Why I Hate Skills

[pemerton]

And in this case you are factually incorrect. Most OSR games are very upfront about the function of encounter rolls. That function is only peripherally diegetic (at best). I don't give a good goddamn how many times you repeat the same biased and incorrect things btw, but if your throat is getting sore I'll happily offer you a nice lemon lozenge.

That a monster turns up is "diegetic".

That the GM rolls every <insert period here> to see if a monster turns up doesn't seem very diegetic. It seems like a clock designed to drive gameplay.

That the GM makes additional rolls to see if a monster turns up if the players have their PCs do noisy things (like, say, bash down doors) is gameplay with a diegetic lampshade that is vulnerable to breakage. Eg if the players come up with a solve for the diegetic element (eg the noise of bashing down a door) but still get the gameplay benefit of their action, the GM has to either ignore the diegetic action and make the additional roll anyway; or has to honour the in-fiction solve and allow the players to potentially break the game.

Versions of that last point - across a huge range of issues, not just encounter tables but almost all areas of game play, especially where spells are involved (and game-balance aspects like range, duration etc have some diegetic lampshades hung on them) - are a recurring problem with an ultra-sim game like Rolemaster. I report this from years of experience. (In Champions, @AbdulAlhazred has talked about a parallel example of the wizard character who is built so that all of their abilities are in their staff.)

 

[Campbell]

Sure. And I do.

(And sometimes the answer is, "Ummm....I, you know, Persuade.")

The point I was making is that so many players seem to have gotten used to the idea that that list of skills is similar to a list of spells or class abilities. Buttons to press to make something happen.

This seems pretty easy to me. "Cool. What does that look like?" or a dozen other clarifying questions. If they ask why you need to know just say you need it to determine what the consequences of success and failure are.

 

[Bill Zebub]

This seems pretty easy to me. "Cool. What does that look like?" or a dozen other clarifying questions. If they ask why you need to know just say you need it to determine what the consequences of success and failure are.

There seems to be a misunderstanding here. I am not asking for GMing advice. I've got that. Thanks, though.

I'm making an observation about how a lot of gamers view gameplay, and how that seems to be tied to a list of skills.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

I don't think this is absolutely true. CoC characters don't know they exist in a world where it'd be extremely unwise for them to investigate any oddity they see and read the odd journals or play with the odd objects they find. If they did, they'd just stay home and only engage with their mundane lives, and no one would play CoC for the reasons it was written.

I do agree that it is not an absolute -- few things are! But my experience running CoC is that the genre shows people investigating randomly, reading odd journals etc. It's the rules that make it dangerous to the characters. Which is why I argue that saying that characters should act based on the rules of the game they are in very often not the most fun way to play -- for the reason you state. If a CoC character acted as a character who knew that reading any book had a high potential of driving them insane, they'd never read anything! But the genre is that people behave (mostly) as regular people of their era would do.

I've run many a CoC campaign, and the typical player, when told they find an odd book in the papers left by their uncle who went insane and vanished on Walpurgisnacht is to say "well, I guess I'll read it" -- playing their character in-genre, while knowing as a player that this is likely to be detrimental to their character.

Horror is actually a excellent example (thank you for bringing it up!) as it only really works if players ignore the rules and do the mundane things their characters would actually do, just like the genre dictates.

 

[Bill Zebub]

If a CoC character acted as a character who knew that reading any book had a high potential of driving them insane, they'd never read anything! But the genre is that people behave (mostly) as regular people of their era would do.

I don't know if that's true. When there's something important going on in the news, I sometimes open an Incognito tab to check out what FoxNews is saying even though I know — I know — what it does to me. The Incognito tab is not for privacy. It is for containment. A futile ward against what seeps through regardless.

It began innocuously enough. A headline. A chyron. The particular amber glow of the site's palette, which I have since come to understand is not a design choice but a frequency — a specific degradation of the visible spectrum that the human optic nerve was never meant to process in sustained doses.

