[Request] Analysis of Failed Design: d20 Skills

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hogarth
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Post by hogarth »

FrankTrollman wrote:So to give a solid example, consider two skills that Batman has. First, he can sing pretty well, as shown in the Justice League Episode "This Little Piggy." Also, I hear that Batman may be able to stealth pretty good. He uses the latter ability virtually every adventure, and I would be surprised if his singing talents have been particularly important more than 5 times in the last 50 years.
So in a class-based system, shouldn't it make more sense to have Batman be stealthy because he picked a class with the class ability "be stealthy" instead of cashing in a bunch of "I can sing good" points that everyone has?
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Post by Voss »

GâtFromKI wrote:
Voss wrote:Nonsense. The bard absolutely should be rolling to see if beasts can be turned on their masters, or crowds can be calmed or whatever.
If a skill is required by a class (Perform for Bards, SpellCraft for Wizards, etc), it should be a class ability instead. That's not even negotiable. "You have 2 skill point per level, but one of those has to go into SpellCraft or you can't learn spells" is bullshit.

Anyway we're talking about D&D. Casting a spell doesn't require any roll. Why should a bardic performance require a roll ? Announce what you're casting, MC rolls save if necessary, end of story.
Uh, yeah. That is how it works. But he's presenting a revised skill system, and talking about playing in combat, which is pointless and detrimental to the party if its not related to a spell (as a verbal or somatic component) or ability.

But sure, let me put it another way- a combat music ability should have some sort of roll, even if it's a save by the target. But someone who can deal any level of mindfuckery through music shouldn't be pestered with bullshit rolls for mundane tasks at any time. Hero to Zero on mundane bullshit is offensive.
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Post by tussock »

Depends how you define your terms. If music is magic, then all musicians can be capable of performing mind-fuckery, and the reason busking works at all is just mind control. You pay the pied piper for taking the plague away or he steals all your children because they have such poor will saves.

But in the same way, regular folk are all tuneless and can do little better than annoy things with it. Like anyone can learn to read a bit, but reading magic is special and faking it is dangerous to the user. So in that spirit, your fighter can do some fake "music" with a skill check which may go badly, while Bards have a spell list that just works.

But there doesn't need a be "mundane" music at all. In the same way there's not really mundane swording in D&D worlds, you really do just slice up tanks and stone walls with little bits of iron, because SWORDS!
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Post by Voss »

If it were anyone else, I'd wonder if they were drunk. But no. Just tussocked.
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Post by Mechalich »

Voss wrote:But sure, let me put it another way- a combat music ability should have some sort of roll, even if it's a save by the target. But someone who can deal any level of mindfuckery through music shouldn't be pestered with bullshit rolls for mundane tasks at any time. Hero to Zero on mundane bullshit is offensive.
Well, the thing about that is it creates some weird world-building distortions. If having 'magic music powers' totally overrides the need to have mundane musical skill, you have created a scenario where every 1st level bard is a better musician than Beethoven.

There are systems that do that. Exalted is a good example. In that system the absolute maximum of mortal achievement is getting 11 successes on something (5 attribute, 5 ability, and 1 specialty dot if I recall correctly), and that will not happen very often (the math is annoying, but I think its like a 1 in 10000 chance). However, it is trivially easy for even the weakest of Exalts, the dragon-blooded, or even for charm-using 'god-blooded' and so forth to beat 11 successes as a matter of routine by using relatively simple charms.

The result is that everything important in the world is done by the exalted and anything that's worth bothering with is superior in quality to anything ever made by the most gifted mundane people. Unfortunately, as the Exalted review on this very website demonstrates this tends to result in stupefying levels of grimderp if taken seriously. Most super-hero universes of any kind have this problem as well they just simply ignore the issue outright to the point that they may willingly tweak the willing suspension of disbelief in a self-aware way (I recall a Marvel comics issue, I believe it was Avengers Initiative, when one characters mentioned having episodes of 'Chuck' on his iPod, as if such a show would have any chance of existing in the Marvel reality). Which is perfectly okay, so long as the game is built around working that way.

