Skills By Social, Environmental, and Character Class

[mythusmage]

What skills would be appropriate for the following classes.

Social: Peasant, Commoner, Noble.

Environment: Savage, Barbarian, Civilized

Character: Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, Rogue.

Note: Each may have subclasses.

This is for the basics. A Paladin (as an example) would have skills from Fighter and Cleric. A Cowboy would be a Commoner Civilized Horse Nomad, otherwise a Commoner Barbarian Fighter variant.

BTW, instead of telling me about the neat skills from thus and such book I probably don't have, how about listing those skills and posting their mechanics? They should be OGC after all, and you might sell somebody on the book.

 

[Nyaricus]

Well, what do these catergories include for their skills, first off?

Peaseants might have craft, but not Craft: Alchemy - so how do you draw the lines?

After you flesh this out, the rest will come easily

 

[airwalkrr]

That's not a bad idea. I'm not too clear on what you mean for the distinctions to be however. For instance, what separates the peasant from the commoner? As a scholar of medieval history, I would have to say peasants usually WERE commoners, although the term peasant might mean something very different depending on where you came from. A Russian peasant from the 15th century for instance was a serf, bound to the land and inclined to do the will of whichever boyar (lord) owned the land. An English peasant from the same century on the other hand could often move freely and swear fealty to a different lord if one lord didn't suit his fancy, although the next lord might be as cruel as the first. Peasant could also refer to both a city laborer or a village farmer. So a bit more distinction might be in order.

Perhaps Rural Peasant, Urban Peasant, and Noble would be a better distinction. Even still, there are two other classes you might want to consider, if you are looking to reflect a relatively accurate (except for magic and monsters) medieval society anyway. Slaves were often a small, but significant part of many medieval societies. In some societies, slaves were even the backbone of that society's labor or they fulfilled some other important role (consider Russian serfdom as a form of slavery or the Greek slaves of the Romans). The other class you might want to add is Middle Class. Although relatively small in most societies until the advent of free market economics, the middle class nevertheless fulfilled an important role in many societies as bankers, scholars, and scribes, tasks to which the nobility did not wish to stoop and the peasantry was ill-equiped to handle.

Also, I think you may find the term savage and barbarian are roughly synonymous, at least the way most people use it. Perhaps you meant to say Uncultured and Wild, Cultured but Wild, and Cultured and Sedentery. That is being a bit obtuse of course, but just because a group of people lives in the wild does not mean they lack civilization. Many native Americans had very highly developed cultures and were quite civilized, although not in the sense that many Europeans thought. Hence, they dubbed them savages. But the Aztecs built the largest pyramid on earth. It takes a lot of organization for a society to accomplish something like that.

Anyway, just some thoughts you might want to consider. As an obsessive compulsive exacting neat-freak, I feel I would provide an inadequate answer if I attempted to address your question about skills without a bit of clarification.

 

[Nyaricus]

airwalkrr has it right on a few point there; some a a bit similar, really.

You might also want to have technology levels - stone, bronze, iron, midieval, renaissance. Raven Crowking, another frequent user on these boards, features this in his campaign setting, I know for a fact, and would mesh well with this...

 

[mythusmage]

Okay, let's rename the social classes lower, middle, and upper. For now the technology is medieval, with magical influence going back to when specimens of the genus Homo exhibited magical talents. Environment Class gets renamed society Class. And I've added Profession. So...

Class Class: Lower Class, Middle Class, and Upper Class.

Society Class: Savage, Barbarian, and Civilized.

Character Class: Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, and Rogue.

Profession: A whole bunch.

To give you some idea of how skills, and character improvement, work...

Each class has native skills. These are those skills a character learns as part of being a member of that class. Lower Class characters have basic Crafting skills. Trapmaking: Weirs for example. Skills native to another class cost more to learn, and thus take more time. Thus for a Lower Class character learning Etiquette/Social Graces can take up to four times as long depending on factors such as Society Class, Character Class, and Profession.

So a Lower Class/Savage/Cleric would learn Rogue skills at a lower cost than an Upper Class/Civilized/Fighter (Knight) would.

The time it takes to learn the skill depends on how fast the character earns experience, and how much experience each point needed to learn the skill costs.

This is where it gets complex.

For this d20 variant I started with the premise it takes a base 1,000 experience points to earn a level. All levels. Characteristic range I changed to 1-20. The player rolls 2d8 plus a d6 and subtracts 2 from the result. Assign as desired. Each Character Class has one or more governing characteristics. For a Fighter it would be Strength. For a Paladin it would be Strength and Wisdom.

How many experience points it takes to earn a level depends on the Governing Characteristic(s) for the Character Class. The lower the Governing Characteristic is, the more experience it takes. To determine that divide 1,000 by the Governing Characteristic as a fraction of 20. So for a fighter with a Strength of 18, 1,000 experience points would be 18/20th (9/10th) of the actual score needed. (1,053 to earn a level in the case of our Fighter.)

Now we introduce Skill Cost. The points it takes to earn a rank in a skill. The harder a skill is to learn, the more points it costs. Skills also have a governing Characteristic or Characteristics. Yes, a lower Governing Characteristic means it costs more to learn a skill. Spears are relatively easy to learn, so for this post I'll assign a base Skill Cost of 5 to the skill. For our Fighter that 5 points is 9/10th of the true cost (Strength being the Governing Characteristic), or (thanks to rounding) 5 points.

At this point I need to decide on how many Skill Points a character gets everytime he earns a level. You divide the character's real Experience Point cost by the number of Skill Points he gets, then multiply that by how many points it takes to raise a skill. Means more research and more thinking and hard mental stuff like that there.

In case you're wondering, when all's said and done yes, I do get rid of levels. All this talk about levels and experience needed to gain them, and I wind up dumping levels all together. I am evil. But it is necessary to explain how I arrive at the experience cost for improving skills for individual characters.

Don't know if this helps any, but I thought you'd like to know some of my thinking.