Thourne
Hero
You skipped right past Chartmas...I mean Rolemaster to Palladium?Palladium is the system you're looking for.
What's Your "Sweet Spot" for a Skill system?
Celebrim
Legend
So, my main considerations for a skill system are:
1) Space spanning - Does everything that a character would try to do have an obvious choice of a skill that would cover it? This is pretty obvious. Players should be able to tell from the skill list what sort of things they'll be called on to do, and whatever the players attempt should have some sort of skill that covers it.
2) Discrete - Does each skill represent a truly separate area of skill? Skills should not overlap, nor should a skill be built around something that can also be covered by a combination of other skills such that a person who has all the skills we would expect going into doing X find themselves unable to do X because it has its own skill. For example, if 'Knowledge of the Law' is a skill and 'Bargaining' is a skill and 'Oration' are skills, then Lawyering probably shouldn't be a skill. Lawyering should probably in such a situation be a 'Feat' or 'Trait', ei "Gain a bonus to skill use when you use them in in a professional legal situation." and not a replacement for the discrete skills themselves.
3) Independent - This is like discrete but is the additional test that advancing each skill is not connected to another one so that it makes sense that you could advance one without advancing any of the rest. For example, I very much dislike it when a system has a completely separate skill for using clubs, hammers, and maces as weapons. It doesn't feel to me sensible that I could get very good at using a baseball bat as weapon in combat, and advancing that skill would not make me more comfortable with a mace than a person who had never held a swung bludgeoning weapon of any sort.
There are a ton of ways you could cut apart the skill space into discrete and independent pieces, and there are skills that may or may not be relevant to every setting, but every skill system should be trying to obey those three things. Notably GURPS doesn't obey the above considerations and it results in a system that is highly arbitrary and almost unusable because it has to kludge together so many solutions to the problems involved.
As a practical matter, the number of skills in a skill system that obeys the above constraints tends to be neither small nor large. If it's too small then either skills aren't space spanning, or the skills are so abstract that they aren't discrete. If it's too large, then the skills tend to be neither discrete nor independent.
Where I tend to cut the talent space up is when you can raise the objection that you can imagine a person who is good at X but terrible at Y, then this tends to imply they are separate skills.
Note that the additional complexity of having a skill system isn't required. You can just get by with abilities and traits. However, if don't have a skill system then your ability system has to meet the three requirements above.
1) Space spanning - Does everything that a character would try to do have an obvious choice of a skill that would cover it? This is pretty obvious. Players should be able to tell from the skill list what sort of things they'll be called on to do, and whatever the players attempt should have some sort of skill that covers it.
2) Discrete - Does each skill represent a truly separate area of skill? Skills should not overlap, nor should a skill be built around something that can also be covered by a combination of other skills such that a person who has all the skills we would expect going into doing X find themselves unable to do X because it has its own skill. For example, if 'Knowledge of the Law' is a skill and 'Bargaining' is a skill and 'Oration' are skills, then Lawyering probably shouldn't be a skill. Lawyering should probably in such a situation be a 'Feat' or 'Trait', ei "Gain a bonus to skill use when you use them in in a professional legal situation." and not a replacement for the discrete skills themselves.
3) Independent - This is like discrete but is the additional test that advancing each skill is not connected to another one so that it makes sense that you could advance one without advancing any of the rest. For example, I very much dislike it when a system has a completely separate skill for using clubs, hammers, and maces as weapons. It doesn't feel to me sensible that I could get very good at using a baseball bat as weapon in combat, and advancing that skill would not make me more comfortable with a mace than a person who had never held a swung bludgeoning weapon of any sort.
There are a ton of ways you could cut apart the skill space into discrete and independent pieces, and there are skills that may or may not be relevant to every setting, but every skill system should be trying to obey those three things. Notably GURPS doesn't obey the above considerations and it results in a system that is highly arbitrary and almost unusable because it has to kludge together so many solutions to the problems involved.
As a practical matter, the number of skills in a skill system that obeys the above constraints tends to be neither small nor large. If it's too small then either skills aren't space spanning, or the skills are so abstract that they aren't discrete. If it's too large, then the skills tend to be neither discrete nor independent.
