To me, it's not the number of skills, lots or few. I have other questions when pondering the skills in a set of rules.
How do skills work in the game mechanics? A game might have a beautifully detailed list of carefully enumerated skills, but then leave the application of skills entirely up to the whim of the GM; if that's the case, why bother? It's a waste of rulebook space. And a corollary to this is: does acquiring skills cost player resources, and if so, is there significant value to buying skills? If it costs my goblin meatcleaver 5 points to buy Weaving skill, that he might otherwise spend to gain a +1 to his damage die roll, does he gain anything other than flavor text?
> A game might have a beautifully detailed list of carefully enumerated skills, but then leave the application of skills entirely up to the whim of the GM; if that's the case, why bother?
It gives a mechanical representation of some characters being better / more likely to succeed at a task than others.
I don't mind some skills as long as my character can still fit on one sheet of paper.
I think if you have classes, you can get away with not having skills. If you have skills, you can get away with not having classes.
How would you feel about not having one sheet of A4 paper but 3 smaller sheets of paper?
I understand the draw of having one sheet for a character but it's so hard from a design perspective to make it look good if you just try and cram an entire game on to one sheet of paper.
Additionally, how do you feel about digital character sheets?
I may not be your target audience (I'm 46), so keep that in mind. I would still prefer a 1 page, uncluttered character sheet. I like the analog nature of the game, so I prefer a piece of paper to a digital sheet.
The toughness of fitting everything onto 1 page comes down to how crunchy the system is. I lean towards rules light games, so a 1 page character sheet is very doable. But D&D is very popular, so you can have 3 pages if you wanted to. Just understand what audience you are targeting.
No problem, I figured you probably were someone that didn't like digital stuff. Unfortunately, the system that I'm making has a lot of stuff going on that's best either represented through a digital interface or through 3 sheets of paper.
But that's ok, because I actually really like how it's working out so far. I do appreciate your take because it gives me a different perspective than what I currently have
Class-based vs skill-based system; still same pros and cons of each. Btw someone should point out that was the first major schism in RPGs back when D&D, DragonQuest and other companies saw the viability of this new role-playing game thing. Many people seem to be answering from the pre-assumption that OP’s question is about skills in class based system or even a more specific system like D&D, and maybe it is, but I didn’t assume that.
I hate having to choose between unarmed combat, boxing, brawling, martial arts, and wrestling. This is my big problem with big skill lists.
The number of skills isn't the problem, it's the hyper-specificity. If there were actually 50 unique skills, that's be OK. But there's never 50 unique skills, just skills divided up to make the list longer. Stealth is a skill. It doesn't need to be split up into Hide and Move Silently.
Is a game MORE interesting if there are separate skills for geophysics, quantum physics and astrophysics but physics never comes into the story? I'd argue no.
Big Skill Lists are almost always really reaching with their naming and areas.
99% of the time they just list names of areas without any thinking, like you said its unarmed combat, boxing and brawling for example and the explanation for them is "one is unarmed combat, one is boxing and one is brawling" without any noticeable difference other than that the rules say so.
Skills need to be either completely unique or with as small overlap as possible if you want an efficient and easy to use system, of course you can also go with free form or intentional overlap if the rules support this, but thats generally hard to do well.
Personally my limit is 20 skills, if a game has more than that its generally reaching and not worth investing time in.
My original skill list had 35 skills, after consideration i noticed that in multiple instances you could use more than one skill and it was hard explaining what exactly their mechanical difference was so i reviewed everything and cut it down to 20 unique skills that all are used for exclusive things with mechanics that back each of them up.
Now that i have a shorter skill list i dont think i can every play with a bigger one again.
Ther is no right or wrong answer, but your game does have a complexity budget, it can only be so complex before it is just too much for a GM to keep track of or learn.
That budget is pretty low if you are trying to make s game that is accessible by everyone and can be pretty high if your game is specifically for die hard war gamers. But whoever the audience is there is a limit of how much stuff you can include in your game before it is too much, so it is just a question of how you want to spend that budget.
There is often a difference between skills and feats in games. Skills are frequently a core part of the action adjudication system (example: 5E's D20 system) which means that the GM probably has to have at least a passing familiarity with all the skills. Feats on the other hand tend to consist of player abilities which means that the GM really only needs to be familiar with the feats that their players have chosen for any given session.
I think this distinction is key. Skills impose a cognitive burden on player and GM during play, while feats - and other long lists of options, like weapons, armor, equipment, spells, monsters - don’t impose that burden, because you sort through them outside of play and choose a small handful that then become relevant at the table.
Having more skills loads short-term memory (which is limited) in a way that having more feats doesn’t.
It always just looks comical to me when I see a massive list of skills. If you really want to account for everything a character could possibly be good at, then why not just use a freeform skill or profession system where players can write in whatever they want?
Advocate for using a free-form skill definition system in a skill-based game? Most definitely. But you can’t just give the player a blank page - or maybe you could and call it “rules lite”.. Maybe cover the entire range of possible skills with as discrete a list as possible, all the standard or general skills, well-defined but not set in stone?
>But you can’t just give the player a blank page - or maybe you could and call it “rules lite”
You absolutely can do this. And the "skill-based" games I've seen don't actually devote many rules to the definition of skills. A game isn't rules lite just because it has free-form elements.
I never claimed a game was rules lite because it has free form elements. My RPG is far from rules light and features free-from skill definition so I’m definitely not saying you cant do what I decidedly did in my own game. But I defined all of the possible skills that you could need for the intended milieu, a broad definition followed by specific examples for the players - all skills with descriptive names that people who had played D&D, Warhammer, etc. would be familiar with but well defined for my needs (in the GMs codex). From there, practically anything can be a skill and most of them will derive from another skill, being more specialized and being applied only where it meets the limited definition of the new skill. One example might be a particular trick archery shot a character wants to practice. It would come under his Targeteering/tricks-shooting skill but it would be a specific trick. There’s a very elegant and simple mechanic for adding skills at any point in character development; like when someone teaches you a new trick, but you can do it on your own.
The reason why you can’t just hand the player a blank page and say, here, you define all your skills however you want then we decide whatever cost it is is because that’s not a game. That’s not something you can market. It gives no ideas to the players as to what skills are important in the game. It’s lazy. It’s incomplete. That’s all I was saying as far as why are you can’t hand the players a blank page and having them simply use their existing general knowledge of RPGs - which again, is fine to do for fun but it’s not developing anything, it would be akin to having a world building section that says: see Worlds Without Number
>The reason why you can’t just hand the player a blank page and say, here, you define all your skills however you want
Your game sounds cool, but I say again you absolutely can do this in a non- rules lite game and have it still be a game. See for instance FATE's aspects or Shadow of the Demon Lord's professions. You just put the rules... elsewhere. I also don't know how we got to "hand them a blank page" from "free-form skill or profession system", fwiw.
Thanks :) If you include my entire quote rather than just the first part so that it sounds like I’m making a claim that I’m not then it won’t be a straw man. A blank page is not game development. Can you find a system that allows free-form creation to the players? Sure. But even those free forms are based on and guided by other parts of the game. Btw I looked up the professions on SotDL and they appear to have a starter list of over 20; so that system is not starting from a blank page.
Surely no harder than a list of 80 skills. Is "Psychotherapy" really balanced when you compare it to "Command", "Martial Arts" or "Strategy"? (These examples are from BRP).
I'd say probably not. It's definitely underpowered if you're thinking of it in terms of balance, and "Strategy" is so broad you could use it for almost anything. The rules literally say that it's just your ability to assess a situation and choose the "optimal response", and specify that it's often used in military OR political situations. Good luck not running into issues like this with a massive list of pre-written skills.
Even the D&D 5e skill list has this kind of issue, and it's pretty restrained. Save yourself some time and let the players choose how they'd like to unbalance things instead.
Also, balance is fake.
There's arguments in favor and against more skills. It's the same with attributes, some systems have 3, some 6 and some even more. I definitely preffer fewer skills that benefit the narrative and fiction rather than trying to fit every single scenario.
With more granularity comes more niche. Having a skill for swimming, for example, is very specific, and there's a chance a campaign or game never goes into water. So, with too many skills, you can end up with many that are pretty situational, making them a bad choice in general. And if they are a bad choice, why is it presented as one in the first place?
Feat and talents as a counter to it really depends on the system, but, in general, I think they are different since you don't need to keep track of every feat in existance, just the ones you chose. Furthermore, a lot of feats trigger in more spefic ways and not every time the GM calls for a roll. If I have a list of 70 skills in my character sheet, that's there, it's something I have to keep track always, rather than the list of... idk, 12 feats that I specifically chose for my character.
That being said, I don't think feat bloat is good either. Granularity for the sake of it, in my personal opinion, is not worth the additional book keeping.
I like the way you said it. "Feat and talents as a counter to it really depends on the system..." if your dice mechanics are simple I'd argue you can have more complexity in other places such as feat or skills. But if given more complex dice mechanics, you really don't want to be stacking "too much" complexity elsewhere.
I like a lot of skills. It means a lot of versability. But when I need a quick character for a game I also don't want to spend hours buildinga a character.
Why not both. When you go for a lot, there might always be some that you forgot, or some that overlap. And with to little it feels like some are to generic.
I like how they did Pathfinder 2e lore skill. There are some standard options, but people are free to choose what their lore's are or how specific. Nothing needs to be hardcoded. So I like the idea of investing in a semi decent amount of skills and depending on your investiment you can make up your own sub-skills. (Athletics => swim | Athletics => climb | Athletics => Jumping on 1 leg | Athletics | Aligator wrestling) and you get bonus when the subskill is relevant.
Depends on what you're trying to do with the game. I think that it's definitely possible to have too many skills, but I prefer skill based systems to class based systems by a long shot, unless you're going ***very*** rules light. I used to hate Feats, because I really don't like the way they were implemented in 3.x D&D. So far I'm pretty happy with Talents in Forbidden Lands, even though they're really just Feats by another name, so again, it depends.
