Baconjurer

I don't see it slowing things down much, if at all. It's either roll vs a constant value or roll vs the other roll, still involves the same amount of effort. Might even be faster if you combine it with another roll like weapon damage. Plus get the advantage of hitting at a more realistic rate of connect. By the standard rules, even an expert fighter with 80% skills still misses their attack 1 out of 5 rounds, even when their opponent doesn't dodge or parry. Opposed rolls means attacks would only miss if they were parried or dodged. Its an interesting idea to tie the damage done to how effectively you hit the opponent and it makes perfect sense. It might be a bit tricky mathematically to preserve the existing damage ranges without a complete rewrite of the rules. My off-the-cuff idea would be to look at the maximum possible damage they can do, and divide it down depending on how much off a difference there was in the attack vs. the defense. If you don't mind less variability in damage results you could do: won by more than 100 = critical result to body location determined by the 1's dice 50 < won by < 100 = MAX damage 0 < won by < 50 = half MAX damage This creates a nice weighted result where you're most likely to do less damage, unless you're much more skillful than your opponent. The more your skill surpasses your enemy, the more likely you are to do more damage. The range I chose here makes it impossible for two evenly matched combatants to score a critical. The math isn't too difficult. It's not too bad to see if the difference between two numbers is more or less than 50 at a glance. It's also not too bad to divide and round a number by 2 at a glance. It also saves you a dice roll, and makes damage weighted rather than linear, which is what I personally prefer.

I think the main advantage would be that it feels more real. As a player, you are equating the hand motion of rolling with the hand motion of attacking or parrying/dodging, and it just gives an illusion of having more input in the situation. The second advantage would be that you don't have expert swordsman, with 80% skill, suffering a 20% chance of missing an enemy, even if they have a very low dodge and parry skill. I like a unpredictable results, but I also like them to be more realistically weighted. I think if I really implemented this in the games, I would probably greatly simplify the BRP success-failure chart, and just make it a simple if-then. Something like if you win by a significant amount you get a critical+special result. And for the case where defense wins by a significant amount maybe the attacker . Still thinking on this. What about if you win the opposed roll and roll a double less than your skill score, its a critical? 80% skill would critically hit on 11,22,33,44,55,66,77 and the 40% fighter would critical on 11,22,33, and 44.

What if you eliminated the need to roll under your skill and made it a simple lowest roll wins? Since there is a difference in skill, you'd probably want the 40% guy to add a penalty to his roll of 40 (80-40=40)...The less experienced fighter could still hit and harm the more experienced fighter about 17% of the time if I'm thinking correctly. With the book system, there is a 8% chance for a successful attack against a failed parry, a 5.5% chance of a special success against a successful parry, and a 1% chance of a critical success vs a successful parry. Actually this idea seems pretty cool. If the 2 fighters were evenly matched 40% vs 40%, it would be a 50% split either way. Every attempted attack would have a definite result, you either hit them or they block/dodge it. No more random whiffs for supposedly trained fighters. That makes perfect sense to me. You could allow unlimited parries per round, but each one would give you a greater and greater penalty, so the each parry reduces your odds of blocking another attack. Parries and weapon attacks could share the same skill, then choosing to dodge would be a tactical choice. You could still use the existing special attack vs special defense chart if you wanted to include the special effects. You could even do it all in one step by just seeing how much the winner of the opposed roll won by. Just throwing this out as an example, but say if you win the roll by 90% it could be the same as a critical/fumble combo, 80% a critical/fail, 70% a critical/success, 50% a critical/special, and everything else is just a standard success/failure. I like this. I'm going to have to think more about this...

