Big Skills

[zugschef]

For the players there is no difference if the secret treasure room is generated before or after the search check, or did I miss something? The result is the same: Success -> moar treasure; Failure -> no treasure.

[hogarth]

Right now, I think I'm in the camp where skill checks themselves just die in a fire.

If a player asks "Can my PC climb this wall?" and the answer could be "yes" or could be "no", then you have a system of skill checks, whether you like it or not.

[momothefiddler]

For the players there is no difference if the secret treasure room is generated before or after the search check, or did I miss something? The result is the same: Success -> moar treasure; Failure -> no treasure.

Yeah, that's true. But the objection wasn't about the players.

Why hide any content? I mean, if you spent time designing areas behind secret doors, any failed Search roll for a secret door hiding content means wasted design.

I'm cool with a skill that gets you some extra treasure (though I'm not convinced it's important), but I agree with K that there shouldn't be a skill that gives you permission to play the whole game as opposed to just portions of it. There's a reason why, when I play Fallout, I care about getting more dialogue options, hacking, and lockpicking more than I care about extra damage.

(In a world where your MC has infinite design time - or at least notably more than is needed for play time - this becomes less of an issue, but I've never encountered that luxury.)

[deaddmwalking]

I think there needs to be a balance. If you play a character that has the ability to notice things, you're going to find things that others will miss. Yes, it will open the play space, but for the people that don't access that additional play space they won't necessarily MISS it, because they won't know that it was there.

Investing in skills that give you 'extra options' isn't a bad thing, as long as you have other choices that give you 'extra options' somewhere else.

If your players don't choose any Diplomacy options, then talking to other people and making alliances isn't going to be part of the game.

If your players don't choose finding secret doors than finding secret places just isn't going to be part of the game.

If that's what the players want, it isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I do think Frank makes good points about 'individual skills' and 'group skills'. I think it's worth pointing out that some skills are also only of benefit to your party and not you directly (for example, Heal).

[Blicero]

If your canned adventure has some cool content behind a secret door, then you are still left with the problem that the PC's missing that check means you are cheating them from cool content for no better reason than to justify the fetishization of skill checks.

I mean, you can remove that secret door and just let them have the cool stuff, but that still means that you've accepted that the skill check was a shit idea in the first place.

You're not cheating anyone of cool content, you are locking rewards behind gates. Which is literally all MCing is. It's weird to assume that your group will interact with every single piece of content you include. They won't, unless every adventure you run is as linear as a Final Fantasy game. Some areas will get missed because they fail to make relevant skill checks. Others will get missed because they don't have relevant spells. Others will get missed because they are behind powerful enemies that are difficult to conventionally defeat. Others will get missed because the players weren't paying attention when you said something was in that direction. That is part of the game.

Actually, I've never seen a curbstomp be satisfying to a group. In fact, I've literally seen DMs invent a new boss battle occurring immediately after the first one just because the actual boss battle was a curbstomp and people didn't feel like they got to do anything useful.

If we are trading anecdotes, the campaign I have been running for just the past two months has already had two significant curbstomps. Both happened because of a mix of luck and skill (y'know, just like everything else in D&D), and both were enjoyed by the group.

Inventing a new boss to show up right after a curbstomp is a shitty MCing technique no different than fudging dice rolls.

[Omegonthesane]

If your canned adventure has some cool content behind a secret door, then you are still left with the problem that the PC's missing that check means you are cheating them from cool content for no better reason than to justify the fetishization of skill checks.

I mean, you can remove that secret door and just let them have the cool stuff, but that still means that you've accepted that the skill check was a shit idea in the first place.

You're not cheating anyone of cool content, you are locking rewards behind gates. Which is literally all MCing is. It's weird to assume that your group will interact with every single piece of content you include. They won't, unless every adventure you run is as linear as a Final Fantasy game. Some areas will get missed because they fail to make relevant skill checks. Others will get missed because they don't have relevant spells. Others will get missed because they are behind powerful enemies that are difficult to conventionally defeat. Others will get missed because the players weren't paying attention when you said something was in that direction. That is part of the game.

And if you feel that strongly about making sure everything from your notes makes it into the game, have the thing from the secret door appear as the result of a later encounter.