However, D&D isn't built to work that way.
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Post by Username17 »

hogarth wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:So to give a solid example, consider two skills that Batman has. First, he can sing pretty well, as shown in the Justice League Episode "This Little Piggy." Also, I hear that Batman may be able to stealth pretty good. He uses the latter ability virtually every adventure, and I would be surprised if his singing talents have been particularly important more than 5 times in the last 50 years.
So in a class-based system, shouldn't it make more sense to have Batman be stealthy because he picked a class with the class ability "be stealthy" instead of cashing in a bunch of "I can sing good" points that everyone has?
Well you're still constrained by the fact that shit covered farmers and small children can and do sneak up on people from time to time.
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Post by Voss »

Mechalich wrote:
Voss wrote:But sure, let me put it another way- a combat music ability should have some sort of roll, even if it's a save by the target. But someone who can deal any level of mindfuckery through music shouldn't be pestered with bullshit rolls for mundane tasks at any time. Hero to Zero on mundane bullshit is offensive.
Well, the thing about that is it creates some weird world-building distortions. If having 'magic music powers' totally overrides the need to have mundane musical skill, you have created a scenario where every 1st level bard is a better musician than Beethoven.
I give no shits about Exalted. Nothing can ever save that pile of crap.

But, the first level bard probably is a better musician than Beethoven.
Probably not a better composer though.

I'd hardly call that a world building distortion.


The thing is, it only gets weird if you try to apply skill rolls to everyday tasks. Outside of the apprentice days, even a mediocre weaponsmith probably doesn't fuck up a sword crafting attempt all that often. Not even 5% of the time often. It just takes X time, and at the end there is another sword. And, unless you're inexplicably playing Craftmasters the RPG, this is honestly fine... if not outright better than the current system. There is no point I'm going to begrudge the party fighter shitting out mundane equipment during a week of down time. Yes, even plate at level 1. I just don't care.

Really, for most skills that happen in a semi-controlled environment, the proper check is 'have skill? Y/N'

Again, this isn't world building distortion. This is heroic characters doing something mundane in an ordinary fashion and it isn't a big deal at all. Its like all those nicks and dents and maintenance measures that weapons and armor actually require and if people think about them at all, they get handwaved at camp.

Really skill checks (and skills that cost character resources) should be limited to shit that has opposition and/or is risky. Climbing walls the hard way, hiding, finding ambushes, significant diplomancy (persuade/force the (level appropriate) bandits to back down, not get a 5% discount at the shop).

Knowledges are weird. Functionally they act as asspulls for 'justified' metagame knowledge, rather than 'knows how to research and is familiar with subject area,' which is probably how the skills should actually function. People without that do fail at such attempts rather frequently.

Personally I find it more weird that professional adventurers wouldn't know the important elements of common monsters (apply fire to trolls, don't bother using X,Y, Z on demons and so on), and that tavern talk with multiple adventurers would pretty much automatically turn into 'talking shop' for the course of the evening. Because otherwise, they're dead adventurers.
Last edited by Voss on Sun Apr 09, 2017 7:23 am, edited 5 times in total.
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Post by Mechalich »

Really skill checks (and skills that cost character resources) should be limited to shit that has opposition and/or is risky. Climbing walls the hard way, hiding, finding ambushes, significant diplomancy (persuade/force the (level appropriate) bandits to back down, not get a 5% discount at the shop).
I don't disagree with this - it seems to me you're suggesting having one set of core mechanics that covers the principle gameplay scenario and a minigame mechanic for everything else. The part that I find tricky is, in the context of a TTRPG, managing to divide those two things in a functional way and also doing so across varied power scales (ex. in D&D you can pretty much stop climbing walls the hard way once levitate becomes a thing).

This system you're describing is what most video games do: there's a combat system and everything else is just minigames. However, that is done by controlling inputs and outputs in a way that is generally not considered acceptable in a TTRPG. Stealth, for example. Fallout 4 incorporates stealth - but your only stealth option is to crouch and creep up on someone, outside of scripted events, distractions, disguises, camouflage, and other methods are all impossible. You also have to, in a class-based system, make sure that if you're making key resolution abilities class-dependent features, that you aren't making certain classes obligate presences in all parties. In 2e many of the essential 'dungeon crawling' skills were only available to a thief - so you absolutely had to have a thief in the party at all times. In 3.X this was, at least theoretically, not the case.

