Why I Hate Skills

[Bill Zebub]

First off your rolling to often as most people who don’t play skill bases systems do. Per page 31 of the core rule book in the call out box labeled “ONLY ONE CHANCE”
“As a rule, you only have one chance to succeed with any action. Once you have rolled the dice, you may not roll again to achieve the same goal. You need to try something different, wait until the circumstances have changed in a substantial way, or let another player character try. This rule does not apply in combat.”

When the thief failed to pick the lock the first time, they were done trying.

Dragonbane has a rule called "Pushing". Re-rolls were the result of pushing.

This is in fact a common rule in skill based games.

I think you missed the entire advancement section in the basic rules because if you think rolling a demon or a dragon is the only way to get advancement checks or the most effcient that’s a huge failure in understanding. Playing a session gives you five chances to get rolls for skill improvement:
From pg 29 in the core rule book
✦ Did you participate in the game session?
✦ Did you explore a new location?
✦ Did you defeat one or more dangerous adversaries?
✦ Did you overcome an obstacle without using force?
✦ Did you give in to your weakness (optional rule)?

Nope, didn't miss it. Not sure what gave you the impression I did.

But that doesn't eliminate the incentive to roll dice in the hope of getting even more advancement points.

(The only thing that was missed was at the end of each session all the players kept saying, "Argh! I forgot to play my Weakness again!")

 

[Spellslinging Sellsword]

You can eliminate the skill check on 1 or 20 and just give a flat # (1-3 seems reasonable) at the end of the session when you award the checks for each question answered with a yes. Heck you can even make it a random 1d3 roll the player makes for how many they get.

 

[Bill Zebub]

You can eliminate the skill check on 1 or 20 and just give a flat # (1-3 seems reasonable) at the end of the session when you award the checks for each question answered with a yes. Heck you can even make it a random 1d3 roll the player makes for how many they get.

Yeah there are ways to mitigate the incentive to roll dice.

But really that incentive in Dragonbane (and other games that have similar advancement mechanisms) only emphasize the problems with skill-based systems, it's not the source of them. That's the point I was trying to make.

Lots of people, of course, don't agree that any of these things are "problems" with skills, so they probably also wouldn't think it's a problem if players want to "use skills" (in the form of rolling dice) more often.

 

[Pedantic]

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."

Feels like this is fundamentally about skill design, not adventure design. You want the skills to point to abilities players want to use (and you probably want most or all of those abilities to be invoked by player action declarations, or it either becomes the GM's job or you get "can I make an X check?" constantly).

The issue here is in the gameplay loop, not the "don't look at your character sheet" discussion. If a character has a discrete climbing ability, they can make a decision about using it, or finding and other solution. If the gameplay is just picking when to prompt random rolls, it's not very compelling outside of the gambling/fictional prompting angle.

I don't actually think the OSR spirit of trying to prompt players to do problem solving and spend resources and make interesting choices needs to be in tension with having a detailed list of player abilities, but the gameplay loop needs to be taken into account from the base.

 

[TwoSix]

I don't actually think the OSR spirit of trying to prompt players to do problem solving and spend resources and make interesting choices needs to be in tension with having a detailed list of player abilities, but the gameplay loop needs to be taken into account from the base.

I think it's in tension when the skills that are meant to be tested by recourse to player ingenuity are ALSO options that can be resolved by a simple skill check.

You can have a gameplay loop that requires both to successfully navigate the challenge, but it's problematic when it becomes an either/or.

 

[Pedantic]

I think it's in tension when the skills that are meant to be tested by recourse to player ingenuity are ALSO options that can be resolved by a simple skill check.

You can have a gameplay loop that requires both to successfully navigate the challenge, but it's problematic when it becomes an either/or.

That's clearly just a design problem though. Feels like a function of designing the problems and problem solving actions in isolation. If you know how climbing works, you know not to conceptualize a one climb check situation as a problem to be overcome.

There's nothing wrong with the loop if the design planned for it.

 

[TwoSix]

That's clearly just a design problem though. Feels like a function of designing the problems and problem solving actions in isolation. If you know how climbing works, you know not to conceptualize a one climb check situation as a problem to be overcome.

There's nothing wrong with the loop if the design planned for it.

If you have a specific solution in mind, I'd love to hear it.

What's a specific scenario in which OSR-style "grapple with the environment" is wedded to a longer, detailed skill list? Doesn't have to be a specific game, just an outline of a play procedure.

 

[Pedantic]

I mean, a super easy example is 3 branching paths that converge to a place you want to go. Say, a weather-beaten cliff mid storm, maybe add some harassing harpies, a fast flowing underwater river full of dire pike and a heavily trapped kobold warren.

You're looking at some combination of iterated climb and other checks for the first one, mitigated by spells, ropes, flight and other tricks, you need to hold your breath or cheat for the second, and make consistent swim checks, and the latter is classic trap finding/perception against sneak attacks, plus probably some athletic stuff for pits, closing walls and so on.

If a climbing check lets you ascend Y feet modified by whatever circumstantial difficulty, same for swimming, you need a plan to handle the attacks, maybe do it one handed, perhaps some kind of information gathering to plan a route..... There's a lot of space to both make decisions about how to proceed and then resolve those decisions with checks. Taking a risk on 70% for some advantage of to react to a problem, verse taking actions (ropes, levitation, etc.) to get it over 100% is an interesting trade.

 

[Pedantic]

You can also do it backwards. Something like Trespasser's exploration loop that's all about picking where and when to spend resources, but uses flat skill DCs. Skills are basically interchangeable and meaningless, but the structure around them is elaborated.

 

[TwoSix]

I mean, a super easy example is 3 branching paths that converge to a place you want to go. Say, a weather-beaten cliff mid storm, maybe add some harassing harpies, a fast flowing underwater river full of dire pike and a heavily trapped kobold warren.

You're looking at some combination of iterated climb and other checks for the first one, mitigated by spells, ropes, flight and other tricks, you need to hold your breath or cheat for the second, and make consistent swim checks, and the latter is classic trap finding/perception against sneak attacks, plus probably some athletic stuff for pits, closing walls and so on.

If a climbing check lets you ascend Y feet modified by whatever circumstantial difficulty, same for swimming, you need a plan to handle the attacks, maybe do it one handed, perhaps some kind of information gathering to plan a route..... There's a lot of space to both make decisions about how to proceed and then resolve those decisions with checks. Taking a risk on 70% for some advantage of to react to a problem, verse taking actions (ropes, levitation, etc.) to get it over 100% is an interesting trade.

Sure, that can work.

My worry as a GM there would be that scenario would encourage the party to split up, based on each character's individual odds of succeeding at one of the three paths.