To the extent that such can be done without triggering Dire Flails And I Walk...

[Almaz]

While I agree that content that is missed can be fine, I am broadly in favor of binary skill keys for the locks on things. Either you have it or you don't. This shouldn't be used for every category of action but definitely for things like Craft or Knowledge where the results of not knowing or not crafting are not terribly interesting, and so you always want to have an excuse to give them the information if they've written it on their character sheet. You just have a minimum requirement and then you ask them if they pass and if they do you give it to them.

Things like Diplomacy and Stealth should probably still be rolled, because those are more uncertain and more importantly, failure is potentially interesting or at least complicated, and the rewards for success are also proportionally high.

[Pixels]

Inventing a new boss to show up right after a curbstomp is a shitty MCing technique no different than fudging dice rolls.

Ultimately, the goal of playing a game is to create an enjoyable experience. If the players are unsatified with an anticlimatic boss fight, then I don't really see a problem with editting the planned narrative to up the stakes. The goal should be to never get into that situation in the first place, but when I do I'd prefer an unexpected twist over a limp disappointment.

Or, you aren't a "shitty MC," you will have left a few hooks for yourself to explain more conflict. Being able to adjust to unexpected player actions or radical RNG in a way that feels natural is something that marks a really great DM, not a shitty one.

[MGuy]

The idea that skills give certain specific options just by having them is one I can get behind. However I don't mind the idea players miss out on something just because they failed a skill check. For instance not knowing something despite having the knowledge isn't something that's out of place in my opinion. Having to do research or other legwork being skipped over by just making the right roll seems completely appropriate to me. Whether or not knowledge has more general uses beyond that could help you determine how little getting that skill should cost but I would not find a whiffed knowledge check to be at all detrimental to the game.

[Judging__Eagle]

For the players there is no difference if the secret treasure room is generated before or after the search check, or did I miss something? The result is the same: Success -> moar treasure; Failure -> no treasure.

Yeah, that's true. But the objection wasn't about the players.

Why hide any content? I mean, if you spent time designing areas behind secret doors, any failed Search roll for a secret door hiding content means wasted design.

I'm cool with a skill that gets you some extra treasure (though I'm not convinced it's important), but I agree with K that there shouldn't be a skill that gives you permission to play the whole game as opposed to just portions of it. There's a reason why, when I play Fallout, I care about getting more dialogue options, hacking, and lockpicking more than I care about extra damage.

(In a world where your MC has infinite design time - or at least notably more than is needed for play time - this becomes less of an issue, but I've never encountered that luxury.)

Emphasis mine. This is the same reasoning why in Skyrim, I pretty much ignored the storyline, and treated the dragons as random loot bags than threats. Instead of the "story" I explored the game engine and the social aspects of the world. I maxed out my three crafting skills and picked up perk trees that increased the variety of options my character would have (Alchemy, Smithing, Enchanting; Stealth; Archery; and b/c I felt like it, Hvy Armour, over Med. or Light, both of which synergize better w/ Stealth). I joined up with each of archetype Guilds, became a(n) (almost never) werewolf; and generally ignored the Civil War backdrop, as well as the skill trees that didn't give my character more "options".

I've been recently trying out Kaelik's "Skill Groups" system for d20; and I do admit it gives characters both breadth, but also requires some degree of game mastery to balance skill selection.

[Username17]

Why hide any content?

If you always get all the content, then your contributions don't matter. You're basically just running into the ancient gaming paradox:

• Winning is more fun than losing.
• Winning isn't fun if you didn't have a chance to lose.

It's more awesome to win the Super Bowl than it is to win one of those "everyone's a winner" scenarios in kindergarten. Because most people don't win the Super Bowl. Most teams lose before they even get into the Super Bowl and one of the best teams in the league loses the Super Bowl in front of millions of viewers. And all of that losing is required to make victory at the Super Bowl as special as it is.

Role Playing Games are all about the slight of hand. To present the players with as much victory as possible while still presenting the very real ability of the players to lose as being a much more likely possibility than it actually is. So to maximize the actual victories while maximizing the perceived chance of defeats. That is how fun is maximized in an RPG. But obviously if you set the actual chance of defeat to zero this sets the perceived chance of defeat to zero and is not fun-maximizing even if it is maximizing one of the key components of fun (victories).

