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I've a question for everyone here.   How exhaustive of a skill list do you prefer in a game?   From games with no skill lists (like Amber) to games with skills broken down into very detailed sub-categories (like GURPS), there is a lot of variation.  

I tend to like simpler resolution mechanics and character creation but I like lots of skills....particularly in settings where skills are very important.   I ran a Star Trek campaign in GURPS years ago and the detailed skill list really worked with that setting.   However, as I've gotten older I've appreciated simplicity more and more.  I've lately been running a D20 game to give the system a try and I've only found it to be aheadache with the huge pain in the butt that character creation, advancement and everything can be.  

I figure that shorter skill lists add to simplicity and players can spend less time looking at their character sheets in a game and more time playing.

So what do you prefer and why?   (I know that tatse will inevitably vary by genre and setting, but in the grand scheme of things do you like streamlined skills, "crunchy" skills or no skill lists?)

...and before anyone mentions this:  I saw Autocrat started a similiar thread but that thread has been more on types of skills for his game, so I felt this would be best spun-off to another thread.

Hello Nuadha,

I'll repeat what I asked Autocrat in that thread:

QuoteWhat are skills for in your game? How important do you think they are, relative to other things (attributes, possessions, whatever)? Who decides whether a character is using a given skill: GM or player?

And most importantly: do skills solve characters' problems, or do they set up problems? Imagine my character in a situation - can I make a skill roll and get out of it? Or is that option closed, and no matter what, I have to use a mutant power, to use a gadget, or to fight?

You see, the word "skill" doesn't mean the same thing across all RPG rules. It really doesn't. Even if you've played ten games and they all seem alike, it's quite possible that nine of them were imitations of the other - which means you've only played one "real" game.

So when you ask, "what skills should I have?" there's absolutely no way to answer sensibly. I cannot possibly know what you are asking about, until you tell me what skills as a game mechanic do for people during play. Let us know, though, and you'll get tons of help.

Your post asks a slightly different question, and unfortunately it's even vaguer than Autocrat's - "what do you prefer" is really, really not the kind of thing we can discuss here.

To put it as clearly as I can:

- Amber, Sorcerer = no skills, just attributes

- Castle Falkenstein, Zero = no attributes, just skills

Both work very well. If you could provide some better context for what you're asking about skills, then we can help.

Best,
Ron

Axtually, your question on the other thread is exactly why I posted this in another setting.   I'm not referring to skills for a particular setting at all.   I'm asking how much detail do people here generally like in their skill lists and why.  

I'm not asking what skills I should have in my game.   I'm not asking how many skills a particular style of game should have.   I'm not applying this question to any system whatsoever.  

If your concern about answering this question is that I have not defined how skills work in the system and how important they should be to this system, then you misunderstand the question.   Perhaps worded this way it will make more sense:   How much detail in (non-superhuman) character abilities do you like in a system's character creation?   How much detail do you generally like and why do you feel you prefer this?  

If this question belongs on another board, let me know but I feel this is an important part of game theory and creation.   Soem people prefer lots of detail while others prefer little.    Why do they prefer these widely different styles?

Hi Nuadha,

H'm, looks like we're both missing one another. Let me try again. You ask,

QuoteHow much detail in (non-superhuman) character abilities do you like in a system's character creation? How much detail do you generally like and why do you feel you prefer this?

This is, effectively, unanswerable in terms that work at this site. There is no "a system." Every system is its own thing, and therefore the answer for skills is going to be very different depending on the thing.

Also, criteria such as "what abilities you like" and "feel you prefer" aren't going to generate discussion. It's a survey question, much like "what is your favorite color." No matter how many people answer, it won't ever be anything but a list of one-time-only feelings-results. The Forge has a long history of avoiding surveys of this kind, because one of the goals is always to generate a useful discussion.

So all you need for this thread to be a solid, powerful one is, instead of "a system" or "in general," to name a specific game-system or type of system that you know quite well, and ask questions about what works and what doesn't work, and why.

Surely you've had play-experiences that led you to start this thread in the first place. What game were you playing? What skills seemed especially important or unimportant? Why?