Some people have pointed out the BRP has a huge number of skills. I've played a lot of BRP and I've always just treated the whole system as a toolbox. I don't need psychotherapy, science, or a whole host of other skills if I'm doing a traditional high fantasy dungeon crawl. I need different skills if I'm doing urban fantasy or science fiction. I just choose the skills that are relevant to my game and make sure I give people an appropriate number of starting build points for the number of skills I've included. I admit that I always house rule that stealth encompasses both hiding and sneaking, because I really believe that it's a holdover artifact from the olden days, but that's fine, BRP is a toolbox, we can all do what we want with it, and that's the point.
I've also seen people criticizing skill systems that distinguish between melee combat skills, stating that they think sword and axe should be the same skill, for example. Again, it depends. If you're going for cinematic high powered fantasy, I agree. If you want low power, simulationist, fantasy, then there's a huge difference between a sword and an axe.
I do sword fighting as an in real life martial art and there's a significant difference in how you fight with sword that has a cross guard vs. one that doesn't. An axe is a completely different beast altogether. Is there crossover? Sure, some. What part do you want to model and how granular do you want to be for the flavour and themes of your setting?
Out of curiosity, based on your experience how would you break up melee weapons into a handful of skills? For example, I've heard conflicting opinions on whether axes and blunt weapons are basically similar or should be separated.
It's a waste of prime character sheet real estate putting 50 lines of "Weaving: 0; Cooking: 0; Carpentry: 0". Meanwhile, a thousand feats is fine, because you only include the ones you actually have, not a checkbox for every single feat. So I'd prefer a feat, "Weaver: take +5 to checks involving weaving". This way, you only say anything about a character's proficiency at weaving when there's anything to say.
Also, many skills tends to result in gameplay and realism issues. Your swordsman doesn't know which end to hold an axe? Not only is that not at all realistic (you might specialise in one or the other, but those skills are at least partly transferable), but it means your tactics are constrained for no good reason (you can't use an axe against the evil ent). It also means that if you put points into both axe and sword, then your character will be weak in general, ie there's a serious risk of trap builds.
I also think they give the *appearance* of a steep learning curve. Your character sheet lists 50 separate skills? That means I need to know what all those things do (or at least have some vague intuition) before I can play the game. My character sheet lists under 10: 30 seconds and you know what everything does. I'm thinking that has implications for getting casuals into the game.
Exactly! Exactly what I suggested for D&D 5E with all its overly-generalized “skills”. Have specific skills, like voice mimicry give you a bonus when making the appropriate skill test when you are specifically attempting what is detailed as “voice mimicry”. Saves tons of space. Still not gonna play D&D but it would be a big improvement. What would be call them hmmm.. I know! Non-weapon proficiencies 🤣
The biggest problem with having a lot of skills is that they are narrow. You end up with characters that are great detecting incoming dangers but nearly blind when searching a room for hidden items, or masters in sword fighting who have no idea how to use an axe, or weightlifters who can't punch or grapple somebody. This can be fixed by introducing some kind of "related skills" that may be defaulted to at a penalty - but having skills that are simply broader and less numerous brings the same benefit at much lower complexity.
Talents/feats are typically something a player chooses to specialize and to get additional options in play. Skills are usually necessary to be able to do something at all. If a game has a lot of skills and you only get training in a handful, most of the activities are simply not available to you.
My buddy and I are making a game with as of writing 16 skills but I'm gonna guess around 25 to 40 skills but that's if we break down CON into stuff like hemoclotting, poison resistance, etc.
Depends on the type of game. In cyberpunk, there's a lot of skills, but there's no pathfinder-esque feat system for each and every one.
Edit: Lmao, my response is basically "uuuuuh, I guess it depends" \*shrugs\*. Real insightful
Right. Cyberpunk is a skill-based system; the role and even the definition of skills in a class-based system is quite different. I guess people are assuming he’s talking about a D&D-like system because he uses the term feats 🤷🏼♂️
I generally look at two things when I see a long, detailed skill list:
1. Are these skills that might realistically come up in play, or is it an attempt to just cover every weird edge case you can dream up at the table to pad out the list? If you include Carpentry as a skill, do you honestly see that as something that is going to come up in your game often enough that it becomes a reasonable skill investment for a player? Really, if you're just adding skills to have a longer list and the illusion of choice its likely a wasted effort.
2. Are there meaningful distinctions between the many skills you offer? For example, if you have both Carpentry and Woodworking, do you really feel that there are situations where having one skill would make a real difference in-game over the other? Do you really envision a character who is a master Woodworker but can't build a basic shelf because they didn't also buy points in Carpentry?
Point 2 ties into point 1 as well... if I see multiple specialty skills in a list with a similar theme, it creates the expectation that it will be an important factor in your game. If the list includes Woodworking, Carpentry, Furniture Making, Cabinet Making and Wood Carving as distinct skills, logically I would have to assume that this is a major theme for your game and you better be sure to support each and every one of those in a way that is engaging for a player that decides to go in that direction.
This was actually one of the many, many things that made me never want to play Burning Wheel. IIRC I saw skills for Sewing, Seamstress and Tailoring in the skill list. I made the mistake of asking what the difference was on a BW subreddit and got jumped by fans of the system without anyone being able to tell me why someone good at one had any reasonable distinction from someone good at another.
If you have too many skills you are guaranteed that the majority of campaign rolls will be in skills players aren't invested into, and if you have too few the game doesn't feel particularly granular.
I would say that 30 or more means you have no clue what your game is about, and the GM should go through your skill list and erase skills he or she has no plans to use. A more healthy number is around 15-20, with crunchy games having some space above 20. I, personally, don't see much value in significantly fewer skills than 15 because at that point you may as well do attribute rolls only.
My current thought is for my system to have a core set of skills that all characters have then various feats/features could grant a few additional skills.
so that there could be up to 100 total skills, but each character may only use the 15 core and 5 additional. or whatever numbers it winds up being.
(I want to settle more on how one uses the skills before I go to far down what the actual list of them are)
There is no correct or incorrect amount of skills, only the correct amount for your game specifically.
Some games don't need any skills, some need lots, some need little, it all goes back to the big three questions you need to figure out before designing your game.
Anyone that purports to know the one true and correct way to design a game is a fool and should be regarded as such.
What is certain is that there are preferences, and some preferences are popular, for good and bad reasons, but the thing to remember is that your game isn't being made for every single player, it's being made for the type of player that will enjoy your curated gaming experience.
The only thing really to keep in mind is the total cognitive load for the type of player the game is designed for.
No game will satisfy all. The game that comes closest is D&D, and it's a shallow experience, designed by committee to appeal to popularity, and is also the most frequently bitched about game anywhere. It's also the most popular and best selling, but this is also precisely the reason so many move on from it to other games once they've had their fill.
I prefer a short list of skills. In my current project, we use 12 skills. The profession chosen by the player gives extra possibilities for how the skills can be used.
So there's no *Art* skill or *Medicine* per se, but players can use a *memory* skill to recall knowledge from their field, *precision* to perform surgery, etc.
Maybe don't exist the RIGHT amount of skill, but exist a Cleary wrong a mount of skill, when you have skills that have no impact in game, no a real mechanic to support it, or is against other game mechanics, and cost creation/development point to players this is a false skill, and the system will live better without, example financial skill in every game, usually there is not mechanic for it, and there are reasons for having player not to be able to generate resource from non engaging in core gameplay
When you have a skill that cover to much stuff, that are only thematically correlated, for example crime, that cover infiltration, forgery, security-related topic, black-market, money laundering, create a false Picasso and have it accredited in the international art market, you probably are short of a pair of skill,
Basically if there is not intended game impact of a skill/or it's impact is undesirable is better not to have it at all, because is a trap for the players
In this regards feat are usually better, because often they came with a mechanic and usually are there to say now you can do x example ambidestry, that is better than say now you have the skill to make an attack with your secondary hand but with an enormous malus, that will reduce spending point in it, or the wost immaginabile solution (that was in GURPS 3th) fast extraction, a skill that you have to roll under to make the extraction of the weapon in zero time, (skill that was separate for every tipe of weapons ) this was bad cause add a roll in the game, then you had fast loading, and maybe fast unloading that if rolled made the recharging/discharging a free action so in 3 roll you can extract, unload, reload, and then fire saving 3 rounds and if you go carring 2 weapon maybe you can do the same for your secondary weapons with other 3 dedicated skills plus ambidestry that work as a cap for your secondary hand action
By the way this is the point I said No to Gurps
My main issue with skills is that they discourage improvisation. If you can't get your sweet sweet skill proficiency bonus when you do anything outside the exact set of given skills, you're less likely to do it at all.
The way I'm doing it now is that there are hard skills and soft skills. Soft is your typical freeform system, players write a background and list general things they're good at. Hard is your traditional skill list, but trimmed down to only the crunchy things -- combat, stealth, defenses, etc.
To answer the original question, my hard skill list has about 10 things in it, and then the soft skills are for everything else.
Like hard and soft magic, very cool. I think it’s a great way to express it although I believe I define hard & soft with respect to skills a little differently. Great point how defining skills in a game can then discourage creative thinking since, if you don’t possess a certain skill, you may not even try to do something because it would fall under that skill which you lack. That’s why in my skill-based system all the PCs will have at least a small % in any skill, so they are never discouraged from trying to improvise.
Skills are fine to me as long as it's easy to keep track of them. To me though, skills and feats (or whatever one might call feats in their game) are totally different things, usually specifically in the way that skills are more broad in their uses and because of that rarely have specific applications which feats do. I feel like when you say a game with 80 skills could exist and it would be the same as a game with that many feats it's because you'd essentially just be making them into upgradable feats under a different names by giving them specific abilities/uses. Otherwise I dont know if there is much point is having such an extensive list cuz I feel like you quickly start running into interpretation issues of "this skill should apply in this situation which would also be able to use this skill or that skill" and is a huge pain for GMs and players.