---

But we're not just talking about the wholly abstract concepts of victories and defeats, we're talking about the specific trope of player character ability gated content. I am going to say that it is good and that your objection is wrong.

If content isn't gated by anything, then it's all bears. Whatever inputs I bring to the table, I get whatever content Mr. Cavern brought. That "lets me see all the content," but it's not interactive. I might as well be reading a book. For there to be interactivity, for it to matter that I'm playing a cooperative storytelling game, then there has to be different sets of content available depending on my inputs. And if there exists a possibility of me seeing different content, then by definition some of the content must remain hidden. That's just tautologically true.

Now there are basically three ways to gate content:

• Player Choices.
• Character Abilities.
• Random Die Rolls.

And I am going to say unequivocally that all three of those are good.

If the players choose to go into the Fire Swamp instead of attacking the Ice Palace, I expect Mr. Cavern to fucking sit on whatever Snow Queen content he had planned. If one of the characters speaks Orcish, then I expect to be able to get the content of overhearing the Orcish guards discussing the Dark Lord's plans, and if none of them do I expect Mr. Cavern to fucking sit on that content. And if I roll a critical hit I can get Mr. Cavern's descriptions of explosive gore, and if my character misses instead I don't want to hear it.

The fact that you'll get different content by making different choices and playing a different character and rolling a different number is why you bother playing the game. Content feeds much faster by just watching a movie than it does by playing a cooperative storytelling game, so the impact of my contributions is absolutely critical in the appeal of the genre.

The issue then becomes one of having enough content. If not having the right character ability or choosing not to go deeper in the Dark Temple means that we all just fucking stare at each other, then the game has failed. If shit keeps happening and it's simply different shit, then it's fine. And necessarily that means that you're going to need to cut a lot of corners in content generation. If you write two branches for every choice the players could make you'll have had to write over a million outcomes to cover twenty decision points, and that is not happening.

Now there are a lot of tricks you can use to get around that. You can create content decision points ahead of time and then plug them together into a narrative whole on the fly (which would mean that you'd only have to write 40 bits for those twenty decision points rather than 1,048,576, which is doable instead of impossible). You can alter and reuse content that players didn't see at other points later in the adventure (that pirate you were going to use if the players took the boat route could be recast as a bandit chief later in the story). You can buy yourself time to write new content by having time filling encounters like social talky bits or set piece battles. If you run out the clock on the night, you can even get yourself a whole new week to write content to an unexpected direction of the story. And so on and so on.

But the solution is never to simply declare that everyone gets a participation trophy and everyone sees all the content no matter what. That's just "bears" and it's so disempowering that there's no point in playing the game at all.

-Username17

[hogarth]

I'm cool with a skill that gets you some extra treasure (though I'm not convinced it's important), but I agree with K that there shouldn't be a skill that gives you permission to play the whole game as opposed to just portions of it. There's a reason why, when I play Fallout, I care about getting more dialogue options, hacking, and lockpicking more than I care about extra damage.

So if I understand your argument, you're saying that Fallout's skill system was a failure because it successfully encouraged you to use it?

[momothefiddler]

I'm cool with a skill that gets you some extra treasure (though I'm not convinced it's important), but I agree with K that there shouldn't be a skill that gives you permission to play the whole game as opposed to just portions of it. There's a reason why, when I play Fallout, I care about getting more dialogue options, hacking, and lockpicking more than I care about extra damage.

So if I understand your argument, you're saying that Fallout's skill system was a failure because it successfully encouraged you to use it?

I...

...yes, I suppose that is what I said. Making me an idiot, yes. But I think there's something in what I was trying to say - that when theres a limited amount of content (eg Fallout) I want to see as much of it as possible. Also maybe something about how if it's gated I'll end up taking as many corresponding keys as possible (I get way too excited about my D&D characters' language lists, too), but perhaps that can be used well, rather than just prompting me to stagger up to the table a mess of anti-gate abilities and nothing else.

You can create content decision points ahead of time and then plug them together into a narrative whole on the fly (which would mean that you'd only have to write 40 bits for those twenty decision points rather than 1,048,576, which is doable instead of impossible). You can alter and reuse content that players didn't see at other points later in the adventure (that pirate you were going to use if the players took the boat route could be recast as a bandit chief later in the story).