Where I tend to cut the talent space up is when you can raise the objection that you can imagine a person who is good at X but terrible at Y, then this tends to imply they are separate skills.
Note that the additional complexity of having a skill system isn't required. You can just get by with abilities and traits. However, if don't have a skill system then your ability system has to meet the three requirements above.
ThorinTeague
Creative/Father/Professor
I don't know about Chartmas...?You skipped right past Chartmas...I mean Rolemaster to Palladium?
Thourne
Hero
Chartmaster was the lovingly given nick name for Rolemaster back in the day.
Any game you have seen that you though had to have the most charts, if it wasn't a Rolemaster book, trust me you were wrong.
Don't get me wrong we loved the game.
On skills, there were over 300 of them without counting languagues. Each language was it's own separate skill on top of that.
ThorinTeague
Creative/Father/Professor
Ohhh ok I get it now. Thanks for the info.
Shardstone
Hero
Skills have inky been fun for me in Burning Wheel. Forking is cool. d20 games that use skills, or general percentile skills. usually leave me feeling cold. The difference? Forking presents a game inside the skills. The creative combos forking creates makes for interesting fiction. More so then the typical, do I do the thing yes or no.
The discussion has moved on a bit, but I wanted to circle back and thank @Jd Smith1 and @JohnSnow for the conversation on page 3 regarding the skills in my homebrew system. I made some adjustments for yesterday’s session. I’m happier with where things are now.
What I ended up doing is reworking the social skills and dropping some of the more specialized skills. Cartography got moved into a speciality (as a camp activity that you can take and improve). Riding is gone for now, though it may come back as a combat speciality. Specialities are a form of character customization that use the same numeric progression but come with their own effects baked into the specialty.
Social skills became Coercion, Deception, Negotiation, Persuasion, Rapport, and Seduction. Manipulation is gone. It was too overloaded while Deception in the previous round. I considered renaming Seduction to Enticement, but I think I’ll stick with the name for now. It covers tempting people into doing stuff they want but have reasons not to do. Rhetoric is also gone. I don’t think it makes sense with the more directed social skills. If you’re trying to persuade people, then you’re going to use Persuasion. The goal is to keep things simple and obvious from an adjudication standpoint.
For thief skills, I renamed Burglary to Tampering. If you want to mess with locks and traps, you’ll use Tampering or Sabotage depending on what you are trying to do. Smash it up? Sabotage. Circumvent or redirect? Tampering. My goal was to find something that was oriented towards defeating physical security measures. I feel the current skills handle that nicely now. For something like “picking pockets”, you’ll have to contextualize what you are doing, and the method (skill) should follow from that.
Performance got renamed to Entertainment. I’m not a big fan of it, but I wanted to make it clear it was for putting on shows, playing music, dancing, and that kind of thing. Otherwise, I think there could be confusion between “Performance” and “Rituals”.
Social skills became Coercion, Deception, Negotiation, Persuasion, Rapport, and Seduction. Manipulation is gone. It was too overloaded while Deception in the previous round. I considered renaming Seduction to Enticement, but I think I’ll stick with the name for now. It covers tempting people into doing stuff they want but have reasons not to do. Rhetoric is also gone. I don’t think it makes sense with the more directed social skills. If you’re trying to persuade people, then you’re going to use Persuasion. The goal is to keep things simple and obvious from an adjudication standpoint.
For thief skills, I renamed Burglary to Tampering. If you want to mess with locks and traps, you’ll use Tampering or Sabotage depending on what you are trying to do. Smash it up? Sabotage. Circumvent or redirect? Tampering. My goal was to find something that was oriented towards defeating physical security measures. I feel the current skills handle that nicely now. For something like “picking pockets”, you’ll have to contextualize what you are doing, and the method (skill) should follow from that.
Performance got renamed to Entertainment. I’m not a big fan of it, but I wanted to make it clear it was for putting on shows, playing music, dancing, and that kind of thing. Otherwise, I think there could be confusion between “Performance” and “Rituals”.
Jd Smith1
Hero
Tampering is a much more evocative term, IMO.
Darth Solo
Explorer
Used to be GURPS but Mutants & Masterminds 3e hits the spot: open enough to handle what they're supposed to without being applicable to everything.
nm, already answered
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