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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6104042" data-attributes="member: 82106">I agree, you can see this in 13a's case where IIRC you can make up pretty much anything to be 'skills' that fit with your background, but the effect is mostly in terms of story, there are no 3e type narrow skill list type skills. The thing is DDN is trying to avoid default incompetence by just saying "no, no, there's no list" but that doesn't really do it. Plus narrow skills just suck for story-telling.I have an anecdote for that, I decided to run a CoC scenario for my online group. Hadn't run that game in years, but we always had fun with it. Ugh, it was bad. I mean the scenario and material were fun, but the BRP engine that CoC uses? Wow I'd forgotten how bad that was. You have all these random skills, all at like 50/50 success chance or worse. Every character is some weird hodge-podge of super narrow skills, of which there are about 100 listed. Its harder than hell to be sure which one would apply in a given situation (is it fast talk, bargain, or psychology, lets see....). The skills don't help define the character, they're too narrow and the result is a character that can jump, hide, bargain, and knows Sanskrit moderately well. He's not good enough at ANY of those things to lay a plan on making a check, and the game rules are written around old fashioned binary pass/fail without any clue how to actually use the "rp skills" nor how or when they should work. The result was of course predictable, the PCs constantly tried to do things but failed checks all over, causing every plan to go awry. If I gave them clues to investigate they inevitably botched some check or other and got stumped. Either you have to build in a LARGE amount of redundancy in everything you do, or eventually just stop using skill checks. I finally just used PACE instead of BRP/CoC rules and it was MUCH better. The problem with DDN skills is exactly the same one in terms of pass/fail. They need to at least make very sure they explain the concept that skills should be a player resource and should only determine whether you had 'more consequences' or 'less consequences'.</blockquote>

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