Friday, September 30, 2022

Thinking about Skills

In the early days of the Old School Renaissance, much virtual ink spelled on the question of the merits and utility of skills in Dungeons & Dragons and RPGs derived from it. Much of the debate at the time centered on the thief, since it was the first character class in the game to possess explicit skills with a variable chance of success. I don't want to rehearse all the arguments for and against skills in D&D, since I think they're pretty well known by now. More to the point, I don't think many opinions are going to be changed one way or the other by doing so. 

For myself, I don't have any objection to skills per se. I certainly don't think skills are in any way contrary to the spirit of old school gaming, unless "old school" is taken to mean primitivism. Even then, the case against skills is weak, since Empire of the Petal Throne, published by TSR in 1975, a year after the release of OD&D, includes a skill system. Likewise, many other RPGs published within a few years of Dungeons & Dragons, such as Traveller, include skills and skill systems. If they don't qualify as "old school," I'm not sure what the word means.

All that said, I nevertheless do have some reservations about the inclusion of skills in a game with character classes, since I think they can undermine the uniqueness (and indeed purpose) of character classes. A lot depends, I think, on how skills are conceived in a game, but, by and large, it's generally my opinion that, if you have an extensive skill list and a mechanical system to support it, there's really no need for character classes. 

The fine folks over at Chaosium would seem to have shared this perspective, since RuneQuest, an old school fantasy RPG with a skill system, has "no artificial character classes." While I don't agree that character classes are necessarily artificial, I do think that a robust skill system tends, at the very least, to weaken the mechanical role of character classes, if not completely eliminate the need for them. Consequently, I've largely come to conclude that D&D and RuneQuest (or Basic Role-Playing, if you prefer) represent two different but equally coherent approaches to mechanizing characters in a roleplaying game. Neither is inherently better than the other; both have their place. 

My thoughts on this at the moment arise out of my continued work on sha-Arthan, my science fantasy setting. Originally, I thought of the setting as a natural fit for something obviously D&D-like, hence why my initial work included the creation of new character classes, including several intended for solely for the nonhuman species of sha-Arthan. One of those new character classes, the scion, was distinguished primarily by its collection of skills, which, while different from those of the thief, functioned very similarly to them. I tweaked the scion's skill list often and, in doing so, found myself adding a skill here or a skill there to other classes, in order to better represent what I saw as each class's purpose within the setting. Eventually, I found myself pondering an even broader skill system for all classes and the raison d'être of the scion largely evaporated. So, I went back to the drawing board.

Now, I find myself thinking about scrapping character classes entirely and going for something more like Basic Role-Playing, allowing the player to decide what skills his character possesses from a list available to all characters. There are definite advantages to this approach and it's certainly worked well for games like RuneQuest. Still, part of me likes the simplicity of character classes. They're a great way for newcomers to get into a game, especially a game whose setting, like that of sha-Arthan, is a little more complex than that of vanilla fantasy

I'm still pondering the issue and have come to no firm conclusions yet. I imagine that, as I develop the setting more, I may get a clearer picture of the best way forward.

21 comments:

  1. Why not a robust skill system and then pre-packaged groups of those skills labelled as "classes" that players can choose to simplify character creation if they don't want to get into the weeds creating a custom skillset?

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    1. You've hit upon an idea I have in fact been considering.

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    2. GURPS calls them "templates", as did the old WEG Star Wars RPG (and Shadowrun used the idea, too), and they offer the simplicity of class-based character creation combined with the robust customizability that skills make possible.

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    3. Advanced Fighting Fantasy (2e), does this too, and calls them 'Archetypes'. So you can put your own Hero together using the skill lists and choosing one special Talent, or chose an Archetype (which is a hybrid of character classes and Warhammer's Professions), if your inspiration is flagging, or you have beginners who want something standard for participating.

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    4. I tend to like this school of thought a lot myself. I'll also mention early Shadowrun as something that pulled off a lot of worldbuilding by packaging together archetypes.