What about getting rid of in-game skill checks for relationships and simply make it all off-camera, using the training mechanics? What that would mean during "training" are spending time with the person/organization, learning about them, building connections, being a part of their life/the organizations ways. On top of that perhaps add in immediate bonuses for certain heroic deeds you accomplish for them. Well I chose 50% mostly because I thought negative percentages would make things a bit wonky. Maybe it is simpler to set Neutral at 0% and have positive and negative. That way you can just directly add the relationship to any relevant skill checks. I'm not very sure which would be better in play though. I was envisioning that a good relationship score would add bonuses, but it'd be over 50%, e.g. maybe a 60% score in the relationship would give you a 10% advantage if you were requesting something from them. Or 10% discount if you wanted them to train you or buying stuff off them. Higher relationships should give you access to secrets and powers. Relationships with certain deities would open up communications, perhaps giving you access to divine powers. On the opposite side, you are more dangerous to any opposing forces, giving penalties to requests from them. Very bad relationships would influence initial reactions in an encounter, perhaps even putting a price on your head and assassins on your tail. What about skill/relationship atrophy? I've done some more research on what other systems do. I saw Mouse Guard just limits the number of skills your character can have. That makes sense to me because you only have so many hours in a month and logically could only focus on a certain number of skills. The exact limit could be calculated up front based on how many hours are in a month and how long it takes in training to improve skills. It should be very math light in play which I like. The downside of implementing that system is it's too simplified. It's not very logical that you simply can't take up another skill without totally forgetting one first. You can't be a jack of all trades, master of none type character. Any thoughts on skill decay? Does anyone think skill atrophy sounds fun or interesting, or is it just going to get in the way of more fun things?

@Atgxtg 1) Maybe I would make it combat only, and anytime you score a critical against some enemy, your relationship with them and their organization gets worse, and your relationship with their enemy gets better. But that might be a little to bean-county for combat... I definitely want helping the person/organization out to improve relationship scores. I think what I'd like is that helping someone or some group out would increase your relationship with them by 1-3% where 1% is something a friend would do, and 3% is something a friend who is also a great hero would do. 2) I wanted relationships to start at 50% for neutral because I wanted the range to be from hated (0%) --> revered (100%). This would be variable. For example, if orcs are racist against the player for being human, then naturally the starting relationship between the orcs and the player would be lower, possibly 0%, depending on the setting. 3) The Fame score is a cool idea, but I think I still would need to track reputation with individual organizations. In your example killing a dragon would make you less popular with dragons and more popular with humans, but perhaps you later went out and ended the sport of dragon hunting. Then your reputation might stay the same with humans or possibly go down depending on the means of ending the sport, but your reputation with the dragons would go up. So fame doesn't quite keep track of that. Also I'm worried I might get weird situations where a player with a really high Fame score went to visit a tribe of lizardmen in an unexplored rainforest. That player would of course be totally unknown to them, and thus the Fame score meaningless. So I think tracking just individual relationship levels would cover Fame, as well as avoiding weirdness with combining them all.

Good point @rust. Maybe the flat +1% increase from critical success occurs during quest/task or if you are acting in their name with a holy symbol, tabard, or insignia of some sort, while the actual completion of a task would grant some variable bonus based on it's importance to that party and his/her/their enemies. That of course would fall under referee fiat. That way you improve your relationships by accomplishing great deeds in that relationships honor and by actually helping them with something.

As an idea for my house rules, I'd like a rough mechanic of somekind to track relationships between individual NPCs and groups/guilds/etc. My rough idea so far is that every new relationship starts at 50% (neutral). "Any time you use a skill and score a special success working towards something that can reasonably be considered for that individual or group and/or are wearing an insignia or tabard clearly displaying your affiliation, those relationships increase by 1% and any faction or individual you are reasonably considered to be working against goes down by 1%." Relationships would have different levels, like skills (maybe <30% hated, 30-40% hostile, 40-60% neutral, 60-70% friendly, 70-80% honored, 80%+ revered) that would have different meanings and benefits/consequences. This makes sense in my head because as you become more skillful, your chance of scoring criticals increases, so the more legendary your skills, the more quickly your reputation grows. Also criticals are supposed to represent some sort of memorable use of the skill, and memorable events in the name of some relationship or organization would impact your reputation with that person/organization, and with their enemies. This would need to be used in tandem with some sort of skill decay. I would like to avoid the no stat atrophy trope, but also want something that's simple and doesn't require any more notes. So I'm thinking something like: "every month in game time every skill decreases by 1%" and "every year in game time your primary characteristics decrease by 1." At first I thought of something like "every skill that hasn't been used for x-time decreases", but that seemed very difficult to track. This way you simply always have to increase your skills by at least 1 point once a month in game time, and no tracking of when the last time you increased your skill would be necessary. Relationships would be a special case. Any relationship score over 50% decreases as normal 1% per month. Any relationship less than 50% increases 1% per month. This is because neutral feelings is 50%. I should also note that my current house rules allow multiple skill ups per session, not only at the end of the adventure. Thoughts?