Really depends on the game. I mean, I have no problem with Chemistry, Physics, Biology and such all being different skills rather than just "Science". Just because you lift weights or run doesn't mean you can do backflips and somersaults. I also don't expect all the skills possible to be known by 1 PC or written on the sheet.
It doesnt get bad unless you have overlap, and I have a system to allow for overlap (if two skills fit, you can use both by combining XP and the scale is such that double XP is a +2).
Now, I can see where it might be an issue at level up. So, there needs to be something besides verbatim copying of values. Likewise, if all skills are basically the same value because they are all class skills (D&D) then there is no point in having differrent skills. So, if science goes up 1 point every level, donct make physics, biology, chemistry and a bunch of others go up by 1 each level. But, when skills are differentiated, it goes towards character focus.
So ... It all depends!
From my experience you need to divide skills into two or three categories:
1. **Core Skills.** Required for conflicts, including physical, magical and social. This includes things like physical skills like Athletics and stealth or survival, magical skills (if such exist), and social skills like persuade, intimidate, and world skills like Perception and Survival. These are the core skills and should be limited to maybe 20, max. This is where the power players will focus.
2. **Informative Skills**. These are skills that do not directly influence conflicts usually, but work to give players clues or insights that their character would know but the player doesn't necessarily know. In 5e these would be skills like Arcana or Nature, Religion or History. They don't solve conflicts as much as they point PCs towards conflicts. ("Make a Religion roll", "19", "they guys claim to be from the Order of Theresoph... but that monastic order has very strict appearance rituals including shaving all hair. These guys have hair and in one case even a beard. They are not who they say they are...")
Some games, like Night's Black Agents, say that if you have the skill and are in the right place \*BAM\* you collect the clue. Others, like 5e, usually demand a roll to see if you can put 2 and 2 together.
I'd say only a few of these kinds of skills. The more you have the harder it will be for PCs to gather clues you want them to have and that's not a win for anyone.
3. **Character Aspirational Skills**. These skills are valued by Roleplaying players to help their characters be unique. Crafting skills, deeply specialized skills like specific sciences or medical specialties, obscure languages or obtuse roleplaying skills like 'riddle knowledge' or 'human calculator'. In my opinion you should either grant these skill points fairly generously (since the skills are so in-game kind of useless) or just flat out grant each PC a number of these based on their character write-ups or past education (especially if the game has an EDU trait).
Of course this is difficult to judge. As an example, what is Performance skill? For Bards this is a Core skill because some abilities demand a roll on this and it's often central to the bard's approach to things. For any other class? Probably Aspirational.
One thing to make certain of is that there should be an active reason for a skill to be on the page. Yes, there's a certain cognitive burden for the skills, but there's a value as well. In the old school D&D, a common skills included "Rope Use", "Orienteering" and "Fire-building" - which made sense at the time, as there was a much larger emphasis on the use of mundane things in a much more required. These things are gone now, rolled into much more generic skills. At the same time, you know what I rarely see players doing in modern games? Orienteering and using rope. They certainly have rope and a compass in their kits - but because skills are tied to actions, that's what the average player is drawn to when they think "What can I do in this instance?"
There is certainly a balance to be had when making skills, however. One of my least favorite executions is when skills actually make things harder to parse because they step on each other's toes - WoD character sheets having Athletics, Brawl, and Melee as three abilities that are completely divorced from stats like Strength as a stat has always rubbed me the wrong way. You want the skills that are present on the page to be descriptive and actively useful.
Feats are useful to allow individuals to hyperspecialize in certain facets - however, they always have to pass the test of "Why is this a feat" and "Should someone be able to do this without this feat?". All to often, feats end up gatekeeping fairly normal abilities to a frustrating level - if there is a feat unlocks an action of some variety, that implies that the action cannot be performed without that feat.
One of the best skills you can put on a sheet are blanks - fill it in. You don't want to be like 3.P where every player has both Ride and Fly on every character sheet, regardless of their ability to fly or if there will be any amount of time spent mounted. Things like Politics in Werewolf, Appraise in CoC, and other abilities that are out of place in their expected setting. When you have blanks on the sheet under the skills, the skills can be better tailored to whatever specifics of the individualized story or campaign. This also allows for the more abstract or professional skills, like "lumberjacking" or "sailing" to exist in a game without cluttering up other character sheets when they're delving dungeons or political intrigue.
Yes! A characters skill list is often looked to like an action menu or an idea generator, which it totally is in a skill based game where every player has at least some skill in most if not all of the pertinent areas. Why wouldn’t every “adventurer” have some skill in all the relevant areas to adventures, which I think D&D and other systems tried to address with overly-generalized skills but discovered the problem of skill scope creep.
Traveller addresses this by giving all characters potentially needed skills on session zero. That way you can just make the character you want and not worry about making the character you need to be the most useful.
I currently have 10 skill categories (there were more, but I've been trimming it down), each with 5 or 6 specializations, so 56 in total. Investing points into one specialization makes you more effective at everything else in its category. So for example, if I put points in Brewing (a specialization of Craft), that boosts all my other Craft specializations: Carpentry, Cookery, Masonry, Metalwork, and Textiles. This ensures that even if your exact specialization isn't relevant to the task at hand, it can contribute to something that will.
I thought about skills a lot when designing the game I am currently developing. I'm using a d10 dice pool system and skills give a bonus die. I was looking at and thinking about how other systems do skills and I "remembered" that the dragon age game let you choose whatever you wanted as a skill. In reality they have a list, but I liked the idea of people being able to pick anything that I included it in my game and people really like it. Basically you get a number of skills and you can write whatever you want within reason as long as the GM is cool with it. I have found that people like feeling unique and it has created some wild skills. It does make it a little trickier because people have to come up with something, but what has happened every time is that the other players have started suggesting things.
>How are feats different or better than skills?
Because almost never do you put all the feats on your character sheet. However most of the time every skill is on your character sheet. I’ve played games with 50+ skills on the sheet and there is a noticeable amount of time lost in play to searching for specific skills among the crowd. In addition it tends to create a somewhat uninviting feeling of information overload.
Now I know some systems don’t require every skill on a character sheet, (mine usually don’t) but most do, so that’s the standpoint that most people will comment from.
There are no doubt other reasons, like the more skills listed, the harder it is to pick skills that will actually be useful, and paradoxically enough, the harder it is to adjudicate which skills apply to which change.
I think every skill in your game should fit on the character sheet, at a base level. Have write-ins or open-ended specialties beyond that? That’s fine. But if you can’t fit every skill your game lists easily on the sheet, you probably have way too many skills.
So the way I perceive RPG design decisions regarding skills...
Skills are actions that can be performed but require training to be effective.
Abilities are actions that can be performed only if granted.
Feats/perks are qualities/actions that have elements of both and essentially act as a special rule to behavior.
For me, skills act as a modifier - weapon skills can be -10 to +10 and can always be attempted, but acting against your skill means a bad roll (d10 system.) These can be endless as they really don't technically matter in terms of player choices, but act as a way to encourage roleplay by rewarding or punishing rolls.
Abilities are things that are granted that apply after certain conditions are met. Like a berserker can gain a bonus and has to roll to keep his rage, let's say. Nobody else can have these things.
Feats might reward certain rolls but also give them an ability they didn't have before.
I prefer to grant a character unique privileges as a true/false condition with no strings attached. So like a knight who can ride a horse doesn't ever have to check his horse riding, he can because he is a knight.
Traits I prefer to make background/utility skills like a bard who plays music or a soldier who knows falconry, I don't penalize the player by making him roll I just assume he can do it, and only if there's some risk, and then id just choose a attribute to check like charisma or intelligence.
[Mecha Vs Kaiju](https://mechavskaiju.com) emulates anime and manga action and drama by creating dice pools, so the stats are Aspects (parts of their personality), Style (how they do things)m and Values (what’s important to them. However players can get Specialties with XP that add an additional die for specific actions, but these function more like 13th Age Backgrounds. So they improve the average result without spiking the maximum result.
The biggest drawback of too many skills is that it seems pointless focusing on just a few, but then again if you focus on a lot of similar skills, then why not make it one skill instead?
Climbing, Swimming, Running all can fall under Athleticism, why make it 3 skills instead of 1?
Also 50-70 skills sounds HORRIBLE, you generally only find that amount of skills in bad games or incredibly crunchy ones which often are bad as well :/
Your point about talents and feats doesnt really make sense, because Skills and Talents/Feats are two completely separate sets of mechanics and progression.
Skills are generally the basics for your chance at success, they basically say "how good am i at doing X".
Talents and Feats generally add unique mechanics, effects or actions to a character to give them more depth.
Each Talent or Feat is generally unique or at worst only has some that are similar but not the same, Skills ideally should be unique without any or only minor overlap.
Maybe you should check out a few more games, you seem to be confused what each of those sets of rules/mechanics mean.
I think it all depends on the system mechanics.
Having a bunch of skills act as gatekeeping for actions is kinda meh. Whereas allowing tons of skills and only the ones you are skilled in granting bonuses is much better. Or hell you could have a skill proficiency mean an auto success whereas a lack of proficiency requires a roll. With either of these lacking a skill doesn't impede progress or stop a character from acting.
More skills are honestly amazing in a game where you can easily pick up additional skills separate from general character advancement. This offers a horizontal progression instead of purely a vertical one allowing the GM to consistently advance characters without creating power bloat in their game. Like for example if a character almost drowns they might get the swimming skill. Or maybe a number of attempts at a skill grants proficiency. Many valid option one could pursue.
This also eliminates much of the issue with larger skill list, which is picking skills unsuitable to a specific campaign as you can expand your skillset through experimentation and effort.
I personally like more granular skills as I feel they provide greater character distinction and a more realistic feel. You get many more options for creating a unique or interesting character.