These are good ways to maximize the content experienced per MC design time, and that's a good thing because (at least for me) MC design time is the primary bottleneck in content experienced (and by extension in fun had).

[Almaz]

The idea that skills give certain specific options just by having them is one I can get behind. However I don't mind the idea players miss out on something just because they failed a skill check. For instance not knowing something despite having the knowledge isn't something that's out of place in my opinion. Having to do research or other legwork being skipped over by just making the right roll seems completely appropriate to me. Whether or not knowledge has more general uses beyond that could help you determine how little getting that skill should cost but I would not find a whiffed knowledge check to be at all detrimental to the game.

I cited "knowing a thing" versus "not knowing a thing" because whiffed Spot/Perception and Knowledge checks are the classic source of "either you're clued into the plot, in which case the plot proceeds as normal/intended, or you aren't." And a lot of game premises don't feature meaningful opportunities for research, so whiffing is basically a total failure state. I mean, I'm not really enchanted with fixed plots, and there are other solutions to this problem, but I think "binary skills" is actually something that is fair here. It's kind of like the cited "knowing the language to overhear the guards speaking in Orcish" example. It can be totally binary and still be a rewarding feeling, especially if presented as "you made this choice long ago, and now you get the payoff." Languages are always like that in D&D and stuff and no one complains.

[hogarth]

Also maybe something about how if it's gated I'll end up taking as many corresponding keys as possible (I get way too excited about my D&D characters' language lists, too), but perhaps that can be used well, rather than just prompting me to stagger up to the table a mess of anti-gate abilities and nothing else.

Upon further reflection, I have felt the same way about Pathfinder Society organized play.

In Pathfinder Society, your PC earns gold, but you're not allowed to spend it on whatever you want. If you want anything more fancy than a +1 sword, you have to earn Prestige Points, and some of those Prestige Points can only be earned if you have exactly the right skill and you pass the appropriate skill check (or if your GM is a rule-bending softy). And I'm not just talking about skills like Perception or Diplomacy -- I'm talking about bullshit skills like Knowledge (engineering) or Handle Animal. So whenever I make a character, I feel like I'm being forced to put skill ranks into various shitty, useless skills just so my PC can buy a Headband of Intellect +2 before he reaches level 12 (or whatever).

[K]

Ok, I'll explain what I mean by content.

Let's say you are in an old house, and you fight a male and female undead. It's a good fight, and everyone had fun.

When you search the house, you might find a hidden cache of letters exchanged between two lovers that you will realize were the undead. Finding the letters puts some context to the fight, offers clues to things in this house the PCs might have overlooked, and overall would make the fight more memorable by introducing story and setting elements. Overall, more fun.

Now, if you choose make it a Search check to find those letters, you are opening an opportunity for the players to never get to see them. On a failed check, then never get to see that content and the work you put in was wasted. Also, the players have less fun.

If you later decide to not cheat them out of the content by introducing the same stuff in the letters through some device like a wandering bard, then you've already decided that the Search check results were always going to be meaningless. You'd have been better off never letting them make the check.

In a game like DnD, combat is literally the only place where making checks make sense because the results of those checks always mean that you get the content (the fight). The skills that interact with setting either work to restrict player action and engagement or are just shams concealing meaningless rolls.

[Mechalich]

Skill checks in D&D are difficult to control - if characters are on the RNG at all there is always likely to be a fairly high chance (since even when you succeed on a 6 you fail 25% of the time) to fail any single roll check, and the way the 3.X skill chart is structured it is highly likely that only one character in the party is going to be on the range at all (not counting workarounds like summons and so forth).

However, if the goal is to provide 'cool backstory' to an encounter, having that backstory gated behind a single skill check is poor design. Maybe Search allows them to find the letters. Maybe a gather information check connects them with an old man who can fill in the same details, maybe a knowledge (religion) check allows the cleric to puzzle out the backstory on his own. There should be multiple ways for the characters to get that 'cool backstory' info, and they should be able to propose them and even try them all - which is ultimately better than search anyway, since likely only on character has a decent search score.

