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I tend to like the skill mechanic in games like Call of Cthulhu and Traveller. In those games, the characters are almost entirely defined by their skills. But in games like D&D, I think ability checks easily do the work of a separate skill mechanic. Moreover, it seems to me that the skill mechanic of 3.5/Pathfinder is more about what you cannot do (and should not even try) than what you can, given that the the DC progression assumes near-max rank assignment of skill points. This touches on a larger problem I have with contemporary D&D, what I'll call level-biased inflation.

In Third and Fourth Editions, gaining levels is all but guaranteed but -- thanks to the idea that D&D should be "balanced" -- it hardly matters because you should always be fighting stuff that's appropriate to your level. So even though all the DCs are much higher, you should have the various bonuses to pretty easily cover it. But if you haven't been spending your level-derived resources on those bonuses, suddenly the inflation really hurts. For example, let's say you attempt to swim through a swift current at level 1. The DC is likely 15 or so. The Fighter has three ranks in Swim and the Wizard has none. At this scale, the Fighter has an advantage to be sure but the Wizard has a chance at least. Skip to level 15. The Fighter now has seventeen ranks in Swim and the Wizard still has none. The DC to swim against the current of a magical maelstrom is something like 25.

Arguably, the level 15 Wizard should have a better plan than swimming in such a scenario. And that's kind of the point; skill mechanics suffer in systems with level-biased inflation. Call of Cthulhu and Traveller, games without levels (or even classes), quite naturally don't suffer from this problem. But there is a further issue, also showing how a skill mechanic can limit rather than enable creative play: players are less likely to attempt things that their characters are not good at. That's fair, you might argue, and even could be a design element -- character builds should have consequences. I'm fine with that, hypothetically speaking, but I notice the actual result is players thinking more about the math their character sheets imply for dice rolling than the in-game situation.

Let's use the classic example of swinging from the chandelier down onto some bad guys. These kind of gymnastics probably fall under Acrobatics in Pathfinder -- which is not a class skill for Fighters. So if you want to swing from chandeliers in Pathfinder, you need to play a Rogue (or Barbarian. Monk, etc). Once players become inured to this kind of mechanic, at least as far as I have seen, they stop even thinking about swinging from the chandelier unless they have Acrobatics as a class skill and have loaded up on the ranks (level-biased inflation strikes again).

Now, this isn't necessarily bad. But neither is it necessarily ideal. Contrast it, for example, with Basic D&D. That game (or more properly, those games) had no skill mechanic; everything was an ability check. If you were playing a wizard with high dex, you might be swinging from more chandeliers than the thief. In that game, your characters ... erm, character depended in the largest part on what you as the player could think up. The contemporary skill mechanic, on the other hand, puts some hard boundaries on your imagination, absent those dreaded house rules. A swashbuckling sorcerer? A scholarly knight? These are available "out of the box" in Basic. D20's answer was "here's a prestige class."

So what do you guys think? Do you like the more contemporary skill systems or do you think ability scores can handle things? This is actually pretty topical as the latest version of Next uses ability checks instead of a separate skill system. Is that a good thing, do you think?

I like skills, I think they are pretty good for defining your character and encouraging good roleplaying

But I also think that ablility checks/stat based checks have a decent place too

skills are learned practiced abilities, and as such should be more reliable, ability checks I feel relate more to you as you are at the moment

A character with the athletics skill wants to skill wants to swing down from the chandelier, absolutely ok with me

A athletic character (so decent agility/strength or similar stat) wants to try it that's fine too, but I'd probably make it a bit harder

they'd have less idea what the shock of the first grab would feel (more likely to mess it up) and less idea how to land so as not to break their legs

If Bob the Feeble (wizard of the west) with strength (no way he can hold the grab) and agility (and when he lands snap) well below average wants to try it well he'd better have a karma/plot/fate point to spend or bad things will happen

that's for a 'heat of the moment' action, given sufficient prep time a skill would allow a player to be (almost) certain of succeeding, wheras I'd never let an ability/stat based check be that cerrtain

Plot/karma/fate points ... ugh ... that's a whole 'nother bucket of suck IMO. It will be remembered as the defining feature of the immediately post-d20 era of RPG design.

