Skills: let the players choose to succeed?

[MGuy]

Fate, blades in the Dark, any system that basically lets you trade successes and losses is probably what is being looked for here. When I'm thinking about successes and losses I'm looking to get into the game part of my rpg. I have been using the word 'engaging' a lot more when I'm talking about some of my goals for using one rule or another. What I'm usually thinking about when I use that language is how to make an interesting minigame out of what is going on. Interesting in this case being: "a series of interesting decisions,"*. If you're wanting to eliminate randomness and let players opt into succeeding at anything they want to do I'd ask 'how do you make that engaging?'. I've heard of rpgs that come down to people sitting around in a circle just telling a story, where each person just adds or changes things based off of some limited resource. The farther you go in this direction you're more likely not making a traditional DnD heartbreaker.

*a sentiment attributed to Sid Meier of Firaxus fame.

[Krusk]

I want this to cover all the mundane stuff characters can do, like "use thumbs" or "know things" and I have yet to find a satisfying skill list for that.

So you want to ignore any non combat checks, in favor of magical tea party, and don't want to have a list of what that might include.

Just write a squad based tactical wargame, and staple a page to the back that says "And for not fighting, just make some shit up and fight with your DM about it". Not a whole lot to discuss, if you don't want mechanics or guidelines.

[Dean]

I've played around with letting players pay resources to succeed if they want to, doing so makes your refresh mechanic very important in determining the pace of your game but it works well.

Imagine for instance that you can buff any physical skill check by taking on "Fatigue" and can buff any mental skill check by taking on "Stress". Take 1 Fatigue, get +1 to your jump check, up to the maximum score you could normally roll.

Lets say you can take 20 points of fatigue or stress before incapacitating yourself, and every 2 points gives you a -1 to any checks. It should probably impact your defenses as well but that gets into system specifics we'll ignore for now.

With that little system players could choose to succeed at any given task you throw at them but they'd want to time those uses correctly because it can cause a spiral of increasing fatigue. It makes everyone work like draincasters, where you need to decide if succeeding right now is worth being weaker until you can refresh. If refreshing only takes minutes that's good for short high intensity sequences. It will make good rooftop chases, with lower tier bad guys able to keep up until they gas out and fall dramatically.

Similar mechanics could be used for very long refreshes to fit into a more Intrigue/Domain type game, letting you take on long lasting reputation/resource negatives for bonuses on getting the amendments you need passed right now.