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Vote Up A 5e-alike, Part 4 - Skills
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<blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9163350" data-attributes="member: 29398"><p>I wasn't thinking of background giving skills in any formal sense. Those would be much less formalized e.g. someone with a Courtier background might know stuff about how some local politics work but it wouldn't be codofied into a "skill".</p><p></p><p>Instead, what I'd like to see is the "life skills" (swimming, boating, riding, etc.) and class-specific skills (pick pockets, tracking, legend lore, etc.) and that's it for skills, period. Everything else - knowledge, memory, athletics, balance, etc. - goes to simple roll-under-stat and have done with it; except "social skills" (intimidate, persuasion, etc.) just wander off into a fire and die there.</p><p></p><p>In our games we've had the "life skills" idea for some time, with proficiency for each rolled on an open-ended d10 during char-gen. They rarely if ever come up as hard mechanics during play; instead they're used as a general reference e.g. if the party is on a boat, who might have a clue what to do with it vs who should just cling to the mast and try not to fall off. They can also help with characterization and role-play e.g. if my riding skill is 1/10 then no way in hell am I getting on top of that 4-legged monstrosity; I'll walk, thank you very much. <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /></p><p></p><p>Thing is, what people derisively call "mother-may-I" is, when done right, a perfectly valid way to design and run the game. The trick is to give DMs better advice as to how to run those games.</p><p></p><p>For many things this works (and roll-under is by far the most elegant). For others, though, something different is needed. Oh, and I should point out here I'm quite happy with some skills being on d% rather than d20, for more granularity.</p><p></p><p>This gets far more complicated than it needs to be. For the "life skills", they are what they are. You've already learned them, and unless you want to spend a lot of downtime on it, they don't advance ever. For other skills, if they're baked into your class that's fine as they're forced to advance with it, but if not then it's a whole separate thing to argue with at level-up.</p><p></p><p>My vote would be to drop skills entirely, other than "life skills" and skills that are hard-tied to one's class.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Lanefan, post: 9163350, member: 29398"] I wasn't thinking of background giving skills in any formal sense. Those would be much less formalized e.g. someone with a Courtier background might know stuff about how some local politics work but it wouldn't be codofied into a "skill". Instead, what I'd like to see is the "life skills" (swimming, boating, riding, etc.) and class-specific skills (pick pockets, tracking, legend lore, etc.) and that's it for skills, period. Everything else - knowledge, memory, athletics, balance, etc. - goes to simple roll-under-stat and have done with it; except "social skills" (intimidate, persuasion, etc.) just wander off into a fire and die there. In our games we've had the "life skills" idea for some time, with proficiency for each rolled on an open-ended d10 during char-gen. They rarely if ever come up as hard mechanics during play; instead they're used as a general reference e.g. if the party is on a boat, who might have a clue what to do with it vs who should just cling to the mast and try not to fall off. They can also help with characterization and role-play e.g. if my riding skill is 1/10 then no way in hell am I getting on top of that 4-legged monstrosity; I'll walk, thank you very much. :) Thing is, what people derisively call "mother-may-I" is, when done right, a perfectly valid way to design and run the game. The trick is to give DMs better advice as to how to run those games. For many things this works (and roll-under is by far the most elegant). For others, though, something different is needed. Oh, and I should point out here I'm quite happy with some skills being on d% rather than d20, for more granularity. This gets far more complicated than it needs to be. For the "life skills", they are what they are. You've already learned them, and unless you want to spend a lot of downtime on it, they don't advance ever. For other skills, if they're baked into your class that's fine as they're forced to advance with it, but if not then it's a whole separate thing to argue with at level-up. My vote would be to drop skills entirely, other than "life skills" and skills that are hard-tied to one's class. [/QUOTE]
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