Back on-topic, your examples are great because they show exactly what I mean by the skill mechanic sapping imagination. Bob the Feeble -- and let's be honest and call him by his real name, the d20 Wizard -- needs some kind of miracle points to do a cool physical stunt because he's a wizard. In Basic, you might end up with a magic-user who was better at the phsyical stunts than casting spells. These days, characters are built rather than imagined; they are meant to do a thing that has been decided before hand rather than cunningly face the unknown.

In my opinion, there needs to be a balance between skill and ability. As far as I recall, the vast majority of systems I played fall into this category in that they add the three elements of ability + skill + randomness (dice).

In short, an action should have a chance of success for anyone, which is represented by ability. At the same time, characters who have put a special focus on the nature of certain actions should be more likely to succeed, which is then represented by skill. In fact, the Dragon Age RPG outright uses the term "focus" for this, by allowing players to purchase a flat +2 bonus for ability rolls done to test a specific action.

For example, this character is particularly experienced with swords and has been trained in military tactics. From her background, working on a farm has also blessed the character with a strong and healthy body, and she knows how to handle a horsecart. This doesn't mean that other characters could not attempt to do all those things as well, or even succeed in them - it just means that the character's background, personality and training are represented in a small mechanical advantage.

The more controversial question is how large a gap would you allow with such bonuses, focuses, and skills? In DARPG, a focus merely grants you a +2, later +3, but this ruleset also has fairly low ability scores, so that the difference between a rookie and a high level character won't be as enormous as Manchu's example from D&D. Needless to say, this lack of progression could be regarded as a disadvantage by some, so this is also a question of personal preferences. It is interesting to see the repercussions of allowing such gaps between characters to come into existence, though.

An even more controversial topic might be how we think about the role of chance/dice in regards to a character's chances of succeeding at a chosen action. How much risk is truly okay? Does it affect immersion if supposedly experienced characters have bad luck with their dice? This is less of a problem in combat (unless you're a sniper or some other sort of specialist who defines him- or herself by accuracy) but more of an issue with social interaction or certain tasks. I'm sure we all know the scene from the Gamers movie with the barbarian and the iron gate ...

On a sidenote, I really dislike level-biased inflation.

 Lynata wrote:
At the same time, characters who have put a special focus on the nature of certain actions should be more likely to succeed, which is then represented by skill.

To me -- and here I'm only talking about D&D -- I think that "special focus" should contribute to the DM's judgment when assigning the TN. For the sake of simulation, this special focus would be recorded on the character sheet (as a "part of" the character); and this could take the form of a key word (e.g., locksmith, contortionist, orator) rather than a rank-based mechanic. That way, you'd still get the RP flavor but without the arithmetical pressure to not attempt certain things and always attempt certain others.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
To preemptively clarify, what I'm suggesting is that being skilled should make things less difficult rather than making success easier -- just a slight difference semantically but, in light of level-biased inflation, I think it could have a significant mechanical impact.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Lynata wrote:
An even more controversial topic might be how we think about the role of chance/dice in regards to a character's chances of succeeding at a chosen action. How much risk is truly okay? Does it affect immersion if supposedly experienced characters have bad luck with their dice?

This is a fascinating question. And I think it inevitably depends on what you're trying to simulate. I finally realized after a year of rumination that the point of the percentile system in Call of Cthulhu is to produce those 1% over/under moments because the game is trying to simulate the tension of Lovecraftian horror. Put it another way, it's generally more fun to fail in CoC than it is to succeed. The exact opposite is true in 3.5/Pathfinder/4E; those systems take risk in 5% strides and pile up all sorts of 10% bonuses because the goal is to be an AWESOME HERO, i.e., to succeed far more often than fail.

Ultimately, it depends on what the system is meant to do. Most games I want to run have some sort of skill mechanics, but I'm ok with games that don't if it makes sense.