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  2. I was going to suggest the same thing as Craddoke. BITD, HERO used them in the original "Espionage" game (circa '83) and called them "package deals". It was a bundle of skills and special abilities related to an Agent's specialty - Covert Ops, Assassination, Tech/Gadget guy, etc.

    If you are using a BRP game with a reduced skill list, such as the various iterations of OpenQuest, or the second edition of Mongoose's RQ game (MRQ2), it's not terribly difficult/time consuming compared to say Chaosium/AH's RQ3 or even RQ2.

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    1. TSR's "Top Secret" too employed this element, aka "Areas of Knowledge," which seemed a beefed-up variant on the thief skills. Some of these seemed more obviously playable, like lockpicking and codebreaking, but needed a friendly referee who would seed the adventure to allow for them to make a difference.

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  3. Most BRP/D100 games that I’ve seen package skills into occupations. The Call of Cthulhu 7e Quickstart does an excellent job of this, IMHO. You could take this, plus the more fantasy oriented Mythras Imperative rules, and have a simple fantasy game where character generation was very quick indeed.

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  4. James Raggi proposed a hybrid class/skill system for Lamentations in Green Devil Face #5 (pp 4-5).
    It's worth a look.

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  5. Have you checked out Stars Without Number/Worlds Without Number? A short list of skills any class can take, and by default three core classes (Warrior, Psion/Adept and Expert), with a hybrid "Adventurer" class (partial mix of any two of the three core classes). The core classes each have their niche, preserving class differentiation, but the customization through skill and foci (additional class abilities) choices permits lots of variation.

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  6. Skill packages are nice but will typically contain skills which round out a character thematically, i.e. skills a min-maxer has no interest in. Hence, customising one's character is usually an advantage -- which rewards a game-before-the-game, where interested players sit down with the books and Excel before play starts. These days I prefer classes with no skill system, prestige classes etc. etc., thank you very much.

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    1. This seems to overstate the difficulty a bit. If you have a short list of skills (25 or so) and they aren't based on too many different factors, putting together a character should be the work of minutes, and certainly not require Excel or any other assistance.

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  7. I don't have an opinion about class vs skill (or class plus skills). However games with extensive skill lists (GURPS, for example) are a turn off for me. As a GM, I found managing NPCs to be a bit overwhelming, and as a player I was always paranoid that I had forgotten some important or obvious skill. (Shit! My underwater ukelale player only took the Swimming skill but forgot to buy SCUBA and Stringed Instruments II).

    I much prefer to pick a handful of areas of competencies, and just assume that the adventurer is generally capable in areas not listed. This works well with class systems I think, or games where the characters are expected to be larger than life.

    And of course, some recent games have class AS a skill, so a character might be a Thief 2, Fighter 1, where thief and fighter represent a broad range of skills that those classes would be expected to know.

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  8. Only slightly related, but: if you take a closer look at where WotC is going with D&D lately, you will notice that they are loosening up the restrictions on what you can or cannot do with classes/subclasses/races/subraces, and are starting to focus more and more on 'pick the skills/feats you desire' for the specific character you want to play.

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  9. I'd say it depends what level of granularity you're going for. A quick-playing swords-and-sorcery game needs a few broad categories (see Barbarians of Lemuria, which for my money may be the best S&S ruleset ever. It is very simple and clear, yet very useful thereby). A cyberpunk or sci-fi game may do better with a broad range of skills, since there's a broader range of possible character types.

    Also, take a look at WWN/SWN/etc. Crawford's games are both classed and skilled, and I think show a good balance between each and making good use of the merits thereof. Class determines what you have special abilities at (combat, skills, or magic) and skills determine skilly things. You can have a warrior who is less skilled at certain kinds of combat than a specialist, but the specialist won't ever be able to do the special combat things a warrior can.

