest can ignore them.

I like the system in Chaosium's 1st/2nd ed. RuneQuest (and also simpler variations since).

The main thing about that is that it's very loosely coupled. You can buy training in what you want, but in addition you tend to get better at what you do. It's not necessary to use any particulat list of skills, so GMs can lump or split.

 

[Summer-Knight925]

So I've been working and I feel like I've gotten a skill system that is useful and easy.

It uses percents, but rather than trying to roll under your score, you roll and add your percent to the d%/d100

The number you're trying to beat can be over 100.

The reason for using the percentage is simple, you don't add skill points for going up a level, but rather everytime you use the skill, it increases, so that rather than powergaming a character to be really good at picking locks when he's never really picked a lock, you have a character get good at what he actually does during play.

This also allows you to think outside the box and use the skills more often, such as acrobatics. Why run across the snow covered beam and fire an arrow? Because you want the challenge.

Also, you would have weapon skills, rather than taking a -4 for not being proficent with a weapon, you get a bonus for how well trained.

Every 10% is a +1 to attack.
Shields would work similarly, you would have a shield skill and your character's actual skill in using the shield gives you the bonus.

You would have schools of magic have their own 'skills' with percents, so using those you would add the bonus like weapons, this assumes every spell you make a caster roll, this is a mix of 4e's defenses and the caster check from DCC, if you fail with a spell, bad things happen, if you roll a 20, your lightning bolt shot the target back twenty feet off the bridge.

These skills would be the numbers to beat for certain tests, like you try to disarm, you make a weapon's skill check against target's weapon's skill.

With this, I feel the skills would be more realistic as you would get better through using them, if you don't use the skill, it doesn't just get better.

 

[TKDB]

The reason for using the percentage is simple, you don't add skill points for going up a level, but rather everytime you use the skill, it increases, so that rather than powergaming a character to be really good at picking locks when he's never really picked a lock, you have a character get good at what he actually does during play.

In theory this is a great idea, but in practice I suspect it would bog down play with excessive bookkeeping and/or lead to problems with forgetting to mark down the increases you get every time you use the skill.
In a CRPG it would work great (and in fact a similar method is used in such games, notably the Elder Scrolls series), but for tabletop...I'm skeptical.

Definitely run through some extended playtesting before setting that in stone.

 

[Summer-Knight925]

It's no worse than keeping track of XP, plus everytime you use it, you're eager to mark it down, in theory.

I've play tested this a bit and the only problem I have is setting a curve, so that it gets harder.

I'm thinking of something similar to XP, but again, then you're keeping track of a lot and it would bog down play.

I have been messing with that to create a simple equation to represent this, but of course, things are never easy.

 

[TKDB]

It's no worse than keeping track of XP

Given that XP is generally handled at the end of the session rather than in bits and pieces throughout, I would say your idea is definitely worse in that regard. However, it looks like you're definitely giving it the requisite amount of thought, so if it turns out to work fine, go for it!

 

[Wik]

I actually designed a game using that very system you described about three or four years ago, when we did an RPG design contest on these boards. I could probably dig up a copy, though if you did a search for "RPG design contest" on these boards, you might find my entry.

The gist of the game was this (I'm going from memory, I might miss a few numbers):

* all skills started at a Base of 10. This cannot be improved in character creation.
* Characters could have minor skills (+10 bonus), major skills (+20) and expert skills (+30). These applied a bonus to the base skill, but did not actually modify it (this is important).

* Character attributes likewise modified skills scores, from -10% to +30% or something like that. Again, this didn't modify the base score.

* For difficult tasks, you had to roll over the difficulty, but under your score. So, if something had a difficulty of 20, and you had a 53 in the skill, you succeeded on a roll of 21 to 53. For easier tasks, they were always done in increments of 10 to your percentage score.