The first symptom is always the comments section. I don't read it. I can't read it, not anymore, not since the Incident at 2 a.m. during the mid-terms when I scrolled too far and the usernames stopped being names and became coordinates. I closed the laptop. My houseplants were facing a different direction in the morning. I don't have houseplants.

The second symptom is harder to describe. A loosening of what I can only call narrative coherence — the comfortable assumption that events have causes, that causes precede effects, that Tucker Carlson's eyebrows are the product of ordinary human musculature and not something that opened long before television existed.

I check in, yes. Briefly. As an anthropologist might observe a ritual from a respectful distance. But the distance is not always consistent. There are nights when I look up and the incognito tab has been open for four hours and I have thirteen new opinions about the Federal Reserve and a deep, sourceless certainty that something enormous is moving just beneath the surface of a news ticker, and has been moving for a very long time, and is almost done moving.

I always clear my history.

It doesn't help.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

The point I was making is that so many players seem to have gotten used to the idea that that list of skills is similar to a list of spells or class abilities. Buttons to press to make something happen.

But that's exactly what they are! They are a mechanical, formal way of quantifying how your character can interact with the world -- they are the "game" in roleplaying.

For me, one of the reasons I like more modern systems as opposed to trad and OSR style games is that the newer games make an effort to blur the lines. In an older system every action is either roleplaying or mechanical -- there's very little interaction between the two. If I want to pick a lock, there's a number I have to beat based on my character sheet and the GM interpretation of the scene and that is that. The skill is a simple button. The "Knock" spell is a simple button. In a more modern game I might say "because I was an assassin the pay of the Black Dragon," I know a bit about locks on houses and so that should be easier for me, and we bring some RP into the button-pushing.

But at its heart, a skill system is a button-pushing system where you use mechanics to get stuff done. Even in modern systems, it's still just a way to translate a player desire into a character action

 

[Bill Zebub]

But that's exactly what they are!

Hard disagree.

Not everything on the character sheet is an ability to be used. Is "Wisdom". Are you supposed to just say, "I use Wisdom!" and reach for a d20?

EDIT: This is dependent on the specific game, of course.

 

[TwoSix]

Hard disagree.

Not everything on the character sheet is an ability to be used. Is "Wisdom". Are you supposed to just say, "I use Wisdom!" and reach for a d20?

EDIT: This is dependent on the specific game, of course.

At least in modern D&D, the primary use of a stat is to modify skill checks (counting attacks and saves as a variation of a skill). So, kinda yes?

 

[Bill Zebub]

At least in modern D&D, the primary use of a stat is to modify skill checks (counting attacks and saves as a variation of a skill). So, kinda yes?

You (as GM) would be ok with that? With a player just saying, "I use Wisdom!" without explaining what they are doing?

 

[bsss]

I do agree that it is not an absolute -- few things are! But my experience running CoC is that the genre shows people investigating randomly, reading odd journals etc. It's the rules that make it dangerous to the characters. Which is why I argue that saying that characters should act based on the rules of the game they are in very often not the most fun way to play -- for the reason you state. If a CoC character acted as a character who knew that reading any book had a high potential of driving them insane, they'd never read anything! But the genre is that people behave (mostly) as regular people of their era would do.

I've run many a CoC campaign, and the typical player, when told they find an odd book in the papers left by their uncle who went insane and vanished on Walpurgisnacht is to say "well, I guess I'll read it" -- playing their character in-genre, while knowing as a player that this is likely to be detrimental to their character.

Horror is actually a excellent example (thank you for bringing it up!) as it only really works if players ignore the rules and do the mundane things their characters would actually do, just like the genre dictates.

I don't think I really have anything I disagree with in what you're saying, but would you not say that "playing their character in-genre" and "players [ignore how their characters would interpret the results of the rules, and play] like the genre dictates" is part of what is the "meta", as it isn't coming from the character? The character doesn't know (as in, it's an in-world truth or objective) that the interesting horror roleplaying stuff --- the genre --- is found within investigating mysteries and potentially losing their minds, those activities and their outcomes are what's important to the game and thus outside the character's world.