Ygg: A Discussion

[Christoffer Lernö]

As I'm working on Ygg writing stuff together, I am struck by how uneven it is in its current state.

Not surprising considering the parts have had a lot of different polishing.

What looks the most promising seems to be the combat system. It boils down to rolling a single die and checking the margin. For the margin you kind of "buy" effects. You can narrate what you will but you're limited by the effects you have bought with the margin. Effects are damage, thrown, sweeped, grabbed, hit on a specific spot - and so on. Depending on the margin you can stack a differing amount of effects. There are also "special moves" which are "effect packages" which are cheaper than simply buying them on the fly with margin. Creating special moves is trivial and a quick name generator is also included.

Once you have established the effects, you roll for them dicepool style. The successes indicate the extent of success for the particular effect. You can choose to narrate before or after you roll the effect. It doesn't really matter.

To get more margin you can do use Inspirations a currently very loosely defined mechanic, which basically gives you a bonus D6 or something to add to your margin as long as you can motivate it. Inspirations are stuff like  "seeing a loved one die at the hands of the enemy" or other things that inspire to actions beyond the normal. You can only be inspired by an event once. After that it's "used up".

(Note that not all of this is written down in the rule draft yet)

On the other hand, the skill mechanics is a mess. Partly because I don't want skills (so I default to stats, treating them as representing average skill level) partly because I don't want excessive randomness. However I recognize that randomness sometimes is useful, so I popped in a mechanism which allows for shifting randomness. Initially I also had something called "Riskbreakers" which was kind a retroactive skill increase roll. I don't know what to do with that right now though.
However, my point was only to remove people looking up and down skill lists, so I introduced descriptors which was supposed to only vaguely function as skill bonuses. How those then related to character classes and professions weren't very clear however.

Right now I'm stuck with a mess of rules and I get the feeling that the way out of this is solving things the way the combat system was solved. However I'm a little unsure how. The main point of the mechanics is to allow for narrating results and limited directorial/authorial? control to gloss over traditional weaknesses in sim style systems, without preventing it to be run sim style.

If you look at say Basic D&D, then all skills and stuff had to be improvised. This was usually no problem since the main skills (dungeon exploring ones) were carefully covered. If you steered of the route you ended up in No-Rule-Land.
I want people in similar position playing Ygg, but instead of No-Rule-Land they are supposed to end up in flexible rules using Author/Directorial style to guide them instead of true free-form.

What my mistake might have been is that I worked on those skill rules without any clear understanding of what their true use would be. What they truly should do is to drive the premise, which is exploration of Situation. I'm only starting to realise that however, and I'm not yet sure what it means as far as actual mechanics go.
I only know I wish it was a little more like my combat system :) Any ideas or things I could take a look at - especially skill mechanics used to enchance exploration of situation - I'd be grateful.

[contracycle]

What my mistake might have been is that I worked on those skill rules without any clear understanding of what their true use would be. What they truly should do is to drive the premise, which is exploration of Situation. I'm only starting to realise that however, and I'm not yet sure what it means as far as actual mechanics go.

Thats quite right.  You will recall that when you set out on this path, there was much discussion as to what this game would be, and what Generic Fantasy meant.  You yourself didn't really know how the game was going to play, what people were going to do bar "adventuring".  I think that you are now developing a diferent perception of what you want the game to do; frankly I would reccomed the "clean slate" approach and start from scratch.  This is not becuase the stuff you have is bad - but becuase a design which is coherent from the outset, which is comprehensible in the mind of the designer, is usually more elegant and focussed than one that is a mishmash of seperate ideas, or ideas designed from the wrong mode, or with the wrong intent.  Label this v1, call it a learning experience, and sketch out a whole new v2.  It happens.

[Christoffer Lernö]

Contra, as for the skill system I'm very willing to do that, but do you mean it is necessary for all the other parts of the system as well?

[Edit: I wanted to add something more... As for the game itself and what you do - that hasn't changed. What has changed is my understanding of how I can eliminate problems by changing interpretations of mechanics as well as introducing meta mechanics. It's for the skills that I go something like: "doh, why the hell am I messing around with these things anyway I don't want them". That said, I still would like to see some impact of the stats and I don't want to leave the GM totally without any guidance.]

[Edit2: To clarify - the combat system is looking great, the skill system isn't. The magic system I never thought it could work in it's old shape anyway so that isn't much to worry about. When I'm talking about system problems I'm talking about the skill system. It should be noted that the skill system is actually a minor part (10%?) of the game (whereas the combat system is maybe 50% or more)]

[Christoffer Lernö]

Sorry about double posting but I had even more on my mind.