I was thinking about how power points could represent your character's mental stamina and how sanity would relate to that. Lets say you made a houserule that combines power points and sanity into a single mental stamina system. You could have a "major wound threshold" for the mind where certain extreme horrors or ultra powerful spells automatically earned you a roll on a Sanity table, or if you ever went to 0 or less you also earned a roll on a Sanity table. This way your character has a certain tolerance for horrors, but if you saw too much or cast too much or some combination before a period of recovery, you risk losing your grasp on reality. How crazy is this thought?

Thanks for the thoughts guys! This discussion has got me thinking about eliminating experience points and skill check boxes and only allowing skill up through training/research. Has this been discussed on the forums before?

I agree, and I think "doesn't make sense" was the wrong choice of words. What I really meant was that the extra step of variable weapon + variable armour doesn't really simulate the range of effective hits any better than a single roll would. That's a good point about weapons never being able to score a minor cuts or always taking out limbs, I think I'd make sure in my game that should be possible. I suppose if one wanted to reduce rolls they could tie different amounts of damage to different gradients of success, but of course that means more maths, and probably would end up taking longer than a simple extra dice roll. As to the second point I don't see any problem with some weapons not being able to penetrate some armour without criticals. I'm just imagining someone trying to injure someone wearing full plate or an energy shield with a sharpened stick, I believe I'd definitely want to see a critical in order for that to work.

Here's how I view it Variable weapon damage - represents the culmination of all the wind resistance, swing angle, trust, etc. A result of 1 meaning you didn't have those things to your advantage and a 6 (or 8, etc) meaning you did. Critical success - represents striking a particularly weak spot in the armour, which is how I interpret the "...A critical attack result always ignores armour, even if the armour is all-encompassing" bit. So it is my opinion that variable armour is already well covered , and perhaps a group could further reduce the number of rolls by not having variable weapon damage and letting critical and special successes take over responsibility for lucky blows in combat.

I don't mind them using skills more frequently. I just don't want the immersion broken by "oh, I've got a check in melee combat (sword) during the last battle, might as well switch to a mace now." For frivolous rolls I don't even call for a check. They just automatically succeed if it's something someone at their current skill level would be able to do under the conditions. If it's not it's probably not frivolous or they are actually engaged in self-study and will need to continue for a week to get an experience point.