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  10. My view skills are useful to define things that characters can do better outside of combat and spell casting. Because my campaign tend to be about trashing the setting, being able to be better at certain things outside of spellcasting and combat is important.

    You have my Majestic Wilderlands and Majestic Fantasy RPG Basic rules. You can see how I seamlessly integrate skills (I call them abilities) into the classes.

    In the Majestic Wilderlands every class had a fixed progression of skills. The skills that made the list for that class were those that I felt that the class would be better at outside of combat and spellcasting.

    But in the later Majestic Fantasy RPG, I reduced the number of fixed skill bonuses and put them into the free bonus category. This because in playing this over the past decades the players reminded me that not all fighters, magic-users, etc. don't want to be equally better at the same things outside of combat and spellcasting.

    So coupled with a rule they can never more than half of their skill bonus on one skill, made a version of my rules that allowed character to spend freely some of the skill bonuses they got.

    And it worked out rather well. Especially when I use the rule that any character can attempt anything at the base chance of success (15+ on 1d20) except some will be way better than others.

    Finally how I determined which class got which skill was based on my observation what players picked for their character when I ran GURPS for 20 years. In many ways the Majestic Wilderlands classes are GURPS templates adapted as D&D classes.

    For those you who don't know, GURPS template is a collection of attribute bonus, advantage, disadvantages, perks, and skills that relate to each to represent something in the setting of the game. It just a compact way of describing stuff like "This is what a typical fighter has in my campaign", this is what a Myrmidon of Set has and so on.

    https://www.batintheattic.com/downloads/Gods%20-%20Set,%20Myrmidon%20Template.pdf

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  11. While I can enjoy OD&D with a general lack of skills, I generally like skills. I love RuneQuest which as advertised is class-less with skills (well, some point out cults are sort of classes, but really they are archetypes and skill packages). I also love Cold Iron which uses classes, but only as sort of super skills which allows for level based hit points (which has some nice benefits, though I also like flat hp as in RQ and other games) and level based spells has some real advantages. In my current iteration of Cold Iron, in addition to Figher, Magic User, and Cleric classes, I added an Expertise class that allows for non-combat skills, but CAN also be used for more combat skills (which is nice to round out fighters that have a broad set of weapon skills).

    What I still need to work out is how exactly skills work in the system because I've always had issues with just when to roll non-combat skills, what the difficulty should be, and what it means to have various levels of skill.

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  12. From the OP: "Still, part of me likes the simplicity of character classes. They're a great way for newcomers to get into a game, especially a game whose setting, like that of sha-Arthan, is a little more complex than that of vanilla fantasy."

    To me, this is the crux. Whether you use skills or not, classes/archetypes/templates will be critical in helping players quickly understand the world of sha-Arthan and its roleplaying possibilities.

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  13. In the long run, I've ended up not liking extensive skill systems.
    Too much granularity for my tastes, Free League's games more or less hit the maximum complexity I'm willing to handle.
    But, by and large, I prefer games with no skills or where skills are handwaved (like Secondary skills in AD&D), mostly because skill systems are prone to misuse.

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    1. I agree that overly extensive skill lists can be a drag. I think RuneQuest has a nice set of skills. I constantly waffle around on just how to handle skills in Cold Iron.

      Where I find skills more troublesome is SFRPGs where it seems a challenge to present a reasonable granularity of skills. Classic Traveller Book 1 is a nice set of skills, but it also has gaps, on the other hand, if you take Traveller skills as those areas where a PC gets a bonus in a critical stress situation, then the lack of complete coverage is less an issue. And if a player REALLY wanted to play a character, that say, could resolve some physics problem in a stress situation, well then, just add a Physics skill and let a character, especially a Supplement 4 Scientist, take it instead of Computer. That's what I did for an NPC who was studying religion.

      But I do like skills that provide a way for any character to have some definition of what they're good at out of combat or even to differentiate different kinds of fighters.

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