Best,
Ron

The fact that there is no "a system" is exactly why I post this question to this board.

This is not posted as a poll as much as a gage of why people feel that certain levels of detail are preferred by different players by discussing why they may have found themselves preferring certain levels of detail.

How about I word it this way: Why do you think it is preferred by some to have highly detailed character creations and by others to have more "streamlined" characters?   Particularly I am thinking of "skills" as in a group of named abilities usually gained through training.

As far as what brings up the question, I was GMing the Buffy RPG over the weekend and one of the players was complaining that the skills don't give enough detail about what your character is good at.  

Another player seemed to think it was strange that he wanted more detail.  It works fine like it is.

Personally, I've been assigning modifiers based on character background and familiarity in the game that make sense, so if a character who would have never had a reason to learn to shoot a missile launcher in the past tries to pick up and fire one, I'd assess a high negative modifier to their "gun-fu" skill check.

Some of you probably already know that the earlier versions of Unisystem found in All Flesh Must be Eaten and Witchcraft have more detailed skill lists.   On their message boards there has been discussions were people mention using the expanded skill lists from All Flesh with everything else from Buffy.

This got me thinking how I would probably like adding a more detailed skill list even though the simplicity and flexibility of the Buffy RPG is what I like about it and this would add more complexity.

Why?    I think it gives me a better feel of the character to know that h's good with a rifle but not with a pistol or a "heavy weapon."

Despite many things I haven't liked in the system it was the detailed way of handling skills that I liked in GURPS.   It was complex, but I liked that some skills would default to other skills instead of an attribute if you were untrained.

That is an excellent answer Nuadha,  I'm actually going to probe a little deeper

QuoteI think it gives me a better feel of the character to know that h's good with a rifle but not with a pistol or a "heavy weapon.

Why does this need to be reflected in the skill mechanics?

If its important to you as a player to have a vision of your character's relative skill with different weapons, it is a simple matter to just play the character that way.  You can perfectly reasonably role play the character as being good with rifles and poor with pistols without needing seperate skills for them.

So the real issue isn't one of helping to differentiate the character, that can be done regardless.  Why does this differentiation need to be reflected in the skills?

Note, that isn't a challenge, that's an honest question, because I think in finding that true answer is where a thread like this can have value.  Otherwise, as Ron says its just a survey of preference, which doesn't tell us much.

For example:

As a player I might say "sure I could just roleplay my character with poor pistol skill and no ability to use a heavy weapon, but the skill that I purchased technically gives me access to all of them in the description.  If I'm going to give something up, I want something in return."  By using a system where these things are seperate skills I can save points (or whatever) by only buying some instead of all.

As a GM I might say "sure I could just let you roleplay the difference, but when push comes to shove I don't really trust you to adhere to that, and someday I know you're going to pick up a pistol and start blazing away with it.  And even though you've been roleplaying the last umpteen sessions saying how poor you are with a pistol, for that important shot you're going to want to use your full skill because 'technically that's what's in the book'. "  to head that sort of selective memory off at the pass I might want a system that had more skills so it was easier to control PC effectiveness.


On the other hand, I could just as easily come up with arguements for the other side of the deal too.  Further I might not believe any one of them is the "best" answer but may wind up concluding that for certain styles of game one method works, but for another I think something else is better.

This is the heart of Ron's "a system" comment above.  You can't look at issues like this in a vacuum because they are part of a larger context .


So the question, IMO, isn't "which do you prefer, detailed or broad skills".  But what does one method allow you to accomplish that the other doesn't and what does that say about your roleplaying habits / goals / creative agenda.

Quote from: ValamirWhy does this need to be reflected in the skill mechanics?

If its important to you as a player to have a vision of your character's relative skill with different weapons, it is a simple matter to just play the character that way.  You can perfectly reasonably role play the character as being good with rifles and poor with pistols without needing seperate skills for them.  

So the real issue isn't one of helping to differentiate the character, that can be done regardless.  