I'm a big fan of fate points, but only if they are rare precious things handed out very, very rarely by the GM (for role playing).

you certainly shouldn't expect to use them every session

and preferably major opponents might have one too (used if the players are too cheap or lucky)

they let a player with a neat idea for some sort of cinematic extra special fun action with a character succeed once (just what heroes should be able to do)...

long range shot with a sniper rifle to cut the rope during a hanging ?

jump onto the wet roof of a speeding car ?

guess the combination of the bomb the party has failed (unexpectedly) to defuse that would kill the lot

Moving back to skills vs abilities

I think the most restrictive thing is them knowing the target number they are aiming for much better to give them a general idea and keep the actual number to yourself

If you know you've got a 5% chance you're unlikely to risk it unless you've no other choice, being told it's very difficult (or easy or whatever) I find means players are more likely to try

but it's really all down to the GM and the group more than anything a group role playing will tend to take more chances, playing to their characters strengths and knowledge and certainly making it more fun for the GM

roll players are more likely to min/max their characters and avoid anything that means the risk 'loosing'

I guess it also depends in part on how they system you're using gives out (and upgrades) skills. I like players to be able to justify how and why their skills are rising

if you want to boost your history skill you could pick up some books, talk to some storytellers (all options for more role playing)

if you want you could practice your forms by yourself or spar with others (takes time I'd like to see the character acknowledge in game even if we don't role play it) or perhaps pay a skilled swordswomen to teach you a trick move (a lot quicker)

I much prefer the skill system in Savage Worlds to how things are handled in D&D. Every character is defined by their skills and attributes, but other that skills being linked to their attributes when determining cost to purchase, all characters have an equal opportunity to have all the skills. It's your edges (kind of like feats and proficiencies, I think) that further focus the character.

A fighter and a wizard can each have an equal skill level of "Swimming", but because the fighter's Agility is likely to be higher than the Wizard's (because Agility also governs the skills of Fighting, Shooting, etc- whereas the Wizard would have been upping their Spirit and Smarts instead for spell type-skills) the fighter mechanically spent less overall character points over their career to get their Swimming that high, so the Wizard had to sacrifice more to be equal. But if the player really wanted an agile Wizard and so they kept upping their Agility, they could easily be on equal footing with the fighter with the skills that are governed by Agility.

Palladium or bust!

Bust.

Obviouslly that was a joke post. Palladium has the worst skill system that I can think of. Worst game system, really.

Skill systems in a game are a really hard thing to balance I think. A loose collection of thoughts in no real order:

NWoD/White Wolf has a very generic skill system, with such a small stat/skill rating range, that leads to some very strange situations. It makes sense that my fencer might have a 3 or 4 melee skill, but picking up a battle axe I get just as many dice (barring any dice from a speciality) even though they're greatly different in shape, use and mechanics. Still, it allows for a wide variety of uses of skills. Perception + Melee to recognize weapon quality and the like.

OTOH, having a ridiculously specific system (ala Palladium) is just as bad or worse. You can't handle a walkie-talkie in Palladium without Radio(Basic). There's no defaulting, no figuring it out, you just flat out can't do it. Terrible system.


I'm also not sure I agree with the "Everyone should have a chance to do anything" sentiment. I suppose this applies more to modern or futuristic RPGs than to a fantasy setting like D&D, but it doesn't sit right to me that someone with no training or ability in something has even a snowball's chance of doing it. There is 0 chance of me walking into an operating room and doing open heart surgery. 0, none, nil, nada. It makes sense that a player/character with no training should not even attempt to try; they're more likely to kill the subject than save them.

I was not a fan of the 3.0/3.5 skill system, because to me it combined many of the worst facets of a skill system. You had a combination of insanely specific and insanely generic skills. You got skill points, but mechanically you ended up putting them all in a small set of skills because (other than qualifying for a prestige class) you needed max ranks in any skill for it to be useful. You had multiple skills overlapping the same end result (listen, spot, & search being the classic example), and often rolled multiple skills at the same time to do a single task.

Now I think we can all agree that there is no single skill system that would work for all games out there. Some games simply focus on skills more, or require more specific skill choices than others. A D&D Paladin probably doesn't need to separate Ride(Horse) from Ride(Warhorse), while a Shadowrunner probably needs to be able to separate Pilot(Car) from Pilot(APC) - to say nothing of the variety of aircraft, hovercraft, motorcycles, aeroforms, and whatever else is out there.

 streamdragon wrote:
I'm also not sure I agree with the "Everyone should have a chance to do anything" sentiment. I suppose this applies more to modern or futuristic RPGs than to a fantasy setting like D&D

Sure, I agree. There is a big difference between "Use Rope" in D&D 3.5 and "Electrical Engineering" in Traveller.

