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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9883072" data-attributes="member: 6690965">I think the bolded steps are the place where a well designed skill system can come in and meaningfully change gameplay.The downsides to setting the GM as a designer action to action are generally understood and doing a good job is most of what gets called "DMing technique". Basically, it's possible to do poorly by setting the odds badly, setting the consequences too punitively, not providing an effective decision point, or by simply failing to provide all the information to the characters. You call all those risks out nicely here, and I think it's generally agreed to be a matter of GM skill to thread neatly between them.A less obvious impact is that it largely narrows the scope for a player to do problem solving and make meaningful plans down to a singular action (or maybe a short set of actions with the additional risk of iterated probability). Even if, as you indicate above, you let players propose several actions and work through the risk/reward of all of them, there's no way for a player to have enough information to propose several actions in a row to build out a strategy. Players can't actually know what their full capabilities really are until they're actually in a specific situation and do the discussion of what actions they might take. The closest I think you can get is playing with a given GM a lot, learning how they tend to do their design, and then trying to push toward a state they think is predictable.All of which is to say, what a skill system can do is specify those interactions beforehand, so players can know them without asking the GM moment to moment, and that can create a larger space of gameable decisions. Done poorly or without enough detail though, you end up pushing the GM back to design and/or restricting the player's options, or creating the negative state you describe below.I totally agree with what you're identifying here as the negative results of skill systems not designed with an eye toward the resulting gameplay. Not writing fully explicated skill rules seems to largely result in the skills just becoming big, vague actions. You don't try to pick a lock and reference the rules to see how that works; you do the action "make a Lockpicking check." Worse, that generic action usually ends up defaulting to having rules that boil down to "roll 15+ to conquer any obstacle, roll 10+ to conquer an easy obstacle." There's basically no real space for player decision making to matter at that level of resolution, it's just iterated gambling with the level of stakes set by GM/system taste.</blockquote>

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