I'm not sure what you mean by "just play the character that way".  In practice, firearms skill is something that affects multiple characters in play.  Thus, the player can say "I shoot the pistol at her head" but the results depend on system.  Just saying it doesn't necessarily make it so.  I can picture two main options:

1) I can play with the system as written.  So my rifle and pistol shooting actually have equal skill and chance of success.  However, I role-play my character as preferring to use a rifle when practical, and I have my character speak about how he isn't good with a pistol.  

2) I can change the system on the fly depending on what I am holding, with the group's permission.  For example, I can have a low skill and sometimes say: "I'm using a rifle so I'd like +3 on my roll" -- or alternately I can have a high skill and sometimes say "I'm using a pistol so I'd like -3 on my roll".  

Assuming that you really do want to differentiate, I don't think either of these are good choices.  The thing about #2 is that, if I do this consistently, it has effectively become a part of the system.  So why not just write it down instead of bringing it up and fudging it every time?  Even if you don't write it down, it is still a part of the house system and has the same pros/cons as having an "official" split skill.  

Quote from: ValamirSo the question, IMO, isn't "which do you prefer, detailed or broad skills".  But what does one method allow you to accomplish that the other doesn't and what does that say about your roleplaying habits / goals / creative agenda.  

I would agree with this as the choice.  I see detailed skills as being good for differentiation; but they add to search time and character creation time.  If the detailed skills are almost always the same or similar, then you aren't getting anything for the cost in search time and character creation time.

Personally I prefer a mixture.  I don't like systems that cover every nook and cranny because that limits roleplaying.  On the other hand I don't like the systems that have very general skills because that has the same effect.

In the end, it depends on the system you run and the environment that the characters are in.  As a rule of thumb, when my players suggest new skills that they want their characters to have, I sometimes allow them to be added to the list.  I had one player that wanted his character to be good at singing and playing a flute, but I didn't have such detailed skills, but I allowed him to have the skills anyways.

I find that skill-depth cuts both ways.

Sure, if you have a detailed, GURPS-style skill list you have a really good idea of what, according to the rules, your character can do.

At the same time, skill lists can be a real pain in the ass when you have a solid character concept, but are unable to get all of the little fiddly skills you need to flesh it out.

Knowledge skills often cause this problem. I don't think I have ever made a first level D20 D&D character that had the knowledge skills appropriate to his background and conception. The darned things are just too expensive. Same goes for GURPS and Hero System--there are too many skills that are important to your vision of the character but that don't provide enough mechanical benefit to spend valuable points on them that would be more useful to the character elsewhere.

As a rule of thumb, if you want to make a "skill list" for your game instead of some form of player-defined skill, you should think very hard about how each skill contributes to the game. Don't base your list on "real life" so much as on importance to the flow of play.

My 2 least favorite things about creating a character are A) buying equipment; and B) choosing skills.  Both seem to require a lot of accounting in most games, and I never really feel that it's that earth-shatteringly important.  So I like games that cut corners in this department.  Rather than make sure I buy all the skills needed to be an entomologist (math, biology, natural science, chemistry, etc), I prefer to just jot down Science (entomology) and leave it at that.  I really liked the way Sorcerer handled that with Cover.  Leaves out a lot of unnecessary bookkeeping.

Jay and Scourge108 bring up a good point, which is accounting.  I think there is a tendency to assume that huge skill lists go with accounting of some sort, i.e. you have X number of points to spend on the following list, with the following sub-rules and so forth.  

An exercise I remember some friends doing in grad school was to design yourself.  As Jay points out, knowledge skills are very often a problem.  By the end of grad school, you should be a world-class expert at some small thing (the subject of your dissertation), and you've got very advanced training in a bunch of things.  If you're in the humanities, I'm betting you know a bunch of languages.  Ouch.  Languages are always pricey, and suddenly you've got a character like yourself in knowledge (if you can afford it) who can't drive, can't swim, can't do martial arts, can't in fact do anything other than knowledge skills.

But suppose we just divorce accounting and skills?  I mean, granting John's excellent point about search time, suppose you have a large number of skills and essentially infinite points to put in them?  You give some guidelines about what's an appropriate way to spend them, and let 'er rip.  If your character has a zillion languages, so be it -- lots of skills in languages.  But this doesn't cost anything, because nothing costs anything.  So long as the game is so structured that it doesn't really matter enough to make some player be a weenie about this (I have 100 in everything!), who cares?

