Ygg: A Discussion

[Bob McNamee]

Perhaps you would want to limit skills to a single word...
for instance there would be no Gem Seller, versus Jeweler conflict...
you might have the skill Gems, or Seller(Selling or Merchant), or Jeweler. These could be used in any way useful for the player.
Herbs- could be used to find herbs, know which are good for healing, poisons or cooking and how to use them, or grow them, maybe even how much to sell them for

Burglary- various building related thief type stuff...but different than
Pickpocket- various street thief stuff

I'd be inclined to use mastery labels of Apprentice, Journeyman, Master myself
an idea anyway...

[Christoffer Lernö]

Bob: I although your "single word" has some merit, it would seem that it does not necessary help. Think of "jumping" and "engineer". Both are one word but they are very different in scope.

CC: I agree that having focus on weapon skills leads to weapon use. It's kind of ok since that play is what I more or less prepare for. In fact all characters are geared up to be pretty good at fighting to prevent some players feeling that their characters are left out.
Since I knew that would make other skills less worth I tried to put them at close to zero worth so I wouldn't need to balance them. But that leads to problems as well.
Your idea about backgrounds is neat, but 1 thing per level seems a little to little. It could be developed into something useful I think. However, I was also thinking of some almost solely colour things.. and sometimes the skills wouldn't be skills, but unusual LACK of them. Like "my character can't swim even though my Movement Stat would give me a fair chance to succeed" and so on. So the background is not the only use of it, but it's also a way to describe character oddities. Or that's what I planned anyway. At second glance that might be a bad idea, it's better that such things are defined in play rather than before play.
But I've been on that road before... I'm very interested in having character background (and skill) development *during* play rather than before play. In fact your suggestion on getting facts for background is a version of that, which is partly why I like the idea I guess :)

ks13: No descriptors are not necessary, in fact a skill system is not necessarily what I need to have. That's a thing I try to figure out. I *would* like to have characteristic skills though. For example it makes sense that my Demon Hunter is better at figuring out how to kill a demon than the Barbarian from the Northern Wastes, right? Now if I had a profession system that could be in the background package, but it's not clear if I have professions or not...

As for your further questions ks13: All parts of the skill system is open for debate, but I know I don't want long skill lists and I don't want people to sit in char gen and try to figure out how to get the most value for their skill points. I personally think it's friggin hard to select level of detail for skills. I have no preference either way, general and specific skills, both have advantages and disadvantages.

[ks13]

I like the idea of developing skills on the fly. Why not setup a system where the characters proficiency, past training, experience, etc, is setup in very general terms in the background, and the skills decided as you play. How specific (i.e. how narrow its definition) each skill is depends upon the player. This might result in a long list of skills for the characters, but no long lists in the game and nothing to worry about during chargen.

A possible approach would be that each time a player wants to "reveal" a skill, the GM decides how likely it is to be present, Very likely, Probably, or Unlikely based on the background description. Assign % to each (like 90, 60, 30) and have a pool that gets spent to acquire skills. If a roll indicates that the skill is not present, list it under "training" since this the something the player wants, but the character does not yet have. There is no cost to have skills in "training", but there should be a limit. If the player really wants the skill, allow them to spend a point from the pool, add 10% to the roll and re-roll. The degree of efficiency in each skill could be based on the level system suggested by Contracycle, with more cost per higher efficiency.

Also, unknown skills might be listed aside from "skills being learned". In your swimming example, I wouldn't see it being remarkable that someone from a desert doesn't know how to swim. On the otherhand, someone you would expect to have this skill and they don't is more noteworthy.

So for a Demon Hunter, if the player wants to have a skill "Spot Demon Activity", that might be a very likely skill to have. "Lockpicking" skill on the other hand would be rather unlikely if there was nothing in the characters background descrpition that would indicate this type of knowledge. If the skills can be presented during play as needed, than there is no chance that a player will have a skill they never use since they "buy" the skill just before they are about to use it. The flip side is that they don't want to exhaust the skill pool right away.

[Christoffer Lernö]

I like your idea KS, however the random thing might be a problem to get to work well.

I was thinking of a little simplified scheme.

