Why I Hate Skills

[Fenris-77]

Meta? Good lord. Some people will throw that word around at the drop of a hat. So, for context, everything in most RPGs is an abstraction to some extent. That makes none of it meta.

 

[Andvari]

I play in dungeon turns behind the screen, when the party is exploring a dungeon or dungeon-like environment, but my players are not aware of it directly. The players are aware that the longer time they spend at a location, the more wandering monster encounters they might have, however. Working in 10 minute blocks is just a simple way to track time and trigger random encounter rolls. Usually works well with spell effects, too. You know a spell last 1-10 minutes has expired when you tick off another turn, or 6 for a 1-hour spell.

 

[pemerton]

If one round is 5 seconds and another is 7, that's alright. Just give me reasonable approximations.

Can one turn in a dungeon be 10 minutes and then one in some other location be 18? Sure, why not?

These seem to be pretty similar ideas.

Right, meta in the "you can't act on this information as though it makes sense to your characters, unless it's like an order of the stick world where all the mechanics exist in the world and every NPC understands them how they work" sense.

<snip>

if each of those things takes an explicit quantity of inworld time instead? For your examples: Say 1 minute per square foot; 8 hours; 2 hours in the wilderness or 10 minutes in public in town during the day, possibly modified in major cities, or reduced at nighttime?

In Realm of Stars I have 2-action combat turns in a 6 second round

<snip>

The "default" for a check is that it takes one action (2-3s).

A world where events occur with the regularity of a metronome is just as "meta" as the OotS world.

My Wilderness random encounter rolls are currently done usually at the start of the day, 1 roll per 2h, with a chance of multiples (or nothing) in a 2h window, and then I roll and note down which 15 minute interval in that 2h they occur in. Obviously, if they're somewhere inaccessible (in town, for instance) when it comes up, they would skip that encounter.

I'm imagining a seasoned adventurer with an inquisitive mind carefully gathering data, through years spent exploring dungeons. "You know what's strange...the more quickly we do things like search rooms and open chests, the more frequently monsters wander in on us. When we slow down and take longer, they come less frequently. Weird, huh?"

No more weird than someone calculating that the incidence of random meetings is structured around 2 hour intervals.

All gameplay involves imposing structure on events that - within the fiction we are imagining - are not subject to that structure.

Given the context of the rest of your post where you're saying the tasks in fiction are all the same length of time, this makes more sense. I was not assuming a fixed list of tasks of equal time commitment.

But if they know how long each task takes, and can figure out the intervals for recurring checks like random encounters, is there a need to make all these random things be modified to take the same amount of time (the "dungeon turn")? If yes, why?

Because it gets you to the same game play more easily. I mean, the decision that (say) there is a 1 in 6 chance of finding a secret door if you spend 10 minutes (1 turn) searching in the right 10' x 10' area of wall is pretty arbitrary. What is gained by (say) changing the detection chance to 1 in 12 but declaring that the search only takes 5 minutes?

 

[hawkeyefan]

Meta? Good lord. Some people will throw that word around at the drop of a hat. So, for context, everything in most RPGs is an abstraction to some extent. That makes none of it meta.

Yeah, I’ve very much arrived at this stage of thinking. I just am not interested in worrying about “meta” elements in the same way many others seem to be. I think that drawing such stark lines between game and shared fiction tends to highlight the differences rather than down play them.

All gameplay involves imposing structure on events that - within the fiction we are imagining - are not subject to that structure.

This is what I’ve been kind of groping at with my last few posts, except much more eloquently and simply stated.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Yeah, I’ve very much arrived at this stage of thinking. I just am not interested in worrying about “meta” elements in the same way many others seem to be. I think that drawing such stark lines between game and shared fiction tends to highlight the differences rather than down play them.

Worse, I think trying too hard to avoid being "meta" can actually (translation: "probably will") make the game less fun.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Because it gets you to the same game play more easily. I mean, the decision that (say) there is a 1 in 6 chance of finding a secret door if you spend 10 minutes (1 turn) searching in the right 10' x 10' area of wall is pretty arbitrary. What is gained by (say) changing the detection chance to 1 in 12 but declaring that the search only takes 5 minutes?

My same hypothetical, data-inclined, experienced adventurer: "Also, do you notice that when you move diagonally in a rectangular room, you move slower?"

And his friend: "We must use different systems, because I move faster."

 

[bsss]

A third adventurer: "I don't even feel this 'faster' or 'slower' stuff, I just move between zones."

 

[zakael19]

Something I was thinking about during my drive to work: What if skills were saves?

Rather than being something on the sheet a player invokes to do something, they become a particular competence at avoiding the consequence of taking a risky action?

If nobody else has mentioned it, V. Baker's "OSR" game draft takes exactly this approach.

 

[TwoSix]

If nobody else has mentioned it, V. Baker's "OSR" game draft takes exactly this approach.

Great minds and all that.

 

[thefutilist]

I always thought skills came from saves?

I mostly see them as a bit of a misstep in rpg design, and more recent design has gone back to saves or framed skills within the context of conflict resolution.