D&D 5E What I think I'm going to do about skills

[The Crimson Binome]

Why do skills and backgrounds need to be balanced?

That's true, and it's a third option which I neglected to mention - you could just let some characters who happen to have a background more in-line with the campaign just shine in the majority of situations, leaving any fish-out-of-water character as high-and-dry and not-contributing.

I was ignoring that solution is "not desirable", given how many people appreciate for a game to show some sense of balance. After all, it takes much less effort to un-balance a game than to re-balance it.

 

[Derren]

I was ignoring that solution is "not desirable", given how many people appreciate for a game to show some sense of balance. After all, it takes much less effort to un-balance a game than to re-balance it.

Again, what is desirable to have a balance between backgrounds? When the campaign is naval themed do you change the bonus of the sailor background to make it balanced with others?
What are backgrounds to you anyway? Another choice to optimize your character which has to be balanced against all other choices?

For me a background is there to flesh out a character whit skill bonus being secondary. Want to make a (ex)sailor character? Use the sailor background then, no matter how powerful the skills would be. But the constant drive for balance shifts the idea of backgrounds away from that and more towards the mentioned choice for optimization.
Let powergamers be powergamers. They will always find a way to bend the system and instead focus on having the game letting people create living, breathing characters which seamlessly fit into the world. And you can't do that when for everything applied to the character you worry about balance first.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

What are backgrounds to you anyway? Another choice to optimize your character which has to be balanced against all other choices?

It's two things: 1) A way to flesh out the character, beyond just class and race, and 2) A way to let the character interact with the setting in a manner beyond what a normal person could do. To be a sailor says a lot about the individual, and sailors can generally do things that landlubbers can't necessarily do. Those two aspects are linked.

If you're running a naval campaign, would you prefer the situation where most of the party has a similar background? It can be fun to do a themed game, but I think it's fair to say that the traditional method is to bring in a diverse cast of characters, since it builds more contrast between them. We should not go out of our way to encourage multiple redundant backgrounds throughout the party.

Is it good and desirable that the same one or two characters are the only ones making ninety percent of the non-combat checks? I would posit that it's less fun for whoever is consistently sitting on the sidelines, never being able to contribute to that half of the game.

So it makes sense, to me at least, that we should try to make different backgrounds more useful in situations where they aren't directly relevant. You lose a little bit on the realism (where you would obviously want everyone in a naval campaign to know how to run a ship), but you more than make up for it with character variety.

 

[Li Shenron]

I will admit that I am also playing in a Fate game right now... where your background (through Aspects) are the absolute focus of who your character is and how your character mechanically plays (so for example if you are a 'Thief in service to his god'... then almost everything you do in the game is reflected through that prism.) And I've found that to be much more satisfying a play experience for me. And it makes me hope against hope that the rumors of 'Aspect-like' modules appearing in the game that you swap out the basic skill system for, do in fact show up. Because I really want being a Sailor, or a Blacksmith, or a Soldier, or a Nobleman, or a Guide to have an organic and cultural, emotional, and spiritual impact on who your character is, rather than just the name of a batch of skills you gain small bonuses for.

I'm not sure I understood what you are actually going to do about skills (as per the title)

Are you going to port the Fate skill system into your 5e games, to replace the standard skills system?
Is it possible to use it as-is, or what kind of adjustments does it need?

 

[TerraDave]

I do kinda like skill lists.

The one "skill based" game I have played is CoC, and the the link between profession and skills is straight forward...but the whole point is that your, say, antique dealer can then use some of those skills to get himself into big, big trouble.

 

[Derren]

Is it good and desirable that the same one or two characters are the only ones making ninety percent of the non-combat checks? I would posit that it's less fun for whoever is consistently sitting on the sidelines, never being able to contribute to that half of the game.

So 90% of all skill checks in your game can only be done by people with the correct background?

 

[The Crimson Binome]

So 90% of all skill checks in your game can only be done by people with the correct background?

No, because I use the skills method recommended by Next, so anyone who has the skill is allowed to add their bonus to the check - regardless of whether they got that skill from their class or background, or what their background is. When you try to gather food by fishing, it's a Wisdom (Survival) check rather than a Wisdom (Sailor-related-background) check; and when you try to balance across a storm-tossed deck it is a Dexterity (Acrobatics) check rather than a Dexterity (Sailor-related-background) check.

 

[The Human Target]

Why do skills and backgrounds need to be balanced?

Good games try for balance.

 

[Derren]

Good games try for balance.

How about some arguments to back that up? Why is balance necessary for backgrounds? Why needs a former professional basket weaver to be as useful as a sailor in a naval campaign?
And if you strife for balance, lets remove all character customization. Thats prefect balance.

 

[LostSoul]

How about some arguments to back that up? Why is balance necessary for backgrounds? Why needs a former professional basket weaver to be as useful as a sailor in a naval campaign?
And if you strife for balance, lets remove all character customization. Thats prefect balance.

I think it depends on how you define balance.

To me, balance means that the players have to make decisions where no course of action is obviously better than another - their choices are balanced. (It's important to note that there must be a difference in the outcome - otherwise there's no decision to be made.)

If you want players to make meaningful decisions about their backgrounds during character creation - which is not necessary to play the game - then you'll want to balance the choices the players make.

That's my argument for balance.

*

The way I run my D&D hack, there's a limited list of skills. Backgrounds, physical or personality traits, and training skills are pretty open-ended. Backgrounds are limited by the setting (raised in the only civilized city; refugee from a ruined city or town/village; savage raised by barbarians or something more exotic - like wolves; and stranger in a strange land, which covers earth-men in rocket ships and characters out-of-time). Training skills (apprentice, student, guild-trained, manual labourer) tie you to someone else.

Racial and class skills are more codified and detailed.

A note about racial skills: humans have "social class" and the other races have skills that sound a lot better: elves who can see forever, dwarves who can talk to stone, Eladrin who can remember past lives (like 4 skills in one). Running the game, though, a human PC who took "Middle Class" as his racial skill got a lot more out of it than the dwarf who could talk to stone. (Most of that is probably the setting - human-centric.)

There isn't a list of "DCs" or things you can do with the skills. You state your action and, if the skill is obviously associated to your action, you get a bonus to your roll (or two bonus dice, which is what I'm using now). If it's loosely associated, you get a smaller bonus (or one bonus die).

This is nice because you don't get players saying, "I use Bluff on him"; you get the player acting out the bluff and then they pull out a bonus die or two (depending on the bluff) for being Trained in the Thieves Guild. It's bad because players feel too much pressure to justify the bonus skill dice. (The guidelines to getting bonus dice are supposed to be relaxed so that players don't feel too much pressure to justify them, but obviously that's not the case; oh well.)