Is there anything interesting left to say about TTRPG skills? Probably not. But sometimes the brain itches, and writing down a bunch of stuff that other people have said a million times before, but slightly different this time, scratches the itch.
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Imagine five people: three athletes, a generic fantasy adventurer (a fighter, maybe), and a regular schmo.
Our athletes are an endurance runner, a weightlifter, and a baseball player. We're going to ask all five people to try their hands at the athletes' sports: they're going to run a marathon, lift an extremely heavy object, and play in a baseball game. And we're going to think about how to represent this in a roleplaying game.
Consider the marathon first. This is something with a low barrier for entry and an almost infinite number of grades of success. Let's assume that all five of our participants can run; it's probable that, given enough time, all five can run (or “run”) the whole marathon. It might take Joe Schmo 12 hours, but he'll get there. Our marathon runner should probably post the best time of the five, and Joe should probably post the worst, but a substantial degree of uncertainty is reasonable. The marathon runner might have trained hard for this but just not be built for it, whereas the adventurer might, despite never having trained for a marathon specifically, have developed tremendous distance-running skills while fleeing gelatinous cubes and the like. The weightlifter is probably much more fit than Joe, but she doesn't necessarily run well. Maybe she pulls a hamstring halfway through the race and has to limp across the line last.
Lifting weights (or heaving a fallen pillar out of the party's path in a dungeon, perhaps) is totally different. It's a strict binary: each person can either do it or they can't. Success might come with costs (a hernia?) and failure might be particularly drastic (crushed to death?), but the weight either is gonna get lifted or it isn't. The professional weightlifter's training will ensure that her technique is good, and she'll be most likely to avoid injury; the baseball player, who probably lifts weights frequently as part of his training, will also have good technique but probably doesn't have the same maximum capacity. If the weight is significant enough to pose a real challenge for the weightlifter, Joe and the runner won't be able to budge it, and the ballplayer and adventurer are likely (if somewhat less likely) to similarly just not be able.
Finally, we send them into a baseball game. Again, the level of challenge could vary quite a bit, and there are many grades of success (from just putting the ball in play to getting a base hit to hitting a home run). Any of these people might have some amateur baseball experience, but assuming that our pro ballplayer is good, and assuming the level of competition is enough to challenge him, the bar for any level of success is extremely high. The ballplayer himself might strike out on three pitches; it happens frequently enough. The other four are very likely to strike out, although the adventurer's combat-honed hand-eye coordination might give her a better chance to put the ball in play, and the weightlifter's massive strength might help her muscle a hit out of the park if she does manage to make contact.
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Now, what the hell kind of RPG skill system is supposed to represent all of this? These are three challenges that, in 5E or any D&D-based system with a similarly stripped-down skill list, are likely to be represented by an Athletics check. If we have a system that doesn't lock certain skills to certain attributes (e.g., my trusty Stars Without Number), we might get a little stat-based variation (using CON bonuses for the marathon, STR for the weightlifting, and STR, DEX, or maybe even WIS for baseball). But how can the same flat skill bonus apply to all three?
Said flat skill check works passably well for the marathon, at least for separating the pros from the schmo. A d20 check isn't ideal—creating enough separation between Joe and our endurance runner that there's only a 2.5% chance of the former beating the latter requires giving the runner a bonus advantage of +15 (and that 2.5% chance is still pretty excessive)—but a 2d6 system will handle it easily with some comparatively small bonuses. Of course, if we only have a single Athletics skill, moving to 2d6 won't make the runner meaningfully better than our other pro athletes, which is weird, but we'll come back to that.
The skill check doesn't work so well for weightlifting. Even if we create the same kind of skill gap (Joe only succeeds 10% of the time; the weightlifter only fails 15% of the time), that's weird. This doesn't feel like something where everybody should be balanced on the razor's edge between success and failure. Sometimes, doing something difficult is a matter of raw aptitude. Training and experience might give you a slight edge and a lower chance of disastrous failure—you know just where to grip for maximum purchase, and you're not going to throw your back out in the attempt—but in the end, you're simply strong enough to lift that heavy thing or you're not. When games call for skill checks in situations like this, they probably just…shouldn't. Dragging that stone pillar out of the doorway simply requires 14+ STR. Maybe you can substitute something else (weightlifting experience? being a dwarf?) for one missing attribute point, maybe you can make an Athletics (or similar) check to see whether you injure yourself, but just doing the thing is a binary.
