doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
I’m currently playing Legend of Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom, and it’s got me thinking about how I treat skills, and how I am writing them in my system.
In LoZ:ToTK, you get some abilities that let you do things to loose objects, pretty much however you want, within a very broad framework. You can pick something up, rotate it on two axis, move it forward/toward you, or up and down, and stick objects together.
That’s pretty much it. That’s the “skill”.
Just google Tears of The Kingdom Ultrahand build for a visual idea of how far you can take this once the world gives you devices you can attach to things and then turn on.
Similarly, Portal gives you a portal gun. It has a couple simple parameters, and from there it’s just physics and your imagination.
Now imagine you want your TTRPG to treat skills similarly. Some folks see 5e skills as a form of it, but for me it’s better to have at least a more robust description of the sorts of actions you can take with a skill, or what the parameters are.
So for Acrobatics, I’d want a description of the kind of movement it covers, and something like “you can try to move gracefully over obstacles, take a rolling fall instead of landing hard and getting hurt, or perform a gymnastic stunt, or anything similar.”
Paired with a solid general action resolution system, this is all I need to get into play and just be acrobatic.
With magic, if aeromancy allows me to move things, and notes that the difficulty is precision and scale, and the general rules for skills tells me and the GM how to deal with more advanced uses of skills, Aeromancy is now a physics engine skill.
Basically, the crunch is mostly general resolution mechanics, with few if any skills having specific mechanics. Instead you have evocative descriptions of each skill, probably 2-4 paragraphs each, and example Techniques and Spells in the appropriate sections that are specialized uses of skills that both allow simpler play for noobs and show what the system can do in a more interactive way.
With my system, you have some training in a couple dozen skills and specialities (sub-skills that are more specific), but you shouldn’t ever have to open the book to figure out if you can do something with a skill. The list lets you see at a glance, on the first page of your sheet, what you’re good at, okay at, and bad at. Things like unusual finesse, power, or scale, require greater success or spending a resource. These advanced uses can be codified and trained (as in spending downtime and XP) into Techniques and Spells, becoming less costly and more likely to succeed as a result.
Does any of this interest anyone here?
Does anyone’s favorite system do this already?
Could 5e be pushed into this paradigm by making general resolution more transparent and consistent, and less binary, and giving each skill more page space dedicated to what it does? Or do you think D&D is too far away from this?
In LoZ:ToTK, you get some abilities that let you do things to loose objects, pretty much however you want, within a very broad framework. You can pick something up, rotate it on two axis, move it forward/toward you, or up and down, and stick objects together.
That’s pretty much it. That’s the “skill”.
Just google Tears of The Kingdom Ultrahand build for a visual idea of how far you can take this once the world gives you devices you can attach to things and then turn on.
Similarly, Portal gives you a portal gun. It has a couple simple parameters, and from there it’s just physics and your imagination.
Now imagine you want your TTRPG to treat skills similarly. Some folks see 5e skills as a form of it, but for me it’s better to have at least a more robust description of the sorts of actions you can take with a skill, or what the parameters are.
So for Acrobatics, I’d want a description of the kind of movement it covers, and something like “you can try to move gracefully over obstacles, take a rolling fall instead of landing hard and getting hurt, or perform a gymnastic stunt, or anything similar.”
Paired with a solid general action resolution system, this is all I need to get into play and just be acrobatic.
With magic, if aeromancy allows me to move things, and notes that the difficulty is precision and scale, and the general rules for skills tells me and the GM how to deal with more advanced uses of skills, Aeromancy is now a physics engine skill.
Basically, the crunch is mostly general resolution mechanics, with few if any skills having specific mechanics. Instead you have evocative descriptions of each skill, probably 2-4 paragraphs each, and example Techniques and Spells in the appropriate sections that are specialized uses of skills that both allow simpler play for noobs and show what the system can do in a more interactive way.
With my system, you have some training in a couple dozen skills and specialities (sub-skills that are more specific), but you shouldn’t ever have to open the book to figure out if you can do something with a skill. The list lets you see at a glance, on the first page of your sheet, what you’re good at, okay at, and bad at. Things like unusual finesse, power, or scale, require greater success or spending a resource. These advanced uses can be codified and trained (as in spending downtime and XP) into Techniques and Spells, becoming less costly and more likely to succeed as a result.
Does any of this interest anyone here?
Does anyone’s favorite system do this already?
Could 5e be pushed into this paradigm by making general resolution more transparent and consistent, and less binary, and giving each skill more page space dedicated to what it does? Or do you think D&D is too far away from this?