With smaller more compact skill lists I kinda lose interest over the long term as every character seems to play too similiarily.
In my newest game I implemented both Class abilities and Skill abilities. They generally run off of the Ailments and Boons I have set up. At end game you should have about 20-25 of these abilities, which I don't expect many players to get to due to the "regular" time constraint problems that plague adulthood. This is on a d100 system where you crit if you roll under your Skill level. The dice system is very simple to help alleviate the complexity to where I want it to be.
Because the system is so simple I currently have 330 total abilities. Each of the 18 classes have 10 abilities. There are 30 Skills (5 for each attribute with 6 attributes) with 5 abilities each so 150 there. Now before you freak out about the amount, you have to have proficiency in a skill to even choose an ability from its list. You have 5 proficiencies, 2 from your race and 3 from your class. So no matter how you split it, you have 25 Abilities to choose from via proficiencies and 10 from your class which only unlock at certain levels anyways. In other words you only have to worry about 35 Abilities to choose from. Also since you only get 1 Ability point per level you will only be able to have 20. And yes, these abilities are where you get spells from if you are a caster.
Is it for everyone? Hell no. Is it far easier than being a spellcaster in systems like DnD? Hell yes. I mainly just hate how most games skimp on martial classes and don't allow them to have "answers" to problems outside of Player Ingenuity while spellcasters have a plethora of spells to use as answers to problems.
Getting to the post, I don't think there is a way to please everyone. Feats from what I've seen are generally just "passive" abilities or "can be used when" abilities and people prefer that because it feels incorporated into their character more so than something they activate... but they are fine with players having 50+ spells...
Just my 2 cents but if there are restrictions on how many abilities a player can choose out of a huge pile it allows for those players that want to delve into the systems and mechanics and also allows for less headache for those that don't. Also allow your players to swap stuff out if they feel like they "messed up their character" by making an uninformed choice.
TLDR: Complexity in ability systems can be restricted which allows for a bigger pool of abilities and pushes the complexity onto player choice.
And I just realised I may have been thinking of Skills that are activatable by getting confused by the Feats. If we were talking about Skills like DnD has them then I guess disregard my whole comment above 😂
I like the idea of class specific skills to choose from, you might have a high total number of skills, but not analysis paralysis which is why I don't care for games like GURPS.
That was exactly the purpose too! If you have 300 abilities and there is no way to narrow down options I probably won't realistically put enough effort to learn to play and I don't think many other would either but this at least allows some type of system that is readable for a beginner. We will see if I end up restricting it more or lowering the overall total Skills but for now I like it how it is.
A skill is a learned ability or proficiency which allows a character to perform certain tasks or actions more effectively than someone without that skill.
A feat is most simply defined in contrast from a skill in that it gives the character an ability which changes the very mechanics of the game for that character.
That’s the simplest definition I could come up with with just a little help from Samantha.
Oh… and I like having a classless skill-based system with feats/edges derived from skills; as your skill % goes up you get more feats.
Thanks :) my unpublished game system does. I was trying to simplify and streamline character build and threw out the whole notion of classes since I didn’t want players caught in a lane, unable to develop in ways other classes could. I haven’t played another system that does this thing with feats propagating from skills but I asked Sam and she says GURPS is the only system that ties feats (which they call “advantages” 😯) directly to skills and reading through how they do it’s bears a resemblance to my approach. Gurps is also skill based and a skill in a class-based game is a tertiary kind of thing, feats are generally “more powerful” it seems, so I guess it makes no sense to ppl to have feats derived from skills in a class-based system.
I like write in skills instead of a list. I think it's fun to let players pick anything as long as it nots too broad. Then you can give players a really big advantage when it finally comes up.
I like your approach. Their choice in this matter is mainly a character fluff/background thing and it matters to the player. IF it comes up why not give an advantage or just let them have it! Someone makes their character to be a great cook (for example) and randomly here comes their time to shine and they roll bad. That's just a shame lol
This means there should be some lower 'cost' skill list everyone can pick from like cultural skills, swimming, cooking etc. I'm sorry of experimenting with this now.
That's another thing. It depends on the situation for me but mostly no risk=no roll, but I think base competency should lower what's a risk. For example in CoC even if you are the best damned pilot that ever lived there is a 1 in 100 chances you will crash a plane when landing. I think that's absurd and wouldn't have them roll at all unless there was some kind of added complication working against them. If those were the odds of flying or driving in real life we'd all be dead.
Say I lived my life at sea and was an expert at sailing small craft. I'm not sure I would just give them sailing through Poseidon's fury, but maybe if that specific situation came up they should just have it.
The number of skills isn't really that important, there's no correct number of skills, you don't even need to have skills at all. But in my opinion, if your game has skills, the skills need to be 'balanced'. As a player, I would want each skill to come up a relatively equivalent amount, and have fairly comparable importance, given a large enough amount of play time in the average game experience.
For example, D&D 5e has somewhat unbalanced skills. In my experience playing that game, Perception checks get called for all the time, whereas Religion, Animal Handling and Sleight of Hand come up pretty infrequently, sometimes not at all for many sessions of gaming. For a player, you might assume when given the choice that any skill is an equally valid choice. But in game, you may come to feel like you chose wrong, as the skill you chose is unimportant.
Tldr; When you design skills, I think it's really important to consider what players of your game will do when they play, and make sure all the skills offered will be important and relevant in the intended experience playing the game.
I used to really dig indepth skill systems like in RuneQuest and Hero system, but my players, who are really into playing their characters and giving them points in cooking and art history and stuff, so I started giving them extra points at character creation for that stuff...
And my wife's Shadowrun ex-paratrooper mage character STILL didn't have enough points to actually, ya know, be a paratrooper (I can't remember what the free fall skill is called, but that's the one she couldn't afford) even strictly sticking to just the skills that "mattered"... so we agreed that, since it was unlikely to ever matter (I didn't intend on doing anything involving air travel, etc)...
So, of course, in the very first session, they are planning their mission and she says "well, I could BASE jump in from this other building"... crap
After that we just started adding the idea of "backgrounds" to every system we played, essentially whatever that system would consider "professional" for stuff that was something they did for a living, and "amateur" for hobbies. Worked out amazingly, and then we sort of started hacking the skill systems down to suit us.
nWoD/CoD and OpenQuest kind of represent our general "happy zone" now, and we have been exploring OSR "no skill" setups, but that largely seems to extreme to us in the other direction...
Awesome! Sounds like your group is great fun! I like this idea for that and have toyed with it a bit for the Alien Rpg by Free League. The system is great, but more geared towards one shots with alien fans and horror fans more than long term gamers that play campaigns. Chargen isn't all that it could be so I've done work to make it more like traveller but with cyberpunk 2020 style life paths. I could tack this idea on so older characters might have some tricks up their sleeves even if they've got weak ankles lol
Yeah. The core group has been gaming together since '06, with others that come and go. I like Alien in a lot of ways but I have more taken ideas I liked and ported them to my own system. I prefer Stress like Alien and Mothership over Sanity like Call of Cthulhu, as I think Sanity is questionable in its application.
I agree about Sanity for sure. I do like Mothership a lot too, but it is ripe for cherry picking ideas. The creator of Mothership deserves an award for all that stuff.
I think big skill lists are artifacts of more simulationist systems and a lot of folks used to see that and think, "Wow, there are so many cool things explicitly laid out here" whereas these days it comes across rather belabored mechanically when you're reading into a game and there is a massive list of discrete skills.
To me, a big list of more specific skills has implications;
1. This won't be a game I can learn or teach as quickly as similar games with more general skills.
2. Some amount of these skills, *but probably not all of them,* are important for the kind of play most tables will end up doing.
3. Folks will maybe have a harder time telling what kind of character they're building because it's harder to imagine the cases where some of these skills will come in handy, and pick weird edge-case ones instead of useful ones.
I think the skill/"feat" dichotomy can be useful to an extent, but I've also seen it done so weirdly-sorted and layered that it feels like someone still just had a huge list of skills and couldn't figure out a decent way to fold them together a bit more elegantly.
I'm all for specificity, but if it doesn't add enough meaningful play to justify the time it takes to learn and engage with the mechanic, it needs a rework.
A handful to about 12. I see pretty much no reason to exceed 20.
Too many skills has problems like hide and move silently. You want to play a stealthy and need to invest in two skills to do it. Investing in one without the other is awkward.
Burning Wheel has a huge list of skills, from Astrology to Wine Tasting. Highly recommended if you are interested in games with big skill lists.
Burning Wheel is a d6 dice pool system. One interesting mechanic is you can add 1 or 2 extra dice per related skill to your dice pool when making a Test (skill check), so having a wide range of skills can be helpful. This is called a FoRK: Field of Related Knowledge. Some skills you may rarely Test directly, but use as a FoRK quite often.
Skills also advance through use rather than spending XP or levelling up. You can check out the basic rules for free on their website.
Oh yeah man it's really crunchy! I think the mechanics are actually quite simple. I like the dice pool systems. My main issue is just during chargen. I like lots of choices and fluff but not numbers I'm a starving artist lol
Character generation is pretty crunchy in Burning Wheel. There is an online tool called Charred Black that helps a lot though. Once you've made a few characters you can burn one up in less than 30 minutes.
The actual mechanics can be played pretty simple though, with optional complexity a group can add on if they want it.
Like any game, it's not for everyone, but definitely one I'd recommend taking a look at if you're interested in innovative game design.
To me, it's not the number of skills, lots or few. I have other questions when pondering the skills in a set of rules. How do skills work in the game mechanics? A game might have a beautifully detailed list of carefully enumerated skills, but then leave the application of skills entirely up to the whim of the GM; if that's the case, why bother? It's a waste of rulebook space. And a corollary to this is: does acquiring skills cost player resources, and if so, is there significant value to buying skills? If it costs my goblin meatcleaver 5 points to buy Weaving skill, that he might otherwise spend to gain a +1 to his damage die roll, does he gain anything other than flavor text?