* You could take two actions per round, with no penalty on either roll (moving is an action). You could take any single action type (shoot a particular gun ,use a particular skill) twice per round max. But you could take additional actions with a penalty (20%, I believe?), or you could take only one action with a commesurate bonus (+20, I believe). So, if you moved and shot your gun twice, it was -20 on both shots. But if you just aimed, it was +20 on the single shot.

* Degrees of success: each 10 points you rolled on the die was one degree of success. So a roll of 03 had no degress of success, while 29 had two degrees. If it was a difficult task, you'd subtract the difficulty from the degrees scored (so if you succeeded on a roll of 52 against a difficulty of 25, you had 5 - 2 = 3 degrees of success). Degrees were traded for additional effects, as decreed by the GM. This wasn't really expanded on in my draft, due to space constraints, unfortunately.

* Opposed Tests: Whoever rolled higher and succeeds, wins. If one guy fails and the other wins, the success is obvious. If both people fail, whoever rolled higher wins. If a degree of success matters, subtract the higher degree of success from the lower if both succeed, or else just count the degrees of the guy who won. If both failed, there is no degree of success.

* The game had no critical success or failures. But 01-05 was an auto success, and 96-00 was an autofailure.

* My favourite part of the system: Whenever you rolled a "0" on a skill check (either the ones or tens column), you had a chance to improve your skill. You did this by roll d100 against your base score in the skill. If you rolled over the base score, you improved the skill by 1 point. This made skills level slower as they improved, but because everyone starts with the same base score in each skill and modifies it through flat modifiers, it meant that the super skilled guys levelled at the same rate as the unskilled guys - but it also allowed for weird quirks wherein the guy who seldom uses a gun found himself levelling it quickly, which I liked.

* I had feats in the game, of a sort - once your skills hit certain threshold levels, you'd unlock additional uses of the skill. In reality, this was a PITA, and if I made the game again, I'd drop it in favour of a traditional talent/feat system. But at the time of designing the game, I couldn't do that, because my main goal was to have character progression occur entirely "in game" and without any awarding of experience points.

Hope this plants an idea. The thing I liked about this system was that there was minimal math, and it encouraged players to use their skills, while still letting people focus on their specialties. It opened up a nice dynamic, too - is it smarter to let your non-focused characters tackle the easier challenges, to "level up" important skills, or should you let the specialists tackle the big tasks, using every chance to improve their most vital skills?

As a downside, because certain skills in the game were more important than others (I find perception, stealth, and knowledge skills get used a lot more in my game, and this game had combat abilities as skills as well), there was the risk of seeing rarely used but still important skills (such as repair or survival skills) not getting the same amount of screen time to improve. This was a design flaw I wasn't able to tackle in my final draft, although it isn't an insurmountable one (and would be easy to fix if the game was allowed to include experience points).

 

[Wik]

Ah. Found it. Like I said, it's not perfect, but at least it's a place to start and mine for ideas.

To be honest, I miss that RPG design contest. It'd be kind of fun to get another one going.

 

[Summer-Knight925]

Given that XP is generally handled at the end of the session rather than in bits and pieces throughout, I would say your idea is definitely worse in that regard. However, it looks like you're definitely giving it the requisite amount of thought, so if it turns out to work fine, go for it!

my group has always taken care of XP right there, rather than at the end, it has never really been a problem.

At the end of the battle, we tally up how many of what we killed or what traps we set off, and then move on, with this concept, you just mark down for that skill, I don't feel like filling in a box or two is really going to hold up play.

 

[TKDB]

my group has always taken care of XP right there, rather than at the end, it has never really been a problem.

At the end of the battle, we tally up how many of what we killed or what traps we set off, and then move on, with this concept, you just mark down for that skill, I don't feel like filling in a box or two is really going to hold up play.

I was really speaking more generally -- D&D's pretty much the only game I've looked at that does XP on a per-monster or per-encounter basis; most use a much looser per-session method.
D&D of course comes down to group preference, though personally I've never played in a group that didn't save XP awards until the end of the session.