Ideally, what I'd like to have system-wise is the simplicity of Donjon. From the previews I've seen it's actually similar to what I was thinking of in forms of skills and stats. Similarly to Donjon I also want to keep skills few.
Of course Donjon is directorial mechanic driven and mine is mainly Sim. I'm not looking to borrow Donjon stuff, I'm merely pointing out how Ygg should look like in the end when it comes to skills.

Problem is I don't know how the heck I get there.

Again, of course, I'm overlooking the problem "how does this lead to explore situation"?

I'm not sure. What is slightly important though is that the players really feel that their characters are equiped to explore the situation (which might be monster hunting or saving villages from bandits or whatever). A random thought is that knowledge skills can be a great help for the GM to guide the players right in their mission. Another thing to consider is that characters should grow in ability with time. Although this is very firmly in my mind with regards to combat, the transition to skills are not clear.
Sometimes very high skills can be permissable without ruining the "increasing ability" feeling, sometimes it is not. How to strike a balance there is also a good question.

[contracycle]

All right then: chop the skills out and look at the bloody stump left on the core resolution mechanic: what kind of input is it looking for?  A number?  All you have to do is find another way to get that number.

Thatas the crude reduction, but it'll do.  The problem is that the situation is probably not that simple - the number has to be in a certain range, is going to be modified by a certain range of numbers, and measured against an already established range.  IME, its usally simpler to start again, this time knowing that you don;t want skills and designing a suitable core mechanic that doesn't assume that sort of input.

[Christoffer Lernö]

All right then: chop the skills out and look at the bloody stump left on the core resolution mechanic

Actually it's a little simpler than that. You see it's the core resolution mechanic that I want to throw out. The skills are right now just an arbitrary add-on to the stats.

The "stump" I have would be the stats which lie in the range of 1-12 (humans have values ranging from 2-8). That makes the stats both usable as die pool size, as target number for d12 rolls and such. The combat mechanic makes heavy use of that.

But maybe before we go further, do take a look at this to get a better understanding of how it looks. You don't need to look at everything. Just scroll down to "Actions & Resolutions".

This is the part I'm unhappy with. Note that this part only is resolving non-combat stuff. It's not to be used for any combat resolution.

[contracycle]

Actually it's a little simpler than that. You see it's the core resolution mechanic that I want to throw out. The skills are right now just an arbitrary add-on to the stats.

Well then, what do you want to keep?  And if you are not going to keep the core mechanic, why resist a reqwrite from scratch?

This is the part I'm unhappy with. Note that this part only is resolving non-combat stuff. It's not to be used for any combat resolution.

Why?

[Christoffer Lernö]

Well then, what do you want to keep?  And if you are not going to keep the core mechanic, why resist a reqwrite from scratch?

Because how can I rewrite something I am in the process of writing? ;) This is the rewrite already.

But maybe core mechanics is a little misleading. The core stuff is in the combat mechanics after all (and a little with stats generation). Skill resolution is in the perifery. The reason it ended up like that I already explaine in the first posting:

If you look at say Basic D&D, then all skills and stuff had to be improvised. This was usually no problem since the main skills (dungeon exploring ones) were carefully covered. If you steered of the route you ended up in No-Rule-Land.
I want people in similar position playing Ygg, but instead of No- Rule-Land they are supposed to end up in flexible rules using Author/Directorial style to guide them instead of true free-form.

That hopefully also answers your second question as well.

However, as I keep saying, this is only where I'm coming from it's not how it has to be. I'd prefer to somehow hook up the rest of the resolution on how things are solved in combat. But how to do that without compromising game balance is not obvious to me. There is also the problem of taking "any skill you can think of" in a game where combat efficiency is supposed to be balanced.

[contracycle]

But maybe core mechanics is a little misleading. The core stuff is in the combat mechanics after all (and a little with stats generation). Skill resolution is in the perifery. The reason it ended up like that I already explaine in the first posting:

Fine.  I regard this as one of the major failings of D&D, arguably THE major failing; so to me this is itroducing a problem.  Seocndly, if the skills are not related to the resolution, and do not provide inputs, then theyr can be neither important nor unbalancing, it would seem to me.  There does not appear much point to having them; if they are only intended to provide colour, then it doesn't really matter how they are structured and you might as well just leave any skill actions to the GM.  Taking it a little further, I would be incliuned to say that characters can be assumed to succeed at their "niche" skills, else otherwise their niche will be mostly irrelevant.

