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:

What 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.

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,

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?

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

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.

Valamir wrote: 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.

Valamir wrote: 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.

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

clehrich wrote: 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?

Scourge108 wrote: 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.

An anecdote that seems relevant: I have a friend who hates GURPS for some odd reason. I'm not a huge GURPS fan myself, but I always try to find out why the gamers I know hate a certain game, and the answer is usually because they didn't enjoy their first time playing it and refuse to give it another chance ever again. And this was the answer this time. Specifically, he played in a GURPS game once where players were supposed to make themselves into characters to play, designing themselves. "I didn't have enough points to make myself! The character creation sucks!" To be fair, I proposed an experiment. I challenged him to design himself in some of his more favored game systems. Once again, he found he couldn't. In Storyteller (with all the player's guides, at least), Shadowrun, etc., there were always a few more he felt really should be on his sheet than the points would allow.

So what does all this mean? Well, for one thing, most gamers seem to think they are incredibly skillful people. But I'm sure it has some relevance to game design as well. Perhaps the point is that these were things he knew he could succeed at, at least in some circumstances. Therefore, it would seem he should have that as a skill. Perhaps getting rid of mediocre skill levels would do away with that. One way would be to assume that they have lots of general skills (the early Hero approach) and only count the skills that they are really good at. Another is to lump skills into broad categories, i.e. fighting skills, academic skills, thief skills (who takes Move Silently without Hide in Shadows, anyway?), outdoor skills, etc. I'm sure there are more to be thought of.

Scourge108 wrote: An anecdote that seems relevant: I have a friend who hates GURPS for some odd reason. I'm not a huge GURPS fan myself, but I always try to find out why the gamers I know hate a certain game, and the answer is usually because they didn't enjoy their first time playing it and refuse to give it another chance ever again. And this was the answer this time. Specifically, he played in a GURPS game once where players were supposed to make themselves into characters to play, designing themselves. "I didn't have enough points to make myself! The character creation sucks!" To be fair, I proposed an experiment. I challenged him to design himself in some of his more favored game systems. Once again, he found he couldn't. In Storyteller (with all the player's guides, at least), Shadowrun, etc., there were always a few more he felt really should be on his sheet than the points would allow.

So what does all this mean? Well, for one thing, most gamers seem to think they are incredibly skillful people. But I'm sure it has some relevance to game design as well. Perhaps the point is that these were things he knew he could succeed at, at least in some circumstances. Therefore, it would seem he should have that as a skill. Perhaps getting rid of mediocre skill levels would do away with that. One way would be to assume that they have lots of general skills (the early Hero approach) and only count the skills that they are really good at. Another is to lump skills into broad categories, i.e. fighting skills, academic skills, thief skills (who takes Move Silently without Hide in Shadows, anyway?), outdoor skills, etc. I'm sure there are more to be thought of.

Scourge wrote: Specifically, he played in a GURPS game once where players were supposed to make themselves into characters to play, designing themselves. "I didn't have enough points to make myself! The character creation sucks!" To be fair, I proposed an experiment. I challenged him to design himself in some of his more favored game systems. Once again, he found he couldn't. In Storyteller (with all the player's guides, at least), Shadowrun, etc., there were always a few more he felt really should be on his sheet than the points would allow.

Neil wrote: The anecdote of making yourself as a character is very helpful, here. There are all kinds of things that COULD go on the sheet of RDU Neil... but only a very few that would qualify as real Skills that should cost points....

To that end, for RPG purposes, I think skills should be minimized to reflect only those that can be turned to with confidence in times of stress or overt need. Skills that are actually paid for are expensive, because I really think that most individuals have but a few "real SKILLS" and the rest is just background noise.

M. J. Young wrote: Let's say I give you enough points to buy all the skills needed to create a well-rounded character. Some of you will create a well-rounded character--but some will dump them all into particular game-useful skills. My character can't swim, can't run a mile, can't read above the third grade level, can hardly open a door, but he can kill a trollgre with a single blow and take out a crysalmare with one arrow. Or I can open any lock and override every security system in the western galactic arm, although I don't even know how to hold a blaster.

What's wrong with that, apart from that these are not well-rounded characters, is that they are often more game-effective characters.

Thus the point count made available to the players is not designed for creating a truly well-rounded character; it's calculated to prevent the creation of the uberspecialist, the guy who has to be best in the world at those most important skills because it's all he can do.

Would you play tennis to the death.... I love it, excellent stuff RDU Neil.

I'd like to throw out another, more radical approach which I've touched on a couple of times. My question is, why are we taking an absolutist approach to skills in the first place? As Neil alludes, skills change over time, dvelop or decay from lack of exercise. Also, sometimes skills never come up to be tested despite the fact that a character really really needs to be defined by that skill.

Now I say, look at TV series. I doubt they start from knowing what the hero can do and then work forward through logical progression to now and thus determine whether or not Michael Knight can pick a lock. They just do it and make up suitable backstory, and even then only flashback to it if its sufficiently surprising to need an explanation.

The implication is that the character always had this skill, it just never came up before. There are some systems that permit retroactive skill construction/definition, but I want to suggest something else: that skills can be called into being by the game that is currently underway.

Lets say you have your cleric and you barbarian and your theif... in story 1, they are in a dungeon crawl, and so the relavnt skills to be tested in this adventure are, say, move silently, strike blow, find traps, etc. But in the NEXT adventure they are indulging in intrigue at the ducal palace, and the relevant skills are charm, seduce, dress sense, boast etc.

There is no particular reason that the character concept per se has to be expressed in particularised terms and held static from there. There is no particular reason that the contextually relevant skill-set to be tested is defined as part of the character instead of the setting/situation. WHat you would do instead is EXPRESS an existing character in TERMS of the setting/situation-mandated skillset.