If we accept that the core D&D experience is dungeon-crawling or its wilderness equivalent (which I support but might prove to be a rather heavy lift to the fandom) then it is possible to decide what the essential non-combat dungeon-crawling capabilities are and build a system that is designed to deliver them that is separate from the non dungeon-crawling related skills, which could very easily just be Y/N capabilities rather like the 2e non-weapon proficencies. In that case you'd probably want the list of dungeon-crawling skills to be small, with each one being defined broadly so it could hopefully maintain greater relevance against advancing spellcasting over time, and give everyone a pool of points to divide between them. I think you'd also want to implement something like the FATE pyramid to prevent characters going all or nothing in such abilities - a major issue in the current d20 system even for important skills like stealth and spellcraft.
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Post by Voss »

Yeah, you're making a lot of assumptions: no, that isn't what I'm suggesting.

I'm saying you can trim the skill system of a lot of trash and you don't need 'class-based' skills. Mini games are... Really questionable, it depends what you mean by them. The fallout example is a hell no.

What I'm suggesting is roughly half the skill list is just backgrounds, and you can have the expectation that characters have one or two, and they never involve rolls. Just mundane things they can just do if they have them. It means not having leveled commoners, or hilariously failing at everyday tasks.

The rogue has no justification for existence, tying basic adventuring skills to a single class is really stupid, and it totally was the case for 3e rogues, because trap finding.

At no point would it involve making 'key resolution features class dependent', this would be solely for stuff that has no adventuring application. Mundane everyday stuff that people experienced with it can just do.
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Post by Hiram McDaniels »

hogarth wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote: So in a class-based system, shouldn't it make more sense to have Batman be stealthy because he picked a class with the class ability "be stealthy" instead of cashing in a bunch of "I can sing good" points that everyone has?
Well you're still constrained by the fact that shit covered farmers and small children can and do sneak up on people from time to time.
In order to have fire: oxygen, heat and fuel are required. I think that stealth rules should be similar in that you have 3-4 criteria that must be met. Class features promoting stealth work by removing these requirements. I'm trying to wrap my brain around what these criteria could be, as you said it's technically possible to sneak up on someone sitting alone on a pasture on a sunny, cloudless day.
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Post by Harshax »

Hiram McDaniels wrote: In order to have fire: oxygen, heat and fuel are required. I think that stealth rules should be similar in that you have 3-4 criteria that must be met. Class features promoting stealth work by removing these requirements. I'm trying to wrap my brain around what these criteria could be, as you said it's technically possible to sneak up on someone sitting alone on a pasture on a sunny, cloudless day.
Stealth requires foiling the senses. That's five criteria for most apes. d20 assumes stealth is just attempting to foil Sight and Hearing. This is why Scent is such a potent creature ability and why Scent is such a serious Fuck-you to Sneak skills.
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Post by Username17 »

Harshax wrote: Stealth requires foiling the senses. That's five criteria for most apes. d20 assumes stealth is just attempting to foil Sight and Hearing. This is why Scent is such a potent creature ability and why Scent is such a serious Fuck-you to Sneak skills.
You're not likely to have to consider taste in any particular stealth scenario you're likely to see. But you are going to want to write your stealth rules taking into account whatever alternate senses your game supports. Life Sense, Psychic Sense, Radar Sense, whatever.

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Post by hyzmarca »

FrankTrollman wrote: You're not likely to have to consider taste in any particular stealth scenario you're likely to see.
You're hiding in a bowl of candies on a giant's table, with the intention of leaping down his gullet and killing him from the inside. If he tastes you you've gotten down his throat, he'll be able to spit you out or chew you to death before you've done any real damage.
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Post by erik »

hyzmarca wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote: You're not likely to have to consider taste in any particular stealth scenario you're likely to see.
You're hiding in a bowl of candies on a giant's table, with the intention of leaping down his gullet and killing him from the inside. If he tastes you you've gotten down his throat, he'll be able to spit you out or chew you to death before you've done any real damage.
And do you find that example to be likely?