We seem to have been through all of this before: the whole do-you-want-skills-or-not argument.

[talysman]

If you look at say Basic D&D, then all skills and stuff had to be improvised. This was usually no problem since the main skills (dungeon exploring ones) were carefully covered. If you steered of the route you ended up in No-Rule-Land.
I want people in similar position playing Ygg, but instead of No-Rule-Land they are supposed to end up in flexible rules using Author/Directorial style to guide them instead of true free-form.

I haven't seen a full description of your combat rules with its margins-buying-effects mechanic yet, but if you want the skill mechanic to resemble the combat mechanic, but with a heavy reliance on Director style... why not set a cost for describing one fact, then roll the same as you would for combat, buying facts with the rolled margin? maybe youcould even have different costs for certain broad non-combat actions: Sense costs 1, Move costs 2, Change, Make or Break costs 3. skills could be very broad, maybe based on nouns the character is familiar with.

[Christoffer Lernö]

Fine.  I regard this as one of the major failings of D&D, arguably THE major failing; so to me this is itroducing a problem.  Seocndly, if the skills are not related to the resolution, and do not provide inputs, then theyr can be neither important nor unbalancing, it would seem to me.

Mmm... What exactly is the problem? That there are no skills in the conventional sense or that there are only skills for combat?

Anyway if I try to explain why I went this way in the first place:

First I recognized that the only "game effectiveness"-parameter would probably be fighting ability (or whatever to call the efficiency in combat).

That in turn made me realize that players would have to sacrifice fighting ability to buy non-combat abilities.

I made an attempt to make non-combat abilities that indeed could be used to raise character efficiency, but that just got harder and harder to justify as I went along. So I threw out that idea.

It was at this point the idea to actually use two different currency models for them arose.

Now if I went with the simple approach of simply letting skills default to the stat, then we're on fairly solid ground, except for the resolution mechanic itself which seem too rigid in an old school way, despite the trappings of inspirations, concessions and the like.

If I actually add skills, that is areas of expertise, for the character then there arises the question of skill improvement and the like. Now suddenly were on slippery ground.

The problem is that I see a use for special areas of knowledge for the character, although I don't necessarily see that they need to improve.

To answer Talysman: Right now you can look at the combat system and play it without the directorial mechanics. Sure you won't be able to have as nice descriptions, but it's possible.
On the other hand, using a pure directorial mechanics for the skills would kind of force that kind of game. What I really want would be a skill system which is augmented, but not dependent, on the directorial mechanics such as the one you suggest.

[ks13]

OK, lets forget about actual skill resolution mechanics for a moment and go back to the basics. Say I create an Ygg character with stats and combat abilities, and now I want that character to be able to "pick locks" and "climb". Since you don't have or want skill lists, how do I know if the character can do this or not? Has this issue been resolved?

[Christoffer Lernö]

That's the point ks13. It's not quite resolved. Originally (or I mean up to now) I was delegating such things to descriptors. Those were incidentally a little looser that usual descriptors as I figured them both as bonuses and stand alone skills.

Let's say you had herb lore. Then this could be considered a bonus (+1 compared to stat or whatever) when looking for a particular herb (after all you're more familiar than most of where it grows, and how it looks like) or it could be considered a stand-alone skill "is there a herbal cure to this disease and do I know how to do it". The latter is for the case when there is no obvious basic chance (and stat to derive it from). In that case you don't roll stat+descriptor bonus, but simply a value derived from the descriptor maybe say 4 dice would be appropriate for a simple "Herb Lore" descriptor, whereas  "specialist in herbal medicine" would be 6 or 7 dice.

The problems with this method are many though. First of all, what about big vs. small skills. "Gem Trader" vs. "Evaluate Gems" for example. One way is to have a rule that the more the descriptor contains the less it is worth. So if I have "making the poison called Rykaz" compared to "making poisons", I'm gonna be much better at making the Rykaz, but when it comes to the general stuff I will have less of an idea. Unfortunately I find it hard to translate this into some kind of guidelines for the HM.

Besides, as the "Gem Trader" vs "Evaluate Gems" illustrate it is not necessarily so that one can see that the more general skill necessarily should be less good than the specialist.