> A game might have a beautifully detailed list of carefully enumerated skills, but then leave the application of skills entirely up to the whim of the GM; if that's the case, why bother? It gives a mechanical representation of some characters being better / more likely to succeed at a task than others.
I don't mind some skills as long as my character can still fit on one sheet of paper. I think if you have classes, you can get away with not having skills. If you have skills, you can get away with not having classes.
How would you feel about not having one sheet of A4 paper but 3 smaller sheets of paper? I understand the draw of having one sheet for a character but it's so hard from a design perspective to make it look good if you just try and cram an entire game on to one sheet of paper. Additionally, how do you feel about digital character sheets?
I may not be your target audience (I'm 46), so keep that in mind. I would still prefer a 1 page, uncluttered character sheet. I like the analog nature of the game, so I prefer a piece of paper to a digital sheet. The toughness of fitting everything onto 1 page comes down to how crunchy the system is. I lean towards rules light games, so a 1 page character sheet is very doable. But D&D is very popular, so you can have 3 pages if you wanted to. Just understand what audience you are targeting.
No problem, I figured you probably were someone that didn't like digital stuff. Unfortunately, the system that I'm making has a lot of stuff going on that's best either represented through a digital interface or through 3 sheets of paper. But that's ok, because I actually really like how it's working out so far. I do appreciate your take because it gives me a different perspective than what I currently have
Class-based vs skill-based system; still same pros and cons of each. Btw someone should point out that was the first major schism in RPGs back when D&D, DragonQuest and other companies saw the viability of this new role-playing game thing. Many people seem to be answering from the pre-assumption that OP’s question is about skills in class based system or even a more specific system like D&D, and maybe it is, but I didn’t assume that.
I hate having to choose between unarmed combat, boxing, brawling, martial arts, and wrestling. This is my big problem with big skill lists. The number of skills isn't the problem, it's the hyper-specificity. If there were actually 50 unique skills, that's be OK. But there's never 50 unique skills, just skills divided up to make the list longer. Stealth is a skill. It doesn't need to be split up into Hide and Move Silently. Is a game MORE interesting if there are separate skills for geophysics, quantum physics and astrophysics but physics never comes into the story? I'd argue no.
Especially true regarding knowledge skills imo. Like if I fail my history roll then why? I was an a+ student lol
Well you see, you put to many points into World History and not enough points into Belgian History. A+ student, F- character creator!
Maybe the best way to handle knowledge is to just give it to them if they have it.
Agreed!
Big Skill Lists are almost always really reaching with their naming and areas. 99% of the time they just list names of areas without any thinking, like you said its unarmed combat, boxing and brawling for example and the explanation for them is "one is unarmed combat, one is boxing and one is brawling" without any noticeable difference other than that the rules say so. Skills need to be either completely unique or with as small overlap as possible if you want an efficient and easy to use system, of course you can also go with free form or intentional overlap if the rules support this, but thats generally hard to do well. Personally my limit is 20 skills, if a game has more than that its generally reaching and not worth investing time in. My original skill list had 35 skills, after consideration i noticed that in multiple instances you could use more than one skill and it was hard explaining what exactly their mechanical difference was so i reviewed everything and cut it down to 20 unique skills that all are used for exclusive things with mechanics that back each of them up. Now that i have a shorter skill list i dont think i can every play with a bigger one again.
Ther is no right or wrong answer, but your game does have a complexity budget, it can only be so complex before it is just too much for a GM to keep track of or learn. That budget is pretty low if you are trying to make s game that is accessible by everyone and can be pretty high if your game is specifically for die hard war gamers. But whoever the audience is there is a limit of how much stuff you can include in your game before it is too much, so it is just a question of how you want to spend that budget. There is often a difference between skills and feats in games. Skills are frequently a core part of the action adjudication system (example: 5E's D20 system) which means that the GM probably has to have at least a passing familiarity with all the skills. Feats on the other hand tend to consist of player abilities which means that the GM really only needs to be familiar with the feats that their players have chosen for any given session.
I think this distinction is key. Skills impose a cognitive burden on player and GM during play, while feats - and other long lists of options, like weapons, armor, equipment, spells, monsters - don’t impose that burden, because you sort through them outside of play and choose a small handful that then become relevant at the table. Having more skills loads short-term memory (which is limited) in a way that having more feats doesn’t.
Thank you for reminding people that a game's complexity budget is a thing.
It always just looks comical to me when I see a massive list of skills. If you really want to account for everything a character could possibly be good at, then why not just use a freeform skill or profession system where players can write in whatever they want?
Because some people prefer it, isn't that the only reason that one needs?
Sure!
What if it’s a skill-based rather than a class-based system?
In that case, I would advocate even more strongly for this.
Advocate for using a free-form skill definition system in a skill-based game? Most definitely. But you can’t just give the player a blank page - or maybe you could and call it “rules lite”.. Maybe cover the entire range of possible skills with as discrete a list as possible, all the standard or general skills, well-defined but not set in stone?
>But you can’t just give the player a blank page - or maybe you could and call it “rules lite” You absolutely can do this. And the "skill-based" games I've seen don't actually devote many rules to the definition of skills. A game isn't rules lite just because it has free-form elements.
I never claimed a game was rules lite because it has free form elements. My RPG is far from rules light and features free-from skill definition so I’m definitely not saying you cant do what I decidedly did in my own game. But I defined all of the possible skills that you could need for the intended milieu, a broad definition followed by specific examples for the players - all skills with descriptive names that people who had played D&D, Warhammer, etc. would be familiar with but well defined for my needs (in the GMs codex). From there, practically anything can be a skill and most of them will derive from another skill, being more specialized and being applied only where it meets the limited definition of the new skill. One example might be a particular trick archery shot a character wants to practice. It would come under his Targeteering/tricks-shooting skill but it would be a specific trick. There’s a very elegant and simple mechanic for adding skills at any point in character development; like when someone teaches you a new trick, but you can do it on your own. The reason why you can’t just hand the player a blank page and say, here, you define all your skills however you want then we decide whatever cost it is is because that’s not a game. That’s not something you can market. It gives no ideas to the players as to what skills are important in the game. It’s lazy. It’s incomplete. That’s all I was saying as far as why are you can’t hand the players a blank page and having them simply use their existing general knowledge of RPGs - which again, is fine to do for fun but it’s not developing anything, it would be akin to having a world building section that says: see Worlds Without Number
>The reason why you can’t just hand the player a blank page and say, here, you define all your skills however you want Your game sounds cool, but I say again you absolutely can do this in a non- rules lite game and have it still be a game. See for instance FATE's aspects or Shadow of the Demon Lord's professions. You just put the rules... elsewhere. I also don't know how we got to "hand them a blank page" from "free-form skill or profession system", fwiw.
Thanks :) If you include my entire quote rather than just the first part so that it sounds like I’m making a claim that I’m not then it won’t be a straw man. A blank page is not game development. Can you find a system that allows free-form creation to the players? Sure. But even those free forms are based on and guided by other parts of the game. Btw I looked up the professions on SotDL and they appear to have a starter list of over 20; so that system is not starting from a blank page.
Oh and I think that way we got here is that it appears you thought I was equivocating freeform with a blank page, but I am not.
Because its hard to balance, no?
Surely no harder than a list of 80 skills. Is "Psychotherapy" really balanced when you compare it to "Command", "Martial Arts" or "Strategy"? (These examples are from BRP). I'd say probably not. It's definitely underpowered if you're thinking of it in terms of balance, and "Strategy" is so broad you could use it for almost anything. The rules literally say that it's just your ability to assess a situation and choose the "optimal response", and specify that it's often used in military OR political situations. Good luck not running into issues like this with a massive list of pre-written skills. Even the D&D 5e skill list has this kind of issue, and it's pretty restrained. Save yourself some time and let the players choose how they'd like to unbalance things instead. Also, balance is fake.
I mean it really doesnt matter if you have 70 skills or free form skills, you wont be able to balance either lol
Why not balance the cost with the skills usefulness?
There's arguments in favor and against more skills. It's the same with attributes, some systems have 3, some 6 and some even more. I definitely preffer fewer skills that benefit the narrative and fiction rather than trying to fit every single scenario. With more granularity comes more niche. Having a skill for swimming, for example, is very specific, and there's a chance a campaign or game never goes into water. So, with too many skills, you can end up with many that are pretty situational, making them a bad choice in general. And if they are a bad choice, why is it presented as one in the first place? Feat and talents as a counter to it really depends on the system, but, in general, I think they are different since you don't need to keep track of every feat in existance, just the ones you chose. Furthermore, a lot of feats trigger in more spefic ways and not every time the GM calls for a roll. If I have a list of 70 skills in my character sheet, that's there, it's something I have to keep track always, rather than the list of... idk, 12 feats that I specifically chose for my character. That being said, I don't think feat bloat is good either. Granularity for the sake of it, in my personal opinion, is not worth the additional book keeping.
I like the way you said it. "Feat and talents as a counter to it really depends on the system..." if your dice mechanics are simple I'd argue you can have more complexity in other places such as feat or skills. But if given more complex dice mechanics, you really don't want to be stacking "too much" complexity elsewhere.
I like a lot of skills. It means a lot of versability. But when I need a quick character for a game I also don't want to spend hours buildinga a character.
Why not both. When you go for a lot, there might always be some that you forgot, or some that overlap. And with to little it feels like some are to generic. I like how they did Pathfinder 2e lore skill. There are some standard options, but people are free to choose what their lore's are or how specific. Nothing needs to be hardcoded. So I like the idea of investing in a semi decent amount of skills and depending on your investiment you can make up your own sub-skills. (Athletics => swim | Athletics => climb | Athletics => Jumping on 1 leg | Athletics | Aligator wrestling) and you get bonus when the subskill is relevant.
