Why I Hate Skills

[Bill Zebub]

I think there is a lot of inertia in adventure design -- especially for games that go for that "old school" feel. I love nothing more than an adventure that surprises me with cool ideas and well designed challenges for the players.

Maybe I should stop pontificating and write an adventure the way I think it should be done. Hmm?

I haven't run a ton of Dragonbane, so I don't know how good its adventures are overall.

This was a 3rd party adventure. The official stuff is really good, although it does have the same kind of skill use.

 

[Bill Zebub]

No argument there.

I haven't played Dragonbane, but by your description in initial post, only way to raise skill is by rolls. So game design incentivises players to roll as much as they can. It also ties into adventure design in 2 ways. 1) It's easier to write "Room contains secret door, DC X Awarness rolls reveals them" than write few sentences of clues for players to pick up. Ideally, good adventure would have both though. 2) Since only way to raise skill is by rolling and hoping for that 1/20 that gives you opportunity for skill raise roll, you need to put generous opportunities for players to actually roll their skills.

I think it's pretty common to see things like traps and secret doors as accessories or decorations to the adventure. A shift in mindset so that the one secret door and the one trap are as much a part of the adventure as are the boss and the treasure would do wonders.

 

[dbm]

That sounds a bit like Shadowdark.

Do skills have a level that increases (e.g., allocate points to the categories) or is it binary: your character either has it or they don't?

Yes to both. There is a numerical value which grants points which can be spent for enhanced results. But you always count as capable in that skill, even when you points are fully spent.

 

[bsss]

For secret doors, my preferred solution, although it's a lot of work, is to telegraph their presence so that observant players search in the right place, in which case they automatically discover it. That could be as obvious/immediate as a draft, or footprints that end mysteriously, but my most successful ones...the secret doors that still get talked about by the group...are when the players figure out there must be a secret room somewhere and it takes some work to figure out where, and where the entrance could be, and then more work to figure out how to open it. I've had players cheering when I say, "...click..."

It takes caring about maps (which can be a big ask depending on the overall shape of the game), but my favorite iteration of this is "we need to find something we can't find, and our maps make it look like there should be a room somewhere around... here". Really ties a bunch of dungeon concepts together.

Dungeons are cool, and I agree that going through a dungeon should be about more than just making skill checks, even as I think skills themselves are also good.

 

[Fenris-77]

I think there is a lot of inertia in adventure design -- especially for games that go for that "old school" feel. I love nothing more than an adventure that surprises me with cool ideas and well designed challenges for the players.

It's funny you should say that because I find that a lot of old school adventures are way better about this that some other games. Here I'm talking about good OSR writing mind, not just old school adventures in general.

Your last sentence is the real key. Challenges for the players. Not the character sheet.

 

[Fenris-77]

This was a 3rd party adventure. The official stuff is really good, although it does have the same kind of skill use.

This era of self-publishing is great in many ways, but it also means that places like DTRPG are stuffed to the gills with useless cruft. Some of the cruft is pretty enough to pass in a dim light. C'est la vie.

 

[TwoSix]

(And I don't really want to bash the adventure we were running. It was a good adventure in a lot of ways, it just had these meaningless skill checks sprinkled around. As so many adventures do.)

I mean, they aren't meaningful in the scope of the adventure, and in being an actual determiner of a real "success-failure" fork in the road.

They're useful in the context of "we designed this game around a long, detailed skill list; if we don't make the players roll skill checks a lot, they're going to figure out this long, detailed skill list doesn't actually mean anything."

 

[Reynard]

Challenges for the players. Not the character sheet.

I don't believe those things are mutually exclusive. You can certainly designs systems where the players have to come up with clever solutions while using what's on their character sheets. And a "GM may I" style system is not better than a "I roll perception" style system if the challenges are boring, arbitrary and/or inconsequential.

 

[kronovan]

I've been playing Dragonbane this weekend, and it reminds me of why I hate skill systems.

For any Fantasy themed TTRPG, if I don't like the skills system I propose to the players that we use 13th Age backgrounds instead. Mostly because I've found 13A backgronds to work very well, albeit I always give players 11 points to spend on them.

The adventure we were playing had a lot of things like:
"A successful Awareness roll reveals the outlines of the hidden door..."
"They can find the hidden trap door with a successful Spot Hidden roll..."
"With a successful Myths & Legends check they recognize the mural as..."
"The inscription can be read with a successful Languages check..."

All of this is easily handled by 13A backgrounds and I can think of a number of backgrounds that would cover more than one of them. To make moving to backgrounds more doable, I just create a table where I list the TTRPG's skills in the 1st column and then backgrounds that could substitute for them in the 2nd. I'll always consider the backgrounds detailed in the 13A CRB or the 13 Ways companion, if I've got some players that are challenged to create a complete set. It's typically only 3 to 5 backgrounds, so that doesn't happen often.

First, there's all this "me-tooism" going on, where EVERYBODY wants to roll to see if they can read the inscription. I know some GMs solve this by saying that only one person gets to roll, calling that the best attempt, and in a lot of games whoever has the highest skill becomes the point person. But in games where rolling is a chance to advance, everybody wants to be that person.

This to me is the worse aspect of skills - they often result in a skills contest among players. It's what I disliked most about 3e and PF1e, which seemed to result from a skills lists that's too long for which PCs can only become accomplished in a minority. I don't mind longer skill lists as much in SciFi TTRPGs/settings, because there can often be tech and other tools to resolve challenges. Having recently run a number of OSE adventures, I'm starting to feel that a shorter list of mostly # in 6, d6 skills are preferable. That just seems to encourage more of an emphasis for resolving problems by narrative.

Ideally though for Fantasy settings, I'd prefer backgrounds instead of skills.

 

[Fenris-77]

I don't believe those things are mutually exclusive. You can certainly designs systems where the players have to come up with clever solutions while using what's on their character sheets. And a "GM may I" style system is not better than a "I roll perception" style system if the challenges are boring, arbitrary and/or inconsequential.

My contention is that the latter barely even qualifies as adventure design outside of maybe a choose your own adventure book. Obviously designing for the players means taking into account the mechanical tools they have on hand, but those tools are precisely that, tools.

I am not advocating for any version of GM may I either, let's take that particular canard off the table. That fact the answer isn't a simple skill roll doesn't mean we're playing GM may I. The job of the players is to engage with the setting. The job of the GM (or adventure writer) is to give them things to engage with. Repeatedly rolling 'search' barely qualifies and, personally, I'd rather stick a fork in my eye than ever play another session of game like that. I prefer that the players use words and questions to explore the setting initially in a gvien situation, with skill rolls potentially accruing as situationally called for.

You can certainly combine player interaction and rolls (I'd suggest this is roleplaying at its best perhaps). I'm sure there are groups that love getting into a new dungeon room and just rolling a series of rolls off a playbook. If they are having fun, good for them. But that doesn't make it 'good' in terms of adventure writing nor does it inform best practices.