Basically you start out with:

o Former Profession(s) (this might be jeweller, demon hunter, goat herder or whatever)

o Land of Origin or Home (this would basically signify a culture and a geographical location: "A village in the moors of Akunhar", "The Glorious City of the Moon"

Now, the player and GM can come up with the actual names an such. A few basic types of professions and appropriate geographical locations will be provided. There is nothing stopping someone from saying they grew up in place X and then went to live in place Y, but they're only gonna get half of the bonuses from each.

That means you don't get the full "city bonus" to your roll for knowing about city housing if you grew up in a village and only much later moved to the city for example.

Beyond that you get an amount of development points. When you want to pass a skill you can declare that you are skilled at the task an spend some of those points. If you make the skill roll with the bonus provided by the dev points, you get to dictate how you got the skill. If you fail you write it up as "training". If you have a skill that is already written as "training" and you haven't used it since you got the last batch of development points, you succeed by default to notch it up one step, however the reason written for having this skill can only be "trained it", it can never be a background thing.

This assumes you get batches of dev points to put in at regular intervals though, with the problems that involves.

To sum it up...

With development points you can:

o Declare you are familiar with a skill you have not used so far with this character, add the bonus you're "supposed to have" to the skill roll and roll for it. If you succeed then your "claim" is true. You can now dictate what the exact background is, paying the appropriate amount of dev points. If the roll should fail, you write up the skill as "training" and pay one dev point.

o Declare you have finished training a skill you have written up as "training" during a former adventure. Simply pay 1 dev point and create a "trained in <skillname>"

o Declare you are training a skill which you haven't used so far in this adventure. Pay 1 dev point and write "training <skillname>". The "training" label does not give any bonuses to skill rolls.


What do you think ks13. Is this a little in the vein you were thinking? (With a few modifications of course)

[ks13]

What do you think ks13. Is this a little in the vein you were thinking? (With a few modifications of course)

That captures it very nicely. The more important thing is if you think this fits what you want regarding skills in Ygg. If so, then you should move on to developing dice mechanics to support skill resolution, and define how the "development" points or pool will function.

There are a couple of things I didn't see covered. How can a player create skills that seem to be outside of their professional and social/cultural background. Maybe an initial development cost that provides no bonus? Is there a cap to the bonus you can get? I'm worried that a player can add a bonus to not only have a very high chance of getting a skill but also passing the task at hand. Eg. declaring that you have a climbing skill and then spending enough points to climb a sheer ice wall in the process. It also doesn't address the range of skill (basic skill ability or expert). But these things are only important if you decide you want to go ahead and implement this as a skill system.

[Jeremy Cole]

Pale Fire,

One thing bothers me about this, and here is the gratuitous chasm jumping example.  If I have decided I want to be Indiana Jones, I might choose tomb robber for my background.  When I come to said chasm I would declare I have the skill Jumping, the concept of Mr Jones' fantastic athletic moves on my mind.  Critical fail, and I hang on the edge of the chasm, and further still my background has been changed.  I have gone in my mind from great jumper to jumper in training.  I am now very deprotagonised, as the mechanics have encroached on my character concept.  I still want to have been a great jumper in the past.

It just seems to me that with this system, any whiff factor extends not only to the roll at hand, but will affect my character in the long term.  

Jeremy

[Christoffer Lernö]

Jeremy, you bring up an important consideration. Let's see how it looks with the system KS suggested:

Name: Indytoo
Profession: Tomb Robber
Skills: None

You come to a chasm and want to jump. There are now actually 2 options. One is to declare that your profession makes you a great jumper. If the GM agrees then you don't even need to spend a point. If you had created the profession "A Guy Like Indiana Jones" you'd have even better support for your claim to use that profession skill.

If that isn't possible (the GM says no) we do run into the possibility of deprotagonization you mention. A few ways around this exist, but I can't think of any clear solution.
One would be to allow putting several dev points into a skill to make sure you succeed in getting the skill. Developing skills without needing to roll for them should be possible at chargen, so you can assure that you have the skill to begin with. Finally you might simply accept that there is no way your character starts out "as good as Indiana Jones at everything", because a lot of play aims at increasing player effectiveness as the campaign goes along. Indy of the movies already had a lot of adventures behind him, your starting character won't.

For me I don't feel it would be so much of a problem because if I thought a skill was important I'd write it down during chargen.

How do you feel Jeremy, is this enough to eliminate your fear of protagonization or is it still there?