Then of course there is the whole descriptor as a bonus or as a stand-alone thing. Merely treating it as a bonus is unsatisfactory, but relatively painless. With a double face as stand alone or bonus it gets even more complicated. Not only does a descriptor have a bonus which varies depending how general the descriptor is compared to the action, it also also has an independent rating which is varying in maybe a different manner. An we haven't yet come to the problem of analysing different degrees of descriptor qualities, such as "Good at Evaluating Gems" vs "Master as Evaluating Gems".

This only goes to show how naive my original implementation was.

Still, we can draw out three important points that ought to hold for the descriptors:

* They should be possible to interpret in terms of a number (bonus or stand alone rating) similar in magnitude to the stats

* Actions covered by skills should use the same mechanic for resolution as those "defaulting" to a stat (remember stats are supposed to give the average skill level of skills involving that stat which is why they are "defaulted to")

* There should be no extensive skill lists to look through

[ks13]

That's what I thought. It seems that people are offering dice mechanic suggestions, when you are still trying to decide on the functionality of skills. At this point, trying to talk in terms of dice and modifiers or any solid numbers is not helpful. You really need to pin down what you want skills to represent and to be able to do.

Is a descriptor based skill system a must have?

Does the detail in terms of skill scope need to be present? Do you really want to make distinctions between stuff like "Herbal Lore", "Find Herbs", "Identify Herbs & Plants", "Botany", etc.?

What about handling skills that anyone has a reasonable shot at trying and succeeding, versus those that only trained persons can do (nobody should get a chance to perform brain surgery and figure it out as they go along - at least I don't think this is something you are after).

You could try something similar to the following:
create several ability levels, such as "General Ability", "Basic Training", "Advanced Training", "Master Level Skill", "Godlike", or something similar with as many gradients as you want. Each task then will require one of these levels in oder to perform the task with some decent chance of success (this can later be defined as a specific probability of success). General Ability is anything you feel anyone has a chance of trying and succeeding. Everything else requires some level of skill (by which I mean training and experience). Climbing a wall or tree is a Gen. Ability, scaling a mountain side with all the proper equipment (attaching lines for others following you for example) would require a skill - some degree of training. Have the descriptors provide very general skill areas, or skill packages. Any skill that falls under this broad category can be said to be at the basic level. More specific descriptors would provide higher levels of training/experience. Unlike General Ability, having basic training should provide some chance at performing the skill at a higher level, and thus dealing with a more difficult task. Likewise going backward (a master performing a simple task) will reduce the possibility of failure.

This means that there will be a fair amount of judgement calls. Does a descriptor of "very athletic" provide a long distance running skill of base or advanced level? This can be dealt with by providing guide lines on how to write the descriptors. For example, "athletic" = basic, "very athletic" = basic but broader scope (more likely to apply to different situations), "excellent runner" = advanced. Let the players create the specific descriptors and skills sets, keeping their characters as broad or as specific as they want. Once you can decide on how you want the skill system to work, the dice mechanics can be built to suit the concept.

As you done, make a list of the feature that should be present in the skill system, avoiding any reference to dice resolution for the moment, and pick out what must absolutely be there. Then stick with this decision and build around these features.

[contracycle]

Mmm... What exactly is the problem? That there are no skills in the conventional sense or that there are only skills for combat?

Delicate ground.  Let us say that IN  MY OPINION (should mr gleichman be lurking) the "adventurer centrally defined by combat capacity" leads to, well adventurers.  The system says "look, this is your chief chararetsristic" and it quite reasonably becomes the tool that is most frequently applied.  Contrast this with WOD's mix-n-match attribute+skill synthesis: far more origins for skill to come from, as it were, a more complex interplay of character traits producing results.  More oportunity for cunning, improvisation, surprise.  HeroWars has "flat" mechanics in which no value is more or less important than another; the system does not prompt for a choice of tool to apply.  

Anyway, that roughly is my concern - that a system with a core value will correpondingly devalue other character features.

You mentioned that you want these primarily as representations of expertise and knowledge.  OK - rate your skills as Backgrounds - i.e. Hunter, Sailor, Tracker - in three degrees: Novice, Experienced, Veteran.  For each level, they can ask one question about their area of expertise per session.  If they don't use it the chance is lost.  This might be quite cool for exposition: set up a door with dwarven runes and the dwarf will pontificate about them in the literature, right?  The GM has to give a good, honest answer; they can answer other questions as they like, but these ones have to be legit answers.

Hopefully this would produce an effect in which even characters with the same primary expertise (fighter) will have quite different backgrounds and be knowledgeable in different things.