Talking about Skills again

[M. J. Young]

Someone has said that the problem with most role playing game mechanics is that they start as combat mechanics, and then they try to build backwards to cover everything else. I don't know how solidly that holds across the boards, although I do see something of that trend in many games. I also cannot say with certainty that it is not true of Multiverser, because I was not involved in the earliest stages of the development of system. However, when I came on board, that which was presented to me as the embryonic system appeared to have been built the other way. Skills were resolved by a very simple system of skill ability plus relevant attribute plus bias (an important factor in Multiverser, as it makes skills easier or more difficult to match the nature of the world in which they are being used). Situation modifiers could be added or subtracted to reflect the difficulty of the task or the conditions under which it was being attempted. Combat was skill check, like anything else, but that there were very specific situation modifiers. Chief among these was that in addition to the weapon or attack form skill and the attribute score, the character had a combat ability, a "strike value", he added. Although this made good sense in that it reflected intuition and coordination (and, in melee combat, muscle tone), I came to see that its real function was to offset the target's defensive value, which was always subtracted.  Thus if your innate combat ability matched the target's innate ability to avoid being hit, your chance to hit it was a straight skill check; but if you were an extraordinary fighter or he an extraordinary dodger, that would change the outcome.

It was also inherent in the system that a defender could use a skill to counter a skill, and although there are several ways this can be implemented in the game system the most direct is that a successful use of the defending skill creates a modifier against the attacker's roll. Similarly, the attacker could use other skills to improve his chance to succeed in his attack, such as magical bonuses to his skill or psionic precognitive abilities or electronic targeting computers. These would also impact the skill check by changing the target number.

But then, could these not also apply in a confrontational but non-combat situation? When Gandalf is facing the Balrog on the bridge in Kazad-dum, it is not exactly combat that we see, and yet there is the opposition of powers--the dark fire magic of the Balrog against the White Fire of the wizard.  Do these not oppose each other in much the same ways that, say, trained parrying responds to skilled attack? The same system which is used to resolve the attacks and defenses in combat is used to resolve actions which are not combat actions; but that is putting it backwards. It is rather that the same system which is used to resolve all actions is brought into stark relief when applied to the combat situation.

Yet there are degrees of precision happening here that shift as you move away from combat and confrontation.  For example, in combat I am going to want to know that the dodging ability of the defender is going to impose a 13 percentage point penalty on the attacker's rolls this round, because the situation is not merely critical but demands accuracy--no one wants to have to argue about whether that was a hit. I would similarly want a very clear notion of how much affect one wizard's spell has on the efforts of another to cast something--as perhaps Snape's countercurse against Quirrel's curse when Harry Potter was on his broom. But if the problem is that you're trying to steer a ship into the wind, there's going to be a lot of subjective decisions on my part. Just how strong is the wind? How directly into it are you attempting to go? How well do these sails allow you to tack? In the end, there's going to be a number; but it's going to be my best estimate on the difficulty of the task at hand.

Now maybe--perhaps probably--I won't tell you the number. I'll let you roll, and then (applying the relative success and relative failure rules mentioned above) give you the outcome. You might never know if it was, technically, a success or a failure--all you know is whether you're making progress into the wind, and to what degree.

And sometimes I'm going to see you coming into a situation in which I know you can't fail, or can't succeed. Sometimes I'll hand you the dice anyway--maybe I want to see how badly you'll fail or how well you'll succeed--or maybe I'll just tell you what happens.

Part of the skill of the referee is knowing when the mechanics have to be more precisely applied, and when they can be more loosely applied. No one ever questions why they didn't have to roll the dice to walk across the room; and if they trust me, they never question why they have to roll the dice to walk across the room if I say they do. I remember one player baffled by why the floor kept seeming to move beneath him, why he kept stumbling and falling as he tried to make his way across the dark room, until reaching the ladder it dawned on him that he had awakened on a ship. It isn't exactly illusion; it's more a sense of when things are in doubt and when they are not.

That, I suppose, is how you really do the kind of interface you want: you must have a way of recognizing when the outcome of the task is in doubt. It's easy to use drama resolution exclusively as long as there's no question about what happens. The reason you have a detailed combat mechanic is precisely because at that point you do not know what will happen and do not want the "blame" for the outcome to fall on your decisions. You have a detailed skill mechanic for the same reason: so that the outcome will be determined by something objective, something which all the players can agree is not your prejudices. When there is no doubt of what will happen, there is no need to rely on those mechanics. That's the way you transition.

--M. J. Young

[Andrew Martin]

What are the alternative ways of resolving skills and are any of them compatible with a rather rigidly defined combat system? Look at it from a gamist view. How do we balance a more narrative/directorial style skill system with other parts of the game which are strictly mechanical? Has it been done successfully? If so, where?

Why not just design a RPG combat system that simulates cinematic and dramatic combat? A system that incorporates all the moves one sees in movies, or reads about in books; and that allows players to add in moves as they see fit and that fit the situation? You'll then have simulation play that matches the narrative, and narrative play that matches the simulation. Then just use that combat system as the RPG's skill system. It seems a simple solution to the problem. This doesn't seem too hard to do; after all, I've done it. So why not do this?