It should still be possible for the party members to fail individual roles, and in fact to fail them all. Sometimes everyone at a table rolls like crap for a bit - usually this leads to some jovial 'oh we're screwed' commentary and provides a good opportunity for the GM to work in some new complication because everyone believes they deserve it.

Failure by a party to access one bit of content, it is an excuse to expose them to another, different bit of content, considering that it is generally easier to come up with (or appropriate) more content than any gaming group can ever possibly play through (especially in 3.X which moves fairly slowly unless the group is very experienced). TTRPGs are not content limited, they are time-limited.

[erik]

In a game like DnD, combat is literally the only place where making checks make sense because the results of those checks always mean that you get the content (the fight). The skills that interact with setting either work to restrict player action and engagement or are just shams concealing meaningless rolls.

Da fuck?

K, you're being a bit near sighted. There's plenty of instances where a skill check can be helpful, and yet not meaningless for it to either be missed or obviated later. Like mechalich said, skill checks can result in gating where you get access to an alternate option with successes, and can have fun options even with failures.

A search check for a secret entrance can give you the ability to bypass a fight with a gate keeper monster. You still have the ability to fight the monster, but you have an alternate route. That isn't a meaningless check, and players aren't cheated if they fail to find it.

A search check might reveal treasure somewhere, and if you don't find it then, you will stumble upon alternate ways of discovering the treasure later. But it would have been helpful if you'd found it sooner. It isn't meaningless to succeed on the check earlier, and players aren't cheated if they only find it later.

A diplomacy check with the bird king can give you winged mounts to get somewhere and avoid a crappy swamp, or you can trudge through with a bayou guide and fight some giant alligators.

A gather info check may reveal that the guard for the wizard's tower leaves an illusion to sneak off at midnight for a quickie with his succubus girlfriend. Otherwise you need to either fight him or sneak through otyugh infested sewage to come in from below.

It goes on and on and on.

[MGuy]

Why would they roll a search check when there are no threats? Wouldn't they just take 10/20 instead?

[Mask_De_H]

Stop me if I'm misinterpreting, but it does seem you could allay K's fears and still keep checks by just having passive numbers on your sheet for finding things/basic dialogue tree options/Mook clearing/whatever gated content you wanted but did not want the opportunity to fail at being a coda or lose out on basic content.

Like what GUMSHOE goes for, but with a whatever roll being a shot for getting a bennie or a bonus or some neat procedurally generated content on top of the standard.

[phlapjackage]

Now, if you choose make it a Search check to find those letters, you are opening an opportunity for the players to never get to see them. On a failed check, then never get to see that content and the work you put in was wasted. Also, the players have less fun.

If you later decide to not cheat them out of the content by introducing the same stuff in the letters through some device like a wandering bard, then you've already decided that the Search check results were always going to be meaningless. You'd have been better off never letting them make the check.

I don't agree with this conclusion. A player that's able to have their character succesfully find those letters using skills/powers has more fun (imo) than just getting a DM info-dump from the wandering bard. Both cases result in the players having the same information, story, flavor, etc, but the first case is more fun for the players. And the DM is a player here too, their enjoyment is increased if they get to use "cool", prepared content and situations instead of simply info-dumping on the PCs to continue the plot.

I think you're assigning a value of "fun" only to having the information, and neglecting to assign a value to how the information is retrieved. I mean, it seems like a basic trope - what's more fun, letting players make meaningful choices or just having the DM read a story to them?

[PhoneLobster]

Why would they roll a search check when there are no threats? Wouldn't they just take 10/20 instead?

What if everyone has shit search skill?

Should that campaign lack on background details, interesting clues and secret rooms. Just because no one brought Search?

What if they did bring search but due to the other demands of ability dependancy just can't be quiet as good at it as they might have been? Just because the group had entirely reasonable higher character build priorities than having a maxed out Int score? By exactly how much should the resulting campaign be deprived of interesting discover-able junk, fluff or otherwise because the group's best search guy invested the same amount of otherwise largely wasted better spent skill points but had no choice but to being only 11 Int? Instead of 14 Int? 18 Int? 20 Int?

