An issue that's been popping up in my game design for OA has been making me wonder if I'm in the minority. I just wanted to get a survey of opinions on this question.

How many skills is too many for a game system? In my experience, the more skills the better... even if it's in the several hundred. Most of my group agrees with this philosophy mostly since we're sick on skills having too broad of usage. Are we odd in this regard, and/or what are your opinions of going totally nuts on skills, assuming they're easy to comprehend, logically organized and functional.

Just looking for opinions on the issue. ;c)

The correct answer: however many it takes to get the play experience the designer is looking for. Nothing opinion about that. Do you see why making polls is kinda meaningless? It all depends on the goals of design, not on some universal constant.

Personally, I think that almost all play goals are better serviced by player-defined skills, however narrow. This is so because in most games the players are expected to know the setting, and therefore know what kinds of competence a character could have. The player is the expert, let him handle it. The scope of the individual skill doesn't change this at all; for instance, Dust Devils has skills defined as pretty narrow entities (Rustling and Dancing are appropriate, while general Stealing and Performing definitely are not), but it's still the player who defines the skills he wants.

The situation where a skill list would be appropriate is a game where the skills are used as a venue of setting discovery. The player, through reading the skill list, learns what concepts the setting includes. In those situations a skill list is not completely redundant, in the way it is in most other games. The same function could be reached through describing the setting in normal prose, though.

Another exception to the general rule of skill lists being useless is a system where each skill has it's own rules set, like D&D or Warhammer FRPG. In this case skills become special cases of a kind, and a list is needed to contain the rules for that skill use. This is, however, a pretty peculiar way to use skills, so most games don't do it.

For a closing, let me note that ease of comprehension, realism or other such considerations have no meaning when considering whether lots of skills are good design. Those worries are trumped by the question of whether the skills are needed. The most polished piece of design work, if it's ultimately useless for the whole, is just as redundant as an elaborate piece of trash.

Yup -- what Eero said. Players are going to range all over on this. I like Sorcerer, which has one trait for all your day-to-day skills. A friend of mine gets frustrated at any game that doesn't differentiate between the skill needed to fire a submachine gun and an assault rifle.

You should go with whatever works best for the particular game you are creating. If you don't like it, others probably won't as well. You're never going to appeal to everyone, so just do what you enjoy, and others who feel the same way will enjoy it, too.

Both of these comments are pretty spot on.

I'll add the following observation as well. If you're going to go with a long, broad, mostly static list of skills spend some time thinking about what the skills are representing in your game.

In reality there is no such thing as "a skill". There are activities that each individual is more or less adept at and those activities are very very micro in scale.

We might casually say someone is a good athlete. But that doesn't mean they play Football and Baseball equally well. We might casually say someone is a good Football player, that doesn't mean they can play Linebacker and Running Back equally well. We might say someone is a good Running Back but even this masks the wide range of actual activities that a Running Back might perform. Different Backs will have different levels of aptitude for Blocking, Running, Receiving, Ball Handling, Passing (if they're an option back), Situational Awareness, and so on. Even these can be broken down further. There are many different ways to block depending on the size and speed match up and the needs of the play. Opening a hole for a tail back to scoot through is different from pass protection. There are many different ways to run. Some Backs are better running north and south, others look for openings laterally, some run their tacklers over, other juke and jive. We can go smaller yet. There are many different ways to juke and jive. You can hesitate, you can side slip, you can head fake, you can spin, you can hurdle, you can straight arm, etc.


The point being is that you can ALWAYS break any activity into smaller activities and you can always find examples of how any given differentiation could make a big difference in a specific situation.

SO when you say

Most of my group agrees with this philosophy mostly since we're sick on skills having too broad of usage

Heya,

Euro and Val have given ya some great advice. The two things I would caution against would be first) don't overwhelm the players with skills especially if those skills will only be useful in rare and esoteric instances in your game. Second) avoid redundancy. "Fast Talk" and "Duping" are two skills that might have very similar usages. Make sure each skills serves its own, individual purpose.

On a side note, don't forget you can always include a section in your game about players and GMs creating their own skills to meet their own needs. Just give them a loose set of guidelines and trust them to use their heads about it :) There's a lot of players that would appreciate that.

Peace,

-Troy

Thanks for the advice guys. OA/RPG is currently what I guess I'd call "Neo-Crunchy" in nature. We're trying to base as much on hard science and sociology, but blurring the edges a bit when realism gets in the way of fun. It is going to be a skill heavy system as well for defining what a player is and is not trained at doing.

We're using what we call a "Skill Cascade" which means that you have three levels of skills from very broad Foundation skills that aren't too in depth, but cover a variety of related topics. A good case in point would be Arts: Aural. This handles all art skills related to music or sound making. General skills are more specific, but still covering a semi-broad range. To continue with the above example cascade, Music composition, or Music Performance would be a general skill. They're more tightly related. At the narrowest level are Niche skills. Here you have incredibly deep understanding and trivial knowledge of a narrow specialty. To take the Music Performance General skill you would then pick an individual instruments to focus your efforts like Piano, Violin, Xylophone... etc.

The upshot is, the more specific you get, the more benefit you get for having the proper skill. But if you don't have the proper skill, you can cascade to General skills, and if no skill there is appropriate, you can go to Foundational skills, and ultimately a single random roll to help you out. This allows you a small chance but very unlikely to be successful.

It is the Niche skills, where we spell out many variants of the more broad Foundation and General skill, that the real weight of the skill system exists. For instance, in the above example there is only 1 Foundation skill that covers the use of 5 General skills, and these General skills include 9 Niche skills, but 3 Niche skills are self defined (choose instrument type), (choose Musical style)... and so forth.

There are foundation skills with over 200 Niche skills underneath them. THis is what I think is intimidating the hell out of some people looking at the list. Currently I'm being thorough, and just trying to get as much out as possible, with the full intent to pare back, so I won't have a skill list of 4000 or more skills. That to me is ludicrous. But there is a very good chance I'll never get below 1000 skills.

The intent of this all is to foster creativity and individuality without having the issue of one skill for all seasons. (A pet peeve of mine and many players) The benefit of the cascade is to allow some support for those who want to be more generalist while getting into nitty gritty details for those who desire it as well. I could see some GMs saying "I don't believe in Niche skills" and leave them out. To me, that's fine. I envision granting a bonus for those players who want to use Niche skills over General or Foundation skills.

Not all skills will require a pre-requisite, but others will, and that will be plainly marked with the cascades. Also, the broader the skill, the more expensive it will be to buy up.

Although there will be points where skills will overlap, it will be left to the GM to decide if different skills will impart the ability to do certain things. For instance, using an electron microscope can be taught for many different fields of science. So any of them are valid for use, unless the GM rules that the use the player intends is inappropriate. So there is some flex in the system.

We're also experimenting with ways for related skills to provide a bonus to success for players if they have a lot of closely related skills.

I know I runneth at the mouth too long here. But maybe this can help explain part of why I'm asking. OA needs a lot of detail and scale. The hard part is figuring out how much is too much, and how little is too little.

I agree that no amount of market research will change some of our founding philosophies, and we'll just have to see what the market does with our product. I guess I'm looking for criticism with some of the theories I have to see if anyone can point out anything I missed or didn't consider and therefore help strengthen what I'm working at.

Thanks all! :c)