What are your preferred skill systems, or lack thereof, especially for modern settings?I'm working on a couple homebrews and reskins and I find every skill list I come up with to be unsatisfactory in one way or another. Overlap, some skills too niche, some too broad, deciding on what is a skill vs what isn't.For that reason I think I'd prefer "skill" equivalents to be based on backgrounds and professions, but the lack of skills can feel weird sometimes in modern settings.
Assuming different skills are equally costly (however that's handled) do give some thought to what kind of adventures you're aiming for with your system, because that'll have quite some impact on how impactful various skills can be. The end goal being to make all your skills roughly comparable in narrative impact. Anthropology might be meaningful in Call of Cthulhu, but it'll be wasted effort to add it to the skills list if you're aiming for something more along the lines of Die Hard or Running Man.
>>96886766Prowlers and Paragons
>>96886766>Overlap, some skills too niche, some too broadJust like real life.Some skills are useless and some skills are overpowered and can even transfer, fundamentally or directly, into others.
Fortunately, games don't have to be like real life. You can actually just design a balanced game system.
>>96886766I just use 13th Age backgrounds. Less autism and you only need to slap a player who writes in "good at everything" or "literally Batman" once before they understand.
>>96887471terrible game.
>>96887658It's alright for a D&D clone. I do like the background system more than a massive skill list.
>>96887745No.
>>96886809This.While 'Nuclear Physicist' is an absolutely valid skill set in real life, but unless your campaign is some Cold War; 1 Minute to Midnight style scenario, its probably not going to come up all that often in your campaign/system. Similarly, while saying someone has good 'Social Skills' in real life is a typically valid assessment of their ability to communicate, many people prefer to break up those 'social skills' into distinct subcategories, for balance reasons if nothing else.
>>96887954>While 'Nuclear Physicist' is an absolutely valid skill set in real lifeI think the skill set would be transferable/adaptable to SOMETHING magic related though.
>>96886766What's the point of your skill system? If it's just to mechanically give a boon to someone based on their job/class/archetype, then just pull a Risus. >>96886832 >>96887658 >>96887885small pp fag here to shit up the thread again
>>96888037You lose.
>>96886766https://riftsimcn.weebly.com/uploads/5/6/8/7/56872659/skill_index.1-6.pdf
>>96886766Lovely inane thread about nothing in particular, OP.See you all by Christmas, when this thread will finally croak
>>96886766My Skills are declared as actions or follow-ups, counters or reactions, or are ongoing effects that passively happen as their conditions are met. The magnitude of effect Skills have is usually decided by the Attribute values and Technique ratings relevant to the Skill, with a modifier applied depending on how many of what resources are spent on the Skill.
>>96890256What's with the spergouts on nu-/tg/ at any thread that isn't a general? The thread is quite clearly about RPG skill systems
>>96891523Don't worry about that.What are your thoughts about any of the on-topic contributions to the thread?
>>96891523The OP isn't working on a game, he's training an LLM on our responses. Moron.
>>96886766
>>96886766They all suck, and the more skills there are the more the systems suck. All they do in most instances is determine whether you get to make a roll at all and what you add/roll against. If you have a skill system at all, it should be fast to resolve.>>96887471It's pretty okay, but they fucked it up by making it point distribution rather than just two disparate aspects that give the same bonus.
In a game where all the characters have similar backgrounds/professions and are engaged in broadly the same specific activity, I'm fine with "traditional" skills systems because they represent different ways of specializing within the niche above and beyond the baseline level of competence everyone has. By this I mean in stuff like D&D, every adventurer IS an adventurer. No matter what class you are, you get better at being stabbed and set on fire and thrown off cliffs just by leveling up, everybody has some saves they're good at, everybody can use at least some weapons, even wizards have always known how to knife fight with daggers and beat people to death with a staff going back to 1e. Whether you specialize in being a sneaky and quick fingered adventurer or a smart and well read and researched one or a survivalist and athletic one everybody is still working from a common base expectation of competence.In games with modern settings or where the players aren't all literally working the same job, I'm not a fan of traditional skills lists since there's simply too many things you'd need to keep track of and if the "party" is a heart surgeon, alcoholic detective, an overworked programmer and a college dropout drug dealer you can't expect the same shared baseline you would in a game like Dungeons and Dragons or Star Wars, so systems like FATE style Aspects or similar systems, where instead of a list of 300 skills for all possible things a person could be good at (hi gurps) you instead work backwards from "Does my character have a logical reason to be good at X because he's a Y?" which avoids situations that are common even in D&D style games where somebody should be good at something and they've even put points into being good at something very similar to X but technically it was in Y and they haven't gotten around to being good at X too yet.
Shadow of the Demon Lord/Weird Wizard, and it's pseudo lack of a true skill system:>DC 10 always, unless it's a contested roll against somethings Defense or Attributes>Boon/Banes make the rolls extremely likely or unlikely to occur based on how hard something is>Designed to be accomplished more times than miss, allowing the fucking game to keep moving
Skills systems work the Best when the setting or scope of the Game is very defined (example: cyberpunk with robótics and hacking) otherwise is imposible to balance the cooking skill with swimming, or swimming with combat. Skills checks are incredibly sparse in actual play.A great approach i have tried is having everyone reveal their skills during the Game, adapting to the current challenge of the game
>>96886766Consult pic related and Broken CompassNo, I will not elaborate
>>96893755/thread.
>>96896896in actual play of which games?
>>96897812More like "bump"
Nope.
>>96896835Best post so far.
>>96896835>you instead work backwards from "Does my character have a logical reason to be good at X because he's a Y?" which avoids situations that are common even in D&D style games where somebody should be good at something and they've even put points into being good at something very similar to X but technically it was in Y and they haven't gotten around to being good at X too yet.I like this too, but it does lead to a lot of rulings at the table and discussion, which isn't necessarily a bad thing but can consume a decent chunk of time. Like if a skill is a bonus to an attribute roll, how much of a bonus should that be etc. Is there a way to streamline that at all?
>>96886766Really depends on the nature of the game, but it's been my experience that most games do not benefit from excessive granularity and most systems that engage in excessive granularity tend to fail when it comes to properly representing synergy and cross-compatible skillsets, so you end up with characters who can build nuclear reactors, but can't fix a toaster.
>>96893755Best post so far.
>>96889899Question, why should i put efforts in Lore:Vampire when Lore: the Undead seems to cover more things?Orobouros had broad skills giving a penalty when untrained, but you needed to choose a specialty once you reached a certain threshold (like Survival becoming Survival, Desert).
>>96901140This is why Prowlers is better. Ranks in Academics covers lore on anything you might want. If you want to be a specialist, you have the option. Simply put fewer ranks in Academics and get Expertise Academics for your specialty. This saves you a few points.