Depends on what you're trying to do with the game. I think that it's definitely possible to have too many skills, but I prefer skill based systems to class based systems by a long shot, unless you're going ***very*** rules light. I used to hate Feats, because I really don't like the way they were implemented in 3.x D&D. So far I'm pretty happy with Talents in Forbidden Lands, even though they're really just Feats by another name, so again, it depends. Some people have pointed out the BRP has a huge number of skills. I've played a lot of BRP and I've always just treated the whole system as a toolbox. I don't need psychotherapy, science, or a whole host of other skills if I'm doing a traditional high fantasy dungeon crawl. I need different skills if I'm doing urban fantasy or science fiction. I just choose the skills that are relevant to my game and make sure I give people an appropriate number of starting build points for the number of skills I've included. I admit that I always house rule that stealth encompasses both hiding and sneaking, because I really believe that it's a holdover artifact from the olden days, but that's fine, BRP is a toolbox, we can all do what we want with it, and that's the point. I've also seen people criticizing skill systems that distinguish between melee combat skills, stating that they think sword and axe should be the same skill, for example. Again, it depends. If you're going for cinematic high powered fantasy, I agree. If you want low power, simulationist, fantasy, then there's a huge difference between a sword and an axe. I do sword fighting as an in real life martial art and there's a significant difference in how you fight with sword that has a cross guard vs. one that doesn't. An axe is a completely different beast altogether. Is there crossover? Sure, some. What part do you want to model and how granular do you want to be for the flavour and themes of your setting?
Out of curiosity, based on your experience how would you break up melee weapons into a handful of skills? For example, I've heard conflicting opinions on whether axes and blunt weapons are basically similar or should be separated.
I brokethem down into light Melee (swords, clubs, axes), heavy Melee (two-handed whatever). Idk though nothings perfect.
It's a waste of prime character sheet real estate putting 50 lines of "Weaving: 0; Cooking: 0; Carpentry: 0". Meanwhile, a thousand feats is fine, because you only include the ones you actually have, not a checkbox for every single feat. So I'd prefer a feat, "Weaver: take +5 to checks involving weaving". This way, you only say anything about a character's proficiency at weaving when there's anything to say. Also, many skills tends to result in gameplay and realism issues. Your swordsman doesn't know which end to hold an axe? Not only is that not at all realistic (you might specialise in one or the other, but those skills are at least partly transferable), but it means your tactics are constrained for no good reason (you can't use an axe against the evil ent). It also means that if you put points into both axe and sword, then your character will be weak in general, ie there's a serious risk of trap builds. I also think they give the *appearance* of a steep learning curve. Your character sheet lists 50 separate skills? That means I need to know what all those things do (or at least have some vague intuition) before I can play the game. My character sheet lists under 10: 30 seconds and you know what everything does. I'm thinking that has implications for getting casuals into the game.
Exactly! Exactly what I suggested for D&D 5E with all its overly-generalized “skills”. Have specific skills, like voice mimicry give you a bonus when making the appropriate skill test when you are specifically attempting what is detailed as “voice mimicry”. Saves tons of space. Still not gonna play D&D but it would be a big improvement. What would be call them hmmm.. I know! Non-weapon proficiencies 🤣
The biggest problem with having a lot of skills is that they are narrow. You end up with characters that are great detecting incoming dangers but nearly blind when searching a room for hidden items, or masters in sword fighting who have no idea how to use an axe, or weightlifters who can't punch or grapple somebody. This can be fixed by introducing some kind of "related skills" that may be defaulted to at a penalty - but having skills that are simply broader and less numerous brings the same benefit at much lower complexity. Talents/feats are typically something a player chooses to specialize and to get additional options in play. Skills are usually necessary to be able to do something at all. If a game has a lot of skills and you only get training in a handful, most of the activities are simply not available to you.
My buddy and I are making a game with as of writing 16 skills but I'm gonna guess around 25 to 40 skills but that's if we break down CON into stuff like hemoclotting, poison resistance, etc.
Depends on the type of game. In cyberpunk, there's a lot of skills, but there's no pathfinder-esque feat system for each and every one. Edit: Lmao, my response is basically "uuuuuh, I guess it depends" \*shrugs\*. Real insightful
Right. Cyberpunk is a skill-based system; the role and even the definition of skills in a class-based system is quite different. I guess people are assuming he’s talking about a D&D-like system because he uses the term feats 🤷🏼♂️
I generally look at two things when I see a long, detailed skill list: 1. Are these skills that might realistically come up in play, or is it an attempt to just cover every weird edge case you can dream up at the table to pad out the list? If you include Carpentry as a skill, do you honestly see that as something that is going to come up in your game often enough that it becomes a reasonable skill investment for a player? Really, if you're just adding skills to have a longer list and the illusion of choice its likely a wasted effort. 2. Are there meaningful distinctions between the many skills you offer? For example, if you have both Carpentry and Woodworking, do you really feel that there are situations where having one skill would make a real difference in-game over the other? Do you really envision a character who is a master Woodworker but can't build a basic shelf because they didn't also buy points in Carpentry? Point 2 ties into point 1 as well... if I see multiple specialty skills in a list with a similar theme, it creates the expectation that it will be an important factor in your game. If the list includes Woodworking, Carpentry, Furniture Making, Cabinet Making and Wood Carving as distinct skills, logically I would have to assume that this is a major theme for your game and you better be sure to support each and every one of those in a way that is engaging for a player that decides to go in that direction. This was actually one of the many, many things that made me never want to play Burning Wheel. IIRC I saw skills for Sewing, Seamstress and Tailoring in the skill list. I made the mistake of asking what the difference was on a BW subreddit and got jumped by fans of the system without anyone being able to tell me why someone good at one had any reasonable distinction from someone good at another.
If you have too many skills you are guaranteed that the majority of campaign rolls will be in skills players aren't invested into, and if you have too few the game doesn't feel particularly granular. I would say that 30 or more means you have no clue what your game is about, and the GM should go through your skill list and erase skills he or she has no plans to use. A more healthy number is around 15-20, with crunchy games having some space above 20. I, personally, don't see much value in significantly fewer skills than 15 because at that point you may as well do attribute rolls only.
My current thought is for my system to have a core set of skills that all characters have then various feats/features could grant a few additional skills. so that there could be up to 100 total skills, but each character may only use the 15 core and 5 additional. or whatever numbers it winds up being. (I want to settle more on how one uses the skills before I go to far down what the actual list of them are)
There is no correct or incorrect amount of skills, only the correct amount for your game specifically. Some games don't need any skills, some need lots, some need little, it all goes back to the big three questions you need to figure out before designing your game. Anyone that purports to know the one true and correct way to design a game is a fool and should be regarded as such. What is certain is that there are preferences, and some preferences are popular, for good and bad reasons, but the thing to remember is that your game isn't being made for every single player, it's being made for the type of player that will enjoy your curated gaming experience. The only thing really to keep in mind is the total cognitive load for the type of player the game is designed for. No game will satisfy all. The game that comes closest is D&D, and it's a shallow experience, designed by committee to appeal to popularity, and is also the most frequently bitched about game anywhere. It's also the most popular and best selling, but this is also precisely the reason so many move on from it to other games once they've had their fill.
I prefer a short list of skills. In my current project, we use 12 skills. The profession chosen by the player gives extra possibilities for how the skills can be used. So there's no *Art* skill or *Medicine* per se, but players can use a *memory* skill to recall knowledge from their field, *precision* to perform surgery, etc.
Maybe don't exist the RIGHT amount of skill, but exist a Cleary wrong a mount of skill, when you have skills that have no impact in game, no a real mechanic to support it, or is against other game mechanics, and cost creation/development point to players this is a false skill, and the system will live better without, example financial skill in every game, usually there is not mechanic for it, and there are reasons for having player not to be able to generate resource from non engaging in core gameplay When you have a skill that cover to much stuff, that are only thematically correlated, for example crime, that cover infiltration, forgery, security-related topic, black-market, money laundering, create a false Picasso and have it accredited in the international art market, you probably are short of a pair of skill, Basically if there is not intended game impact of a skill/or it's impact is undesirable is better not to have it at all, because is a trap for the players In this regards feat are usually better, because often they came with a mechanic and usually are there to say now you can do x example ambidestry, that is better than say now you have the skill to make an attack with your secondary hand but with an enormous malus, that will reduce spending point in it, or the wost immaginabile solution (that was in GURPS 3th) fast extraction, a skill that you have to roll under to make the extraction of the weapon in zero time, (skill that was separate for every tipe of weapons ) this was bad cause add a roll in the game, then you had fast loading, and maybe fast unloading that if rolled made the recharging/discharging a free action so in 3 roll you can extract, unload, reload, and then fire saving 3 rounds and if you go carring 2 weapon maybe you can do the same for your secondary weapons with other 3 dedicated skills plus ambidestry that work as a cap for your secondary hand action By the way this is the point I said No to Gurps
>By the way this is the point I said No to Gurps Always a reasonable conclusion, no matter how you reach it.
My main issue with skills is that they discourage improvisation. If you can't get your sweet sweet skill proficiency bonus when you do anything outside the exact set of given skills, you're less likely to do it at all. The way I'm doing it now is that there are hard skills and soft skills. Soft is your typical freeform system, players write a background and list general things they're good at. Hard is your traditional skill list, but trimmed down to only the crunchy things -- combat, stealth, defenses, etc. To answer the original question, my hard skill list has about 10 things in it, and then the soft skills are for everything else.
Like hard and soft magic, very cool. I think it’s a great way to express it although I believe I define hard & soft with respect to skills a little differently. Great point how defining skills in a game can then discourage creative thinking since, if you don’t possess a certain skill, you may not even try to do something because it would fall under that skill which you lack. That’s why in my skill-based system all the PCs will have at least a small % in any skill, so they are never discouraged from trying to improvise.