I can count with eunuch penises how many times it has come up in 30 years of gaming for me.
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Post by shinimasu »

hyzmarca wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote: You're not likely to have to consider taste in any particular stealth scenario you're likely to see.
You're hiding in a bowl of candies on a giant's table, with the intention of leaping down his gullet and killing him from the inside. If he tastes you you've gotten down his throat, he'll be able to spit you out or chew you to death before you've done any real damage.
This scenario is absurd but even if it weren't the operative sense here is touch not taste. Spiders don't taste like much of anything* but I'd sure as hell feel one in my mouth before I swallowed it.

*Yes I know from experience. The exoskeleton is flavorless. It's when you bite down it becomes a problem.
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Post by Harshax »

Neither Touch nor Taste has ever been featured in any Stealth encounter I've ever encounters and yeah, I was being purposely absurd. So I started looking at other physical bluffs as stealth attempts and was just having fun with it:

Stealth: The Stealthening
Picking a pocket from behind is stealth vs. hearing, and touch
Playing a card trick that puts the Ace of spades in the viewer's breast pocket is sight, hearing and touch
Concocting a subtle poison is stealth vs taste/smell
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Post by Previn »

shinimasu wrote:
hyzmarca wrote:You're hiding in a bowl of candies on a giant's table, with the intention of leaping down his gullet and killing him from the inside. If he tastes you you've gotten down his throat, he'll be able to spit you out or chew you to death before you've done any real damage.
This scenario is absurd but even if it weren't the operative sense here is touch not taste. Spiders don't taste like much of anything* but I'd sure as hell feel one in my mouth before I swallowed it.

*Yes I know from experience. The exoskeleton is flavorless. It's when you bite down it becomes a problem.

Well, really you first have to test against hearing, sight and smell before anything else while you're hiding in the bowl, and if you remain hidden from all of that, then you get to deal with both touch and taste, with the sensation more likely being touch.

By the time you get to taste, you've had to deal with 4 (or more in fantasy land) sense that are all remarkably better at detecting things.
Harshax wrote:Concocting a subtle poison is stealth vs taste/smell
Unless your stealth skill is ridiculously large in what it covers, like FATE large, no.
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Post by FatR »

Mechalich wrote: Well, the thing about that is it creates some weird world-building distortions. If having 'magic music powers' totally overrides the need to have mundane musical skill, you have created a scenario where every 1st level bard is a better musician than Beethoven.

There are systems that do that. Exalted is a good example. In that system the absolute maximum of mortal achievement is getting 11 successes on something (5 attribute, 5 ability, and 1 specialty dot if I recall correctly), and that will not happen very often (the math is annoying, but I think its like a 1 in 10000 chance). However, it is trivially easy for even the weakest of Exalts, the dragon-blooded, or even for charm-using 'god-blooded' and so forth to beat 11 successes as a matter of routine by using relatively simple charms.

The result is that everything important in the world is done by the exalted and anything that's worth bothering with is superior in quality to anything ever made by the most gifted mundane people. Unfortunately, as the Exalted review on this very website demonstrates this tends to result in stupefying levels of grimderp if taken seriously.
Exalted (and super-hero universes if theit present state of affaits is taken to its logical conclusion) are not grimderp simply because superpeople completely overshadow muggles in everything. They are grimderp because there is pretty much no way to go from muggle to super. Exalted specifically aggravates the problem, because there also are about four sharply delineated tiers of power, with the tiers that matter being assigned by blood/destiny/sheer luck, and contributions that can be made at lower tiers are insignificant, and sometimes completely irrelevant to people even one tier above yours.

However, that specific state of affairs should not be extrapolated to the general idea that the world, or at least people that reach prominence in it, operate on a different scale from our mundane reality. Which, I should remind, is an idea that naturally arises from the fact that there are people around who can casually destroy giants and dragons and our narrative is about them.

So, yeah, a twinked 1st level bard, or any bard of appreciable level would be a better musician than real-world Beethoven (if not a better composer). DnDland Beethoven, though, probably would be above well above 1st level, like most people extremely dedicated to their craft, and command vaguely music-themed magic, like Frederic Chopin in Eternal Sonata. At least if we're also postulating that magic is more than using finding hacks and cheats of the universe in eldtrich tomes, or consorting with inhuman powers, but can be an extension of relatively mundane activities (and we need to postulate that, if we want our sword-wielding heroes to successfully stab giants and dragons in their dicks, instead of being ingloriously squashed).