And baseball? It doesn't seem like a normal set of dice is going to be able to model how hard it would be for an untrained amateur to, say, hit a major-league slider. Nobody does that, not even the best amateurs in the world, until they've seen a few dozen in the minors, at least. So now even our 2d6 skill system is under some strain. If an untrained, physically average person in one of the XWN games (-1) goes head-to-head against somebody with maxed-out skill (+4) and the maximum stat bonus (+2), there's still ample room for an upset—a roll of 10, 11, or 12 by the amateur will beat snake eyes from the pro, for instance. Even in Traveller, where the untrained penalty is harsher (-3) and there's no hard cap on skill level, our pro needs a total DM+7 just to be guaranteed not to lose a contest—which is more than a starting character can have, and that in a game where starting characters are mid-career professionals and further advancement is slow and difficult.
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Now, do we really need our TTRPGs to be able to model the difference between an average person and a top-tier professional baseball player? In a literal sense, no—when are our characters ever going to play pro baseball?—and metaphorically, probably not, because the literally one-in-a-million talent of an MLB player is a degree of aptitude games don't need to encompass (even if they need better granularity than “nobody can ever have better than a 95% chance of doing anything, or less than 5%"). But something like this comes up pretty frequently, especially in games with non-fantasy settings. The difference between a trained pilot and somebody who's never been in the cockpit, or between a university-educated physicist and a high school dropout, or between a professional programmer and somebody who's never touched a computer? Pretty vast!
Traditional skill checks work for feats like the marathon: anybody can attempt it, but physical aptitude and training go a long way toward making high-level success possible. Simple ability checks (or ability gates, even, without a roll) work for feats like weightlifting. Either you can, or you can't. For this third category, in which people are trying to do things that are challenging for them, in spite of their extensive experience and training, and would be simply impossible for an untrained person, who wouldn't even know how to approach the problem (or what button to push, as it were), we might have to combined the two types of check, and conceptually separate skill from training. You need training to even undertake the challenge; your skill determines the likelihood that you succeed.
Now, it's not completely impossible that an untrained person could fly a jet, or a spaceship. Maybe they've seen other people do it enough to have a rough sense of how it's done, even without any training. Maybe they should, as in Traveller, face a steep penalty instead of being locked out of the skill entirely. But is that penalty determined programmatically? Is it something you put in the rulebook? (E.g., Program is -5 for untrained characters, Pilot is -3, Surgery is -4, etc.) Don't characters with different backgrounds and experiences have an argument for different modifiers? If you're a soldier who's deployed from a dropship a hundred times, you probably have better odds of piloting one than a farmer who's never even seen a spaceship, even if neither of you formally has either training or skill.
And, again, there's that problem of too-general skills. Advocates of skill systems often say they help to define and humanize a character, but any system that makes a marathon runner, a weightlifter, and a baseball player mechanically identical—and equally good, or nearly so, at one another's sports—isn't doing a great job of defining and personalizing its characters. Then again, does anybody want to go to the level of GURPS (or even further) in terms of granularity? If we start splitting piloting into myriad sub-skills (sailboats, large merchant ships, helicopters, fighter jets, space shuttles), we run into the problem that any given character's skills are useless (or at least not optimally useful) 99% of the time, unless the GM finesses everything to make sure there's always a sailboat or helicopter handy.
There's a great, and reasonably popular, solution to all these problems and more (like the weirdness of level-based skill advancement, wherein a character crosses some abstract experience threshold, and poof, now somehow instantly knows how to do new things, potentially including things they got no new training or experience in; and the problem ). Ditch specific skills, let players define their characters' expertise narratively (via “backgrounds” or similar), and work out the numbers by some combination of negotiation, consensus, and GM fiat:
- “I used to be a shuttle pilot, so I don't think it'd be a huge stretch for me to figure out piloting this fighter, given there's no immediate time crunch or danger."
- “Remember when we did a bunch of climbing down in the catacombs a few sessions ago? We learned a lot from that, and climbing this ivy-covered wall seems to be more straightforward than that was.”
- “Naah, I don't think a few hours studying at the local library was enough to substantially deepen your knowledge of arcana.”
Of course, I get why major (or “major”) publishers rarely present games like this—a mass-market game needs to cater to all players, including those who can't abide by loosey-goosey rulings and those who don't trust their fellow players with this kind of freedom—but for a home game, with the right players, it works like a charm. And yet the dream of a perfect skill system persists, even in the sparsely populated and OSR-inclined backwaters of the blogosphere and Reddit.
It should be robust, yet lightweight. Flexible, yet a vehicle for deep character personalization. Suitable for a simulationist approach, yet not excessively granular. I look forward to reading about! I'm sure as shit not going to come up with it myself.
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