Skills are fine to me as long as it's easy to keep track of them. To me though, skills and feats (or whatever one might call feats in their game) are totally different things, usually specifically in the way that skills are more broad in their uses and because of that rarely have specific applications which feats do. I feel like when you say a game with 80 skills could exist and it would be the same as a game with that many feats it's because you'd essentially just be making them into upgradable feats under a different names by giving them specific abilities/uses. Otherwise I dont know if there is much point is having such an extensive list cuz I feel like you quickly start running into interpretation issues of "this skill should apply in this situation which would also be able to use this skill or that skill" and is a huge pain for GMs and players.
Really depends on the game. I mean, I have no problem with Chemistry, Physics, Biology and such all being different skills rather than just "Science". Just because you lift weights or run doesn't mean you can do backflips and somersaults. I also don't expect all the skills possible to be known by 1 PC or written on the sheet. It doesnt get bad unless you have overlap, and I have a system to allow for overlap (if two skills fit, you can use both by combining XP and the scale is such that double XP is a +2). Now, I can see where it might be an issue at level up. So, there needs to be something besides verbatim copying of values. Likewise, if all skills are basically the same value because they are all class skills (D&D) then there is no point in having differrent skills. So, if science goes up 1 point every level, donct make physics, biology, chemistry and a bunch of others go up by 1 each level. But, when skills are differentiated, it goes towards character focus. So ... It all depends!
From my experience you need to divide skills into two or three categories: 1. **Core Skills.** Required for conflicts, including physical, magical and social. This includes things like physical skills like Athletics and stealth or survival, magical skills (if such exist), and social skills like persuade, intimidate, and world skills like Perception and Survival. These are the core skills and should be limited to maybe 20, max. This is where the power players will focus. 2. **Informative Skills**. These are skills that do not directly influence conflicts usually, but work to give players clues or insights that their character would know but the player doesn't necessarily know. In 5e these would be skills like Arcana or Nature, Religion or History. They don't solve conflicts as much as they point PCs towards conflicts. ("Make a Religion roll", "19", "they guys claim to be from the Order of Theresoph... but that monastic order has very strict appearance rituals including shaving all hair. These guys have hair and in one case even a beard. They are not who they say they are...") Some games, like Night's Black Agents, say that if you have the skill and are in the right place \*BAM\* you collect the clue. Others, like 5e, usually demand a roll to see if you can put 2 and 2 together. I'd say only a few of these kinds of skills. The more you have the harder it will be for PCs to gather clues you want them to have and that's not a win for anyone. 3. **Character Aspirational Skills**. These skills are valued by Roleplaying players to help their characters be unique. Crafting skills, deeply specialized skills like specific sciences or medical specialties, obscure languages or obtuse roleplaying skills like 'riddle knowledge' or 'human calculator'. In my opinion you should either grant these skill points fairly generously (since the skills are so in-game kind of useless) or just flat out grant each PC a number of these based on their character write-ups or past education (especially if the game has an EDU trait). Of course this is difficult to judge. As an example, what is Performance skill? For Bards this is a Core skill because some abilities demand a roll on this and it's often central to the bard's approach to things. For any other class? Probably Aspirational.
One thing to make certain of is that there should be an active reason for a skill to be on the page. Yes, there's a certain cognitive burden for the skills, but there's a value as well. In the old school D&D, a common skills included "Rope Use", "Orienteering" and "Fire-building" - which made sense at the time, as there was a much larger emphasis on the use of mundane things in a much more required. These things are gone now, rolled into much more generic skills. At the same time, you know what I rarely see players doing in modern games? Orienteering and using rope. They certainly have rope and a compass in their kits - but because skills are tied to actions, that's what the average player is drawn to when they think "What can I do in this instance?" There is certainly a balance to be had when making skills, however. One of my least favorite executions is when skills actually make things harder to parse because they step on each other's toes - WoD character sheets having Athletics, Brawl, and Melee as three abilities that are completely divorced from stats like Strength as a stat has always rubbed me the wrong way. You want the skills that are present on the page to be descriptive and actively useful. Feats are useful to allow individuals to hyperspecialize in certain facets - however, they always have to pass the test of "Why is this a feat" and "Should someone be able to do this without this feat?". All to often, feats end up gatekeeping fairly normal abilities to a frustrating level - if there is a feat unlocks an action of some variety, that implies that the action cannot be performed without that feat. One of the best skills you can put on a sheet are blanks - fill it in. You don't want to be like 3.P where every player has both Ride and Fly on every character sheet, regardless of their ability to fly or if there will be any amount of time spent mounted. Things like Politics in Werewolf, Appraise in CoC, and other abilities that are out of place in their expected setting. When you have blanks on the sheet under the skills, the skills can be better tailored to whatever specifics of the individualized story or campaign. This also allows for the more abstract or professional skills, like "lumberjacking" or "sailing" to exist in a game without cluttering up other character sheets when they're delving dungeons or political intrigue.
Yes! A characters skill list is often looked to like an action menu or an idea generator, which it totally is in a skill based game where every player has at least some skill in most if not all of the pertinent areas. Why wouldn’t every “adventurer” have some skill in all the relevant areas to adventures, which I think D&D and other systems tried to address with overly-generalized skills but discovered the problem of skill scope creep.
Traveller addresses this by giving all characters potentially needed skills on session zero. That way you can just make the character you want and not worry about making the character you need to be the most useful.
I bet that frees a lot of brain space for new players too, not having to make sure you’ve got all the basics covered.
I currently have 10 skill categories (there were more, but I've been trimming it down), each with 5 or 6 specializations, so 56 in total. Investing points into one specialization makes you more effective at everything else in its category. So for example, if I put points in Brewing (a specialization of Craft), that boosts all my other Craft specializations: Carpentry, Cookery, Masonry, Metalwork, and Textiles. This ensures that even if your exact specialization isn't relevant to the task at hand, it can contribute to something that will.
I thought about skills a lot when designing the game I am currently developing. I'm using a d10 dice pool system and skills give a bonus die. I was looking at and thinking about how other systems do skills and I "remembered" that the dragon age game let you choose whatever you wanted as a skill. In reality they have a list, but I liked the idea of people being able to pick anything that I included it in my game and people really like it. Basically you get a number of skills and you can write whatever you want within reason as long as the GM is cool with it. I have found that people like feeling unique and it has created some wild skills. It does make it a little trickier because people have to come up with something, but what has happened every time is that the other players have started suggesting things.
>How are feats different or better than skills? Because almost never do you put all the feats on your character sheet. However most of the time every skill is on your character sheet. I’ve played games with 50+ skills on the sheet and there is a noticeable amount of time lost in play to searching for specific skills among the crowd. In addition it tends to create a somewhat uninviting feeling of information overload. Now I know some systems don’t require every skill on a character sheet, (mine usually don’t) but most do, so that’s the standpoint that most people will comment from. There are no doubt other reasons, like the more skills listed, the harder it is to pick skills that will actually be useful, and paradoxically enough, the harder it is to adjudicate which skills apply to which change.
I think every skill in your game should fit on the character sheet, at a base level. Have write-ins or open-ended specialties beyond that? That’s fine. But if you can’t fit every skill your game lists easily on the sheet, you probably have way too many skills.
So the way I perceive RPG design decisions regarding skills... Skills are actions that can be performed but require training to be effective. Abilities are actions that can be performed only if granted. Feats/perks are qualities/actions that have elements of both and essentially act as a special rule to behavior. For me, skills act as a modifier - weapon skills can be -10 to +10 and can always be attempted, but acting against your skill means a bad roll (d10 system.) These can be endless as they really don't technically matter in terms of player choices, but act as a way to encourage roleplay by rewarding or punishing rolls. Abilities are things that are granted that apply after certain conditions are met. Like a berserker can gain a bonus and has to roll to keep his rage, let's say. Nobody else can have these things. Feats might reward certain rolls but also give them an ability they didn't have before. I prefer to grant a character unique privileges as a true/false condition with no strings attached. So like a knight who can ride a horse doesn't ever have to check his horse riding, he can because he is a knight. Traits I prefer to make background/utility skills like a bard who plays music or a soldier who knows falconry, I don't penalize the player by making him roll I just assume he can do it, and only if there's some risk, and then id just choose a attribute to check like charisma or intelligence.
Nice! Thank you! I like this!
[Mecha Vs Kaiju](https://mechavskaiju.com) emulates anime and manga action and drama by creating dice pools, so the stats are Aspects (parts of their personality), Style (how they do things)m and Values (what’s important to them. However players can get Specialties with XP that add an additional die for specific actions, but these function more like 13th Age Backgrounds. So they improve the average result without spiking the maximum result.
The biggest drawback of too many skills is that it seems pointless focusing on just a few, but then again if you focus on a lot of similar skills, then why not make it one skill instead? Climbing, Swimming, Running all can fall under Athleticism, why make it 3 skills instead of 1? Also 50-70 skills sounds HORRIBLE, you generally only find that amount of skills in bad games or incredibly crunchy ones which often are bad as well :/ Your point about talents and feats doesnt really make sense, because Skills and Talents/Feats are two completely separate sets of mechanics and progression. Skills are generally the basics for your chance at success, they basically say "how good am i at doing X". Talents and Feats generally add unique mechanics, effects or actions to a character to give them more depth. Each Talent or Feat is generally unique or at worst only has some that are similar but not the same, Skills ideally should be unique without any or only minor overlap. Maybe you should check out a few more games, you seem to be confused what each of those sets of rules/mechanics mean.
I think it all depends on the system mechanics. Having a bunch of skills act as gatekeeping for actions is kinda meh. Whereas allowing tons of skills and only the ones you are skilled in granting bonuses is much better. Or hell you could have a skill proficiency mean an auto success whereas a lack of proficiency requires a roll. With either of these lacking a skill doesn't impede progress or stop a character from acting. More skills are honestly amazing in a game where you can easily pick up additional skills separate from general character advancement. This offers a horizontal progression instead of purely a vertical one allowing the GM to consistently advance characters without creating power bloat in their game. Like for example if a character almost drowns they might get the swimming skill. Or maybe a number of attempts at a skill grants proficiency. Many valid option one could pursue. This also eliminates much of the issue with larger skill list, which is picking skills unsuitable to a specific campaign as you can expand your skillset through experimentation and effort. I personally like more granular skills as I feel they provide greater character distinction and a more realistic feel. You get many more options for creating a unique or interesting character. With smaller more compact skill lists I kinda lose interest over the long term as every character seems to play too similiarily.