Here's the rough draft I have of my house ruled experience point system. I'm planning on only rolling skill checks if they try to use the skill beyond their usual ability (e.g an apprentice artisan attempting to achieve the quality work of a veteran artisan), or if they are in a situation that makes things difficult (e.g. working without tools, working under intense time pressure, etc). Otherwise they will automatically succeed, and thus gain no checks/experience points. My aim is that characters end up skilling up approximately as fast or slightly faster than the suggested tick system, but avoid the strangeness of only one use counting toward growing experience, and the meta-gamey skill shuffling. Novice - 0-24% Apprentice - 24-49% Veteran - 50-74% Expert - 75-99% Master - 100+% Improving Skills Skills can improve through research, training, or experience. The more you use the skill, learn about it, hone it, the better your skill becomes. The amount you use and hone these skills and spells is tracked in experience points. Once you gain enough additional experience your skills may improve. What gives you experience points? Self Study (1 week = 1 experience point) Whacking practice dummies repeatedly, opening the same lock over and over, pouring over manuscripts and tomes on the topic, etc. Self study is the foundation of learning and improving, but perhaps not the fastest way to mastery. You must have a minimum of 25% in the skill to progress by self study. As your skills improve the costs of equipment, books, etc increases. Certain tomes or training equipment, especially those which challenge characters of high skill, may require difficult questing to obtain. Working with a skilled teacher (1 week = 2 experience points) Teachers make study a lot faster, as they can spot when you're going wrong and answer your questions immediately. Teachers must have a skill level 25% or more higher than the student’s to give any advantage to learning. The more skillful the teacher the rarer they are and the more valuable their time is. The same goes for teachers with rare or unusual skills. The cost of hiring a teacher is a function of their normal wealth level, their skill level, their social level, and the number of students they can train at once. They will price their time in order to support their usual wealth level, generally between average and affluent. Skill Check (1 use = 1 experience point) If a skill check is called for you gain an experience point in that skill. Skill checks are not rolled when characters have lots of time, all the tools of the trade, are in sufficiently relaxed environment and are aiming for a result within their range, because they will always succeed in these cases. Thus, no experience points are gained. There must be genuine pressure to succeed on the character along with some doubt of their odds for a skill roll to be called for and grant experience. How many experience points do you need? Current skill level Experience points needed to increase skill 01-10% 1 11-20% 2 21-30% 3 etc... etc... Formula: XP needed = (current skill level)/10 rounded up to the nearest whole number How much does your skill increase once you gain enough experience? When you obtain the required number of experience points you can spend them to roll a 1d3-1 to see if your skill increases. Remember to remove your experience points after you spend them on a skill increase roll.

Variable armour doesn't make sense if you have variable weapon damage. Why else would weapons have a range of damage possibilities if not that they hit more vulnerable spots. Choose one or the other, I prefer the attacker finds the weak spot with his roll rather than the defender rolls to see if the attacker hits his weak spot, but that's just me.

I want something that makes some sense. I don't like the d&d class and level system. I also don't want anything that requires too much arbitration on my part. I don't like giving out story points or roleplaying points or any of that, because I like running more sandbox style games. I like the premise of the as written skill improvement system, especially the ones modelled from RQ3, but I see some potentially serious problems with it, namely the weapon swapping, e.g. wanting to use your spear for the solely because your sword already has a check mark. It's too obvious for gaming the system, and forces me as ref to interfere with character freedom, or ignore it and bear the obvious gaming of the system. So I'm looking for a house rule that preserves the logic of using your skill more improves it, while avoiding the downfalls of RAW. The more I think on it the more I like the time spent in stressful situation/combat = time x 300 toward research. That way every minute spent using your sword improves you, but doesn't make too experienced too quickly. I'm just worried it's a bit TOO much book keeping to keep track of time spent researching/training skills.

What would you think of just scrapping the skill check system? Replacing it with a pure training and research based system, and letting using skill in stressful situations count as 300x the time, i.e 5 rounds of combat = 1 minute x 300 = 5 hours research? "To learn an additional 1d6-2 percentiles of a skill, an adventurer must train for hours equal to the amount to his current percentage ability with the skill." E.g. current skill 55% requires 55 hours of research. You could even keep in place the RQ3 rule that limits training with an instructor to 75% and any research/training beyond 75% must be done on your own through stressful situations. Is this too much more complicated than a check mark each time you use it? I'm envisioning just using tally marks to track how many hours you've worked on the skill, e.g each combat round using sword add a talley to your sword research box during the bookkeeping phase, but I'm too inexperienced with the system to know how well this could work in play.

I've looked over another thread which isn't precisely on topic I liked one of the ideas: on each successful roll add a check. The alteration is that you can have more than one check. Then after the combat or dangerous situation when you have a moment to reflect you can roll experience rolls for each. Or another alternative was that each check increases your chance of improving the skill by 1%, or that you can spend 4 checks for a guaranteed improvement. Does anyone have any examples of successfully house ruling in such a way? My main fear is that player's will notice that it's much more advantageous to swap up weapons as often as possible so as to not waste opportunities for improvement, and I'd like a system that doesn't encourage that.

Is there a case to be