For the most part I'm with Manchu on this.

That might be that I am still miffed that Fighters only get 2+ Int skill points, which is practically useless.

I am a big fan of skill systems, especially if they have skills for stuff like combat involving different types of weapons. One thing that always annoys me about a game is when they have one system for combat attacks and a completely different system for every other skill. D&D isn't so bad because they at least use the same dice, but some games don't even do that.

That said, another thing that always annoys me about a game is a "dodge" skill where you have an arbitrary chance to dodge any attack, regardless of its origin and how skilled the attacker is. I'd like to see a game where either every combat action is an opposed check, or else your level of "acrobatics" imposes a flat negative modifier on people's attack skills.

 dementedwombat wrote:
That said, another thing that always annoys me about a game is a "dodge" skill where you have an arbitrary chance to dodge any attack, regardless of its origin and how skilled the attacker is. I'd like to see a game where either every combat action is an opposed check, or else your level of "acrobatics" imposes a flat negative modifier on people's attack skills.

You might want to look at the new Hackmaster. All combat is opposed rolls, with different bonuses depending on various conditions i.e. combat style, shield use, ranged attack, ect ect.

 Ahtman wrote:

 dementedwombat wrote:
That said, another thing that always annoys me about a game is a "dodge" skill where you have an arbitrary chance to dodge any attack, regardless of its origin and how skilled the attacker is. I'd like to see a game where either every combat action is an opposed check, or else your level of "acrobatics" imposes a flat negative modifier on people's attack skills.

You might want to look at the new Hackmaster. All combat is opposed rolls, with different bonuses depending on various conditions i.e. combat style, shield use, ranged attack, ect ect.

Thanks for the recommendation, I'll keep that in mind and give it a glance when it's convenient.

I redid this post like 5 times now and this is the best I can come up with, but anyway I like the attribute system in 5ed as a core mechanic. It's nice because you can very easily assign an attribute to any and every action. "OK your plan is pick the lock by hitting it with a brick, well that is simply a str check." It also puts the focus on the action itself and hat your doing rather then a big list of skills and trying to figure out what an exotic action fits under. "Ok your trying pick up a barmaid with a cheesy pickup line, Is that a diplomacy check or maybe a bluff check?". The attribute system is very flexible. You can go to space and back without making any changes.

The big problem with it seems to be that 5ed is having a hard time incorporating advancement and specializations into the system. They have gone through a lot of different systems and I haven't really liked one of them.

Manchu wrote:To preemptively clarify, what I'm suggesting is that being skilled should make things less difficult rather than making success easier -- just a slight difference semantically but, in light of level-biased inflation, I think it could have a significant mechanical impact.

Hmm, whilst I believe I understand the issue of level-biased inflation, what impact would that be, exactly? If you are making some task's success easier for skilled people, this means adapting a test's difficulty to individual player characters. How is that different from the individual player characters just having a bonus that helps with the unaltered test? Both ways would not change how the test is perceived by the other (unskilled) chars, after all. Or did I misunderstand some detail?

On a sidenote, level-biased inflation has also been briefly touched upon in this thread on the Green Ronin forums, as some DMs voiced concern regarding test difficulty for higher levels. I think the DARPG does not suffer as much from this issue in D&D, though, as characters won't gain raise their chance to succeed at tests nearly as fast as they do in D&D, in turn not requiring a massive gap between test difficulties - although I did propose a system for assigning higher "Target Numbers" based on difficulty descriptions in that thread ... for example, going by the proposed chart, an Easy test for a level 11-20 character would be Challenging for a level 1-5.

I'd never advocate making specific tasks more or less difficult just because of the players' level, though. The difficulty of climbing a specific mount cares not for what level or skill the player characters have. Either they are experienced enough to succeed, or they need to look for an alternative. It's all part of that idea about a "living, breathing world" I keep blabbering about, where the players need to adapt to the setting, rather than the setting to them.