Leading to the follow-up: if it doesn't matter enough to be worth a little minor min-maxing, why does it matter at all?  Which leads us to, "Write down everything you're good at, and some things you suck at, but all your points go into Attributes; the skills are just guidelines to help you design the character."  And now we're around in circles....

Chris Lehrich

Quote from: clehrichI think there is a tendency to assume that huge skill lists go with accounting of some sort, i.e. you have X number of points to spend on the following list, with the following sub-rules and so forth.  

An exercise I remember some friends doing in grad school was to design yourself.  As Jay points out, knowledge skills are very often a problem.  By the end of grad school, you should be a world-class expert at some small thing (the subject of your dissertation), and you've got very advanced training in a bunch of things.  If you're in the humanities, I'm betting you know a bunch of languages.  Ouch.  Languages are always pricey, and suddenly you've got a character like yourself in knowledge (if you can afford it) who can't drive, can't swim, can't do martial arts, can't in fact do anything other than knowledge skills.

But suppose we just divorce accounting and skills?

This is exactly how Multiverser works.

[*]Conceive the character as you imagine him to be. Since it's usually played as an I-game, the question is really, describe yourself in game terms. Just do it. (There are specific tests for professional and expert level skills, so you can't just be an expert in everything, but you can have professional levels in several areas if you actually do have the experience.) Even if you're playing another character--translating a character from another game, or from a book or movie, or making it up out of whole cloth--the process is the same: decide what the character can do.[*]To streamline play, on-the-fly character creation essentially says write down only those things at which you are particularly good. As for driving, swimming, doing martial arts, and those other skills, if it comes up we'll add it to the sheet and decide then how good you are. Presumably if you are a professional at those things, you'd have thought of them initially; if you just forgot, you can still show reason for you to be rated above the amateur level.[*]Characters can add a skill through play at any time they want. A player can say no, I've never picked a lock, but I've seen it done on TV, or I've watched a locksmith do it, or I know how locks work, so I'm going to try it--then roll the dice, and see whether you've succeeded in teaching yourself a new amateur skill. There's no cost for adding skills; you just have to work them into play.[*]The system provides a massive skill framework that provides information such as how difficult it is to learn various categories of skills (based on what the character already knows, among other things), what skills stop working in what kinds of worlds (such as your kinetic blaster when you're in a swords and sorcery world), and other game-based information. The structure doesn't include every imaginable skill, but it does include a place for every imaginable skill and a fundamental baseline which enables players and referees to figure out where the new ones fit.[/list:u]So it has an unlimited skill list that nonetheless fits within a tight structure.

--M. J. Young

Quote from: Scourge108So I like games that cut corners in this department.  Rather than make sure I buy all the skills needed to be an entomologist (math, biology, natural science, chemistry, etc), I prefer to just jot down Science (entomology) and leave it at that.  I really liked the way Sorcerer handled that with Cover.  Leaves out a lot of unnecessary bookkeeping.  

Well, if the skill isn't very important for game-play, that works fine.  This is the HERO System approach, incidentally, dating back to early Champions.  Other systems, like James Bond 007, simply don't charge points at all for skills like entomology or languages.  

However, for game-important skills, I feel that this "corner-cutting" approach actually eats up more time because the decisions have to get made over and over again in play.  For example, suppose there are three PCs.  One has the skill "Swiss Banker: 11", one has "Police Negotiator: 11", and the third has "Navy SEAL: 11".  Now they get into a gunfight.  What numbers should you use for effectiveness?  The negotiator correctly points out that his character is a trained policeman; the banker points out that being Swiss he has at least trained and served in the army.  So maybe the group agrees that the negotiator can use his skill at -2 (for 9) and the banker can use his skill at -7 (or 4).  If the game has regular violence, though, I think it's easier to write down those numbers than to always decide on the fly.  

Note that importance is, of course, relative to the campaign.  In some campaigns, language skills might be very important while violent skills can be abstracted away.  The issue is how skills are used in play.