Why I Hate Skills

[Bill Zebub]

It's a very gamist way of playing, which is fine for many people. But it often feels like an artificial constraint imposed by the game system.

As an example, if I'm in a group that is attending a fancy dress ball and I'm playing AD&D, if a guest invites me to head out alone with them to see his collection of etchings, I'm immediately thinking "if this turns into a combat encounter I'm screwed" because the system says that I'm 200 feet from my friends which is 4 turns of movement -- and that's if they hear my screams through the negative penalties of a party atmosphere and 10 feet of stone walls. However, if I'm playing a system focused on representing the genre more than trying to simulate reality, I'm not as worried, because it's very genre-appropriate to scream for help and have my friends arrive to rescue me in one round.

This happens to me all the freakin' time in real life. It's getting to the point where I don't even want to go to fancy dress balls anymore.

 

[Fenris-77]

@Pedantic - I wasn't trying to be dismissive. I just have trouble reconciling your very in-setting stance on the one hand with your statement that what the rules say is true when what the rules say is plainly counter to anything like in-setting logic in this case.

 

[Fenris-77]

This happens to me all the freakin' time in real life. It's getting to the point where I don't even want to go to fancy dress balls anymore.

You go to fancy dress balls? You rake, you.

 

[Pedantic]

Staying in a group and not scouting or taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by splitting the group for things like ambush is also actively dangerous. It's nonsense to claim that staying together is simply a better in-setting option. That's plainly not the case. What's pushing back there are mechanics like encounter rolls per X, not anything setting specific.

What an odd thing to say. Moving on I guess.

If you're going to flatly reject the premise, I can't engage.

My point is that if you treat setting truths as encoded in the rules, and thus, conflicts between the rules as they stand and your desired setting truths as design problems requiring new rules, you can get wherever you want to go. Insisting on having rules that don't model your setting is...a strange and unpleasant thing to do, both as a designer, and especially as a player trying to learn about the game and play it well.

 

[Fenris-77]

If you're going to flatly reject the premise, I can't engage. My point is that if you treat setting truths as encoded in the rules, and thus, conflicts between the rules as they stand and your desired setting truths as design problems requiring new rules, you can get wherever you want to go. Insisting on having rules that don't model your setting is...a strange and unpleasant thing to do, both as a designer, and especially as a player trying to learn about the game and play it well.

So explain to me how encounter rolls are a setting truth (whatever that is). You need to step back from shizz like my desired setting truths too, that is some wonky and awkwardly pointed verbiage there my doode. My reading of your post is that you have some kind of fundamental misunderstanding about the terms you are using.

Encounter rolls double when the party splits, that's how most OSR rule sets work, either explicitly or implicitly. There's not a single in-setting reason why that should be the case as encounter rolls are a mechanical game balance thing, and only peripherally an in-setting sort of thing.

 

[Pedantic]

@Pedantic - I wasn't trying to be dismissive. I just have trouble reconciling your very in-setting stance on the one hand with your statement that what the rules say is true when what the rules say is plainly counter to anything like in-setting logic in this case.

I simply don't see a conflict. If you're using something other than the outcome prompted by the rules to draw conclusions (i.e. "scouting is useful" in a setting with weak stealth rules where players can be quickly killed) then you're wrong about how this fictional world works. Scouting might well be more dangerous than useful and you shouldn't do it. The rules, which tell you how likely you are to succeed at stealth and how fragile you are, tell you how the world works. You are able to understand what your character knows about the situation and behave in your shared best interests.

Substituting a principle about the real world, or genre, or some other experience for what the rules tell you about the setting is just reasoning from the wrong source.

 

[Fenris-77]

I simply don't see a conflict. If you're using something other than the outcome prompted by the rules to draw conclusions (i.e. "scouting is useful" in a setting with weak stealth rules where players can be quickly killed) then you're wrong about how this fictional world works. Scouting might well be more dangerous than useful and you shouldn't do it. The rules, which tell you how likely you are to succeed at stealth and how fragile you are, tell you how the world works. You are able to understand what your character knows about the situation and behave in your shared best interests.

Substituting a principle about the real world, or genre, or some other experience for what the rules tell you about the setting is just reasoning from the wrong source.

Yeah, I don't even think we're speaking the same language. You seem to think that the author's intent, or even oversights and mistakes are somehow more important that common sense in-setting tactics. I don't care a pig's fart for the author's intent, not am I even peripherally willing to put up with in-game stuff that makes no sense because someone can't write RPG rules that survive deployment on the table.

I disagree with pretty much your entire take here. Everything you have to say rubs my rhubarb the wrong way. So that's where we're at. I'm just going to move on at this point.

 

[Pedantic]

So explain to me how encounter rolls are a setting truth (whatever that is). You need to step back from shizz like my desired setting truths too, that is some wonky and awkwardly pointed verbiage there my doode. My reading of your post is that you have some kind of fundamental misunderstanding about the terms you are using.

Encounter rolls double when the party splits, that's how most OSR rule sets work, either explicitly or implicitly. There's not a single in-setting reason why that should be the case as encounter rolls are a mechanical game balance thing, and only peripherally an in-setting sort of thing.

I am really not an OSR guy, and really don't have a lot of background in their procedures. I don't know that I've ever used an encounter roll, outside of Trespasser's incredibly specific procedure for them, which I identify as coming at this gameplay direction from exactly the opposite method to the sort of detailed skill rules I was suggesting were not fundamentally the problem under discussion in this thread (so much as the gameplay loop surrounding them).

It was certainly not my understanding that splitting the party should primarily be a risk because of them, that's a new take you're bringing in. This line began, I think, with this post, which is primarily concerned with how dangerous leaving a main ballroom is. My point was that a player deciding not to risk leaving because the rules make this very dangerous if combat breaks out is a completely appropriate response to their understanding of how the world works. If you didn't want that to be the case...well, you could make it much easier to hear screams, make it much easier to move long distances in combat time, and/or make characters more resiliently able to fight off assailants without dying alone.

The player who who doesn't do the genre appropriate thing (or even real world appropriate thing) is not behaving irrationally, they're responding to the rules, and those rules should inform what their character knows about the relative risks; if the resulting behavior isn't desirable, you can and should change the rules to produce gameplay you like.

 

[Fenris-77]

This all begs the question as to why you're making declarative statements about systems and playstyles you have no experience with.

 

[Pedantic]

Yeah, I don't even think we're speaking the same language. You seem to think that the author's intent, or even oversights and mistakes are somehow more important that common sense in-setting tactics. I don't care a pig's fart for the author's intent, not am I even peripherally willing to put up with in-game stuff that makes no sense because someone can't write RPG rules that survive deployment on the table.

I disagree with pretty much your entire take here. Everything you have to say rubs my rhubarb the wrong way. So that's where we're at. I'm just going to move on at this point.

Mmm, happy to leave this topic, but a point I do want to raise is that all of my positions start from a sadly unusual intolerance for badly designed rules. RPGs get too many passes for not actually meeting their design intent (or, as I pointed out in this thread, not actually having a clear design intent and just grabbing from totally different gameplay loops), and we've established a culture that expects an at the table designer to do much or all of the work. "Oversights" in RPGs would be catastrophic failures in other fields of games, and it's wild how much we put up with.

If a game has a shoddy stealth system, I damn well expect that to be a design choice telling the players that sneaking is a desperate, high-risk move, not a "mistake" the GM is expected to remedy later.