This is also why agree with streamdragon and you regarding the defaulting where it makes sense. Not only because a "living world" kind of necessitates players having more options to tackle something that may well be intentionally difficult for them if they try it "too soon" (in regards to their experience and equipment), but also because it is, quite simply, more realistic and thus immersive if they can just come up with a clever idea and/or at least try and improvise. That's one of the biggest advantages of pen&paper roleplaying, after all.

dementedwombat wrote:That said, another thing that always annoys me about a game is a "dodge" skill where you have an arbitrary chance to dodge any attack, regardless of its origin and how skilled the attacker is. I'd like to see a game where either every combat action is an opposed check, or else your level of "acrobatics" imposes a flat negative modifier on people's attack skills.

Don't a lot of RPGs work like that? Generally, rulesets that lack a specific dodge skill will have non-armour-based damage avoidance factored in elsewhere. D&D has this merged into Armor Class, Dragon Age has it as Defense, ... all values that one's attack is tested against.

Now, what *I* would like to see is attack rolls modifying damage inflicted. How awkward is it when you roll ridiculously high on accuracy, but somehow your bullet only manages to inflict a glancing hit. And ruleswise it'd be so easy to implement, too. Don't even have a damage roll. Have damage be "[weapon value] + [something from the attack roll]". Together with Dodge, this eliminates two dice rolls and really speeds up combat.

On the downside, it reduces player agency as a single dice roll determines whether somebody is injured or not, and it takes away from the fun of players rolling for guaranteed damage to hurt an opponent. I could see people being unhappy about feeling "helpless" as a psychological concern when thinking about such rules. Perhaps that's why most rules stick to the more traditional format? I guess all of this can be attributed to the "there is no perfect system" thing mentioned earlier.

 Lynata wrote:

dementedwombat wrote:That said, another thing that always annoys me about a game is a "dodge" skill where you have an arbitrary chance to dodge any attack, regardless of its origin and how skilled the attacker is. I'd like to see a game where either every combat action is an opposed check, or else your level of "acrobatics" imposes a flat negative modifier on people's attack skills.

Don't a lot of RPGs work like that? Generally, rulesets that lack a specific dodge skill will have non-armour-based damage avoidance factored in elsewhere. D&D has this merged into Armor Class, Dragon Age has it as Defense, ... all values that one's attack is tested against.

Yes, games do it that way a lot of the time, but games that do that seem to make a very hard distinction between "combat skills" and "noncombat skills". Look at D&D for example, it doesn't matter how many ranks of acrobatics you have, you never get any harder to hit. Defense and attack are handled by a completely different set of numbers than other skills. I never understood why, it just seems overcomplicated and inflating the system (again I repeat that D&D does this better than some systems, because at least they use "d20 + modifiers" for everything. Some games actually use different dice for attacks and other skills).

 Lynata wrote:

Now, what *I* would like to see is attack rolls modifying damage inflicted. How awkward is it when you roll ridiculously high on accuracy, but somehow your bullet only manages to inflict a glancing hit. And ruleswise it'd be so easy to implement, too. Don't even have a damage roll. Have damage be "[weapon value] + [something from the attack roll]". Together with Dodge, this eliminates two dice rolls and really speeds up combat.

On the downside, it reduces player agency as a single dice roll determines whether somebody is injured or not, and it takes away from the fun of players rolling for guaranteed damage to hurt an opponent. I could see people being unhappy about feeling "helpless" as a psychological concern when thinking about such rules. Perhaps that's why most rules stick to the more traditional format? I guess all of this can be attributed to the "there is no perfect system" thing mentioned earlier.

I was tossing a system like that around for a game I was designing but never really put together. I rolled with a system where you rolled once to attack, subtracted the target's defense, then took that number and divided it by the weapon's "damage threshold" to see how many points of damage got inflicted. Wearing armor could subtract from that value. Used that in combination with a hit location chart with separate HP tracking for each individual limb. It was a dice pool system where having more ranks in a skill let you roll more dice (kind of White Wolf style if you're familiar with that).

That system never got around to being completed, since I realized it was getting overcomplicated. Would be fun for a video game where the computer does all the math for you, but not what most people would play for fun.