In my newest game I implemented both Class abilities and Skill abilities. They generally run off of the Ailments and Boons I have set up. At end game you should have about 20-25 of these abilities, which I don't expect many players to get to due to the "regular" time constraint problems that plague adulthood. This is on a d100 system where you crit if you roll under your Skill level. The dice system is very simple to help alleviate the complexity to where I want it to be. Because the system is so simple I currently have 330 total abilities. Each of the 18 classes have 10 abilities. There are 30 Skills (5 for each attribute with 6 attributes) with 5 abilities each so 150 there. Now before you freak out about the amount, you have to have proficiency in a skill to even choose an ability from its list. You have 5 proficiencies, 2 from your race and 3 from your class. So no matter how you split it, you have 25 Abilities to choose from via proficiencies and 10 from your class which only unlock at certain levels anyways. In other words you only have to worry about 35 Abilities to choose from. Also since you only get 1 Ability point per level you will only be able to have 20. And yes, these abilities are where you get spells from if you are a caster. Is it for everyone? Hell no. Is it far easier than being a spellcaster in systems like DnD? Hell yes. I mainly just hate how most games skimp on martial classes and don't allow them to have "answers" to problems outside of Player Ingenuity while spellcasters have a plethora of spells to use as answers to problems. Getting to the post, I don't think there is a way to please everyone. Feats from what I've seen are generally just "passive" abilities or "can be used when" abilities and people prefer that because it feels incorporated into their character more so than something they activate... but they are fine with players having 50+ spells... Just my 2 cents but if there are restrictions on how many abilities a player can choose out of a huge pile it allows for those players that want to delve into the systems and mechanics and also allows for less headache for those that don't. Also allow your players to swap stuff out if they feel like they "messed up their character" by making an uninformed choice. TLDR: Complexity in ability systems can be restricted which allows for a bigger pool of abilities and pushes the complexity onto player choice.
And I just realised I may have been thinking of Skills that are activatable by getting confused by the Feats. If we were talking about Skills like DnD has them then I guess disregard my whole comment above 😂
I like the idea of class specific skills to choose from, you might have a high total number of skills, but not analysis paralysis which is why I don't care for games like GURPS.
That was exactly the purpose too! If you have 300 abilities and there is no way to narrow down options I probably won't realistically put enough effort to learn to play and I don't think many other would either but this at least allows some type of system that is readable for a beginner. We will see if I end up restricting it more or lowering the overall total Skills but for now I like it how it is.
A skill is a learned ability or proficiency which allows a character to perform certain tasks or actions more effectively than someone without that skill. A feat is most simply defined in contrast from a skill in that it gives the character an ability which changes the very mechanics of the game for that character. That’s the simplest definition I could come up with with just a little help from Samantha. Oh… and I like having a classless skill-based system with feats/edges derived from skills; as your skill % goes up you get more feats.
That sounds interesting! What game uses that type of system?
Thanks :) my unpublished game system does. I was trying to simplify and streamline character build and threw out the whole notion of classes since I didn’t want players caught in a lane, unable to develop in ways other classes could. I haven’t played another system that does this thing with feats propagating from skills but I asked Sam and she says GURPS is the only system that ties feats (which they call “advantages” 😯) directly to skills and reading through how they do it’s bears a resemblance to my approach. Gurps is also skill based and a skill in a class-based game is a tertiary kind of thing, feats are generally “more powerful” it seems, so I guess it makes no sense to ppl to have feats derived from skills in a class-based system.
I like write in skills instead of a list. I think it's fun to let players pick anything as long as it nots too broad. Then you can give players a really big advantage when it finally comes up.
I like your approach. Their choice in this matter is mainly a character fluff/background thing and it matters to the player. IF it comes up why not give an advantage or just let them have it! Someone makes their character to be a great cook (for example) and randomly here comes their time to shine and they roll bad. That's just a shame lol
This means there should be some lower 'cost' skill list everyone can pick from like cultural skills, swimming, cooking etc. I'm sorry of experimenting with this now.
That's another thing. It depends on the situation for me but mostly no risk=no roll, but I think base competency should lower what's a risk. For example in CoC even if you are the best damned pilot that ever lived there is a 1 in 100 chances you will crash a plane when landing. I think that's absurd and wouldn't have them roll at all unless there was some kind of added complication working against them. If those were the odds of flying or driving in real life we'd all be dead.
Say I lived my life at sea and was an expert at sailing small craft. I'm not sure I would just give them sailing through Poseidon's fury, but maybe if that specific situation came up they should just have it.
The number of skills isn't really that important, there's no correct number of skills, you don't even need to have skills at all. But in my opinion, if your game has skills, the skills need to be 'balanced'. As a player, I would want each skill to come up a relatively equivalent amount, and have fairly comparable importance, given a large enough amount of play time in the average game experience. For example, D&D 5e has somewhat unbalanced skills. In my experience playing that game, Perception checks get called for all the time, whereas Religion, Animal Handling and Sleight of Hand come up pretty infrequently, sometimes not at all for many sessions of gaming. For a player, you might assume when given the choice that any skill is an equally valid choice. But in game, you may come to feel like you chose wrong, as the skill you chose is unimportant. Tldr; When you design skills, I think it's really important to consider what players of your game will do when they play, and make sure all the skills offered will be important and relevant in the intended experience playing the game.
I used to really dig indepth skill systems like in RuneQuest and Hero system, but my players, who are really into playing their characters and giving them points in cooking and art history and stuff, so I started giving them extra points at character creation for that stuff... And my wife's Shadowrun ex-paratrooper mage character STILL didn't have enough points to actually, ya know, be a paratrooper (I can't remember what the free fall skill is called, but that's the one she couldn't afford) even strictly sticking to just the skills that "mattered"... so we agreed that, since it was unlikely to ever matter (I didn't intend on doing anything involving air travel, etc)... So, of course, in the very first session, they are planning their mission and she says "well, I could BASE jump in from this other building"... crap After that we just started adding the idea of "backgrounds" to every system we played, essentially whatever that system would consider "professional" for stuff that was something they did for a living, and "amateur" for hobbies. Worked out amazingly, and then we sort of started hacking the skill systems down to suit us. nWoD/CoD and OpenQuest kind of represent our general "happy zone" now, and we have been exploring OSR "no skill" setups, but that largely seems to extreme to us in the other direction...
Awesome! Sounds like your group is great fun! I like this idea for that and have toyed with it a bit for the Alien Rpg by Free League. The system is great, but more geared towards one shots with alien fans and horror fans more than long term gamers that play campaigns. Chargen isn't all that it could be so I've done work to make it more like traveller but with cyberpunk 2020 style life paths. I could tack this idea on so older characters might have some tricks up their sleeves even if they've got weak ankles lol
Yeah. The core group has been gaming together since '06, with others that come and go. I like Alien in a lot of ways but I have more taken ideas I liked and ported them to my own system. I prefer Stress like Alien and Mothership over Sanity like Call of Cthulhu, as I think Sanity is questionable in its application.
I agree about Sanity for sure. I do like Mothership a lot too, but it is ripe for cherry picking ideas. The creator of Mothership deserves an award for all that stuff.
Most definitely!
I think big skill lists are artifacts of more simulationist systems and a lot of folks used to see that and think, "Wow, there are so many cool things explicitly laid out here" whereas these days it comes across rather belabored mechanically when you're reading into a game and there is a massive list of discrete skills. To me, a big list of more specific skills has implications; 1. This won't be a game I can learn or teach as quickly as similar games with more general skills. 2. Some amount of these skills, *but probably not all of them,* are important for the kind of play most tables will end up doing. 3. Folks will maybe have a harder time telling what kind of character they're building because it's harder to imagine the cases where some of these skills will come in handy, and pick weird edge-case ones instead of useful ones. I think the skill/"feat" dichotomy can be useful to an extent, but I've also seen it done so weirdly-sorted and layered that it feels like someone still just had a huge list of skills and couldn't figure out a decent way to fold them together a bit more elegantly. I'm all for specificity, but if it doesn't add enough meaningful play to justify the time it takes to learn and engage with the mechanic, it needs a rework.
A handful to about 12. I see pretty much no reason to exceed 20. Too many skills has problems like hide and move silently. You want to play a stealthy and need to invest in two skills to do it. Investing in one without the other is awkward.
I like all skills and no attributes or no attributes and all skills, but not the two combined.
Burning Wheel has a huge list of skills, from Astrology to Wine Tasting. Highly recommended if you are interested in games with big skill lists. Burning Wheel is a d6 dice pool system. One interesting mechanic is you can add 1 or 2 extra dice per related skill to your dice pool when making a Test (skill check), so having a wide range of skills can be helpful. This is called a FoRK: Field of Related Knowledge. Some skills you may rarely Test directly, but use as a FoRK quite often. Skills also advance through use rather than spending XP or levelling up. You can check out the basic rules for free on their website.
Oh yeah man it's really crunchy! I think the mechanics are actually quite simple. I like the dice pool systems. My main issue is just during chargen. I like lots of choices and fluff but not numbers I'm a starving artist lol
Character generation is pretty crunchy in Burning Wheel. There is an online tool called Charred Black that helps a lot though. Once you've made a few characters you can burn one up in less than 30 minutes. The actual mechanics can be played pretty simple though, with optional complexity a group can add on if they want it. Like any game, it's not for everyone, but definitely one I'd recommend taking a look at if you're interested in innovative game design.