Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="steenan" data-source="post: 5876490" data-attributes="member: 23240">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 systemGet 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).</blockquote>

Verification