In the end you want the vampire letters K outlined to be found. Somehow. At some point. Period. This can be with a successful search. This can be with an auto-success search. This can be after a failed search but with some other "er, no wait, aside from that, er, thing you didn't find HEY LOOK WHATS SUDDENLY RIGHT OUT IN THE OPEN!" retroactive re-insertion moment.

But the end result is that Search doesn't matter and the players find the content regardless.

And this applies loosely in a lot of variant scenarios/methodologies. What? You "just re-purpose" and shoe horn in your content later? Well actually that's REALLY the same as the "wait, look, um, its another, suddenly much easier search check for, um, another thing" only with more waiting and extra work for less pay off. And it STILL means that the Search skill, and however much you had of it still didn't really matter.

Hell fuck it, you throw the content away. The players then free up time... which they spend interacting with more content. It's no longer the originally intended content, and risks being a bit worse and poorly planned, but hey, probably about the same and maybe if you are lucky flukes out to be better. But hey, you are still spending time adventuring vs opponents of give or take the same difficulty and getting loot of give or take the same value and Search still doesn't matter.

You can put content gate keeping skills in your game. You can have fixed or flexible (but always lets not forget bullshitty) DCs for them. You can include auto-success mechanics.

But in the end content gate keeping skills have only two choices.
1) The gate keeping skill is actually functionally worthless window dressing that doesn't really do anything. Eventually the content just happens anyway.
2) Fuck you, you guys failed a star trek trivia check, go home THE GAME IS OVER!

There are minor variations on those themes, but one of them is a shitty option for shit GMs who are shitty people, and the other one has implications for the valuation of abilities in the design of your game system.

[Username17]

K, I think the fact that PhoneLobster is supporting your position means that it's time for you to radically rethink it.

While it is true that the players are going to get a roughly static amount of content no matter what they do, it is not therefore true that their choices and inputs do not matter. The players influence what content they receive with their choices and character abilities. At least, they'd fucking better, or the game is a sham.

This has some surprising implications. For example, "Hunted By Frost Giants" is usually written as a disadvantage in most games, but it's actually a character ability co-equal to "climbs good" or "Scouts well." The fact that you have "Hunted By Frost Giants" written on your character sheet means that you're going to fight Frost Giants at some point, and that's you having impact on the progression of the story. Same as if your character was able to learn rumors at the inn or steal the rooster key from the guard's pocket.

But the fact that searching well gave your character's information is definitely meaningful. To the extent that anything at all is meaningful in an RPG, that qualifies. Hell, the fact that different players roll search checks and different characters find the letters is still a meaningful difference in the story. And the fact that it's possible for no one to have found the letters makes the accomplishment feel more special. The fact that you'd move on to other content for the evening and shit would still happen if you didn't find them does not invalidate the thrill of "success" at finding them.

-Username17

[Almaz]

In spite of my favoring of less rolling for minor details and other such things, yeah, you gotta decide that some content is missable by some mechanism. Telling a story at all requires the elimination of other stories you can tell, even in kitchen sink fantasy. That's how the world works. Two paths diverged in a wood and so forth.

[PhoneLobster]

it is not therefore true that their choices and inputs do not matter.

A search check. You are talking about a search check. For some bonus fluff no less.

A search check simply to notice some fluff the GM thought might be nice is a choice that matters and lets players influence the game?

Lets draw a clear line between actual choices and you know bullshit ones because a search check falls into bullshit "choice" territory. Its a passive skill check that delivers only what the GM feels like having it deliver IF it even manages to deliver that.

The only "choice" a player makes in a search check is investing in search in the first place... on the off chance that MAYBE the GM might have that deliver SOMETHING and the player has no fucking idea if it will be even a good or a bad something, or even ANY something, let alone what it is they just "chose".

THAT makes it nearly worthless window dressing from any kind of game balance perspective. You can have it IN your game, but had better not be making players PAY anything worth having for it.

edit: And search is, compared to many "content gatekeeper" bullshit skills one of the big ones. In the end the argument actually DOES eventually get to the territory "You failed a Knowledge(Star Trek Trivia) check, GAME OVER! Yes/No".

Of course despite search being "a big one" it's inherently impossible to gauge value means that actually if it exists side by side with knowledge(star trek trivia) we can never know which one will actually be "bigger" in actual game play in advance. THAT should be a warning sign that you are evaluating this type of skill... poorly.