The system just have to allow mundane people to succeed at reasonable rate in their mundane tasks, without the need to become mid-level badasses. And it should not be complex or difficult to manage, if most or all skills are supposed to be relatively swiftly rendered obsolete by magic/class abilities.
Last edited by FatR on Fri Apr 14, 2017 1:56 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Kaelik »

I love that he wants to create at least 4 and maybe more stealth defense skills, but one stealth skill to rule them all, so that the entire game is just everyone having max stealth ranks and then BSing how they can use their one defense skill with max ranks.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Just do it like BAB.

Stealh Class: Stealth = Level.

Non-Stealth Class: Stealth = half Level.

Loud Class: Stealth = Quarter Level.


Small Child is a stealth class.

Shit-Covered Farmer is a Non-Stealth Class
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Post by MGuy »

Or just make the small child also a non stealth classes with size bonuses
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Post by Mechalich »

FatR wrote: However, that specific state of affairs should not be extrapolated to the general idea that the world, or at least people that reach prominence in it, operate on a different scale from our mundane reality. Which, I should remind, is an idea that naturally arises from the fact that there are people around who can casually destroy giants and dragons and our narrative is about them.
I think, in the case of D&D (and many D20 games more generally, including something like d20 Star Wars), many don't accept the premise that the PCs are operating on a different level from the mundanes - at least not until they've accumulated a bunch of levels and even then they want things like armies and castles and horses to actually matter.

A big part of the problem with the extant skill system is that it is supposed to represent both mundane people doing everyday junk, and superheroes doing superhero shit. The idea that making a pot and making Iron Man armor are uses of the same exact skill, just making the bonus to the roll bigger doesn't work out.

I agreed that you can split the current system: you have one system that represents mundane things that ordinary people can do, which PCs might get a free skill or two mostly for flavor purposes, and you have a bunch of magical/class abilities for things that characters need. In some sense this sounds like the 'Secondary Skills' that 2e had.

The part that, to me, is the trickiest, is deciding what goes into which pile. The reason it's difficult is that different groups have different ideas about what sort of gameplay the system is intended to offer, and anything you shunt into the secondary pile is no longer part of the core gameplay. So you end up offering a game with a narrower play focus than D&D currently purports to offer. IMO, that's probably a good thing, but I'm not sure it would fly if I was designing 6e.
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Post by FatR »

Every skill in the current d20 system is something that mundane people can do. Half of its problems lie in the exact fact that very little of that scales well to superheroic level or is not rendered obsolete by low-level spells.

Personally, I've split d20 skills into two different piles - the first pile includes stuff like mundane stealth (don't confuse with supernatural stealth, which allows hiding in plain sight and countering typical stealth negators like scent and radar senses), and acrobatic feats, and being intimidating, which everyone possesses automatically and which automatically improves as people become mode badass overall with levels; the second pile includes stuff requiring specialized but mundane (or largely mundane) knowledge, such as forging swords or lockpicking, which logically should not come automatically just because you're extraordinarily talented, and which people therefore have to buy.
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Post by MGuy »

Necroing this thread to get the skill discussion out of the Domain thread.

I'm not sold on the idea that the d20 skill system can't be fixed. I'm not even convinced that some of the problems Frank purposes are problems unless you elect them to be*. Better it go into the appropriate thread to avoid more of a tangent.


There's no real reason to have kids be able to hide groom giants because you're not really trying to emulate that story in DnD as it is actually played and also even if you consider it in the genre of high fantasy there are a lot of genre conventions people here have eagerly disavowed that are completely in genre (sword dude on the same team as high level wizard).
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Post by Iduno »

MGuy wrote:Necroing this thread to get the skill discussion out of the Domain thread.

I'm not sold on the idea that the d20 skill system can't be fixed. I'm not even convinced that some of the problems Frank purposes are problems unless you elect them to be*. Better it go into the appropriate thread to avoid more of a tangent.


There's no real reason to have kids be able to hide groom giants because you're not really trying to emulate that story in DnD as it is actually played and also even if you consider it in the genre of high fantasy there are a lot of genre conventions people here have eagerly disavowed that are completely in genre (sword dude on the same team as high level wizard).
D20 works fine as long as you follow the convention that everyone has similar capabilities. If one person is noticeably more or less skilled than others, you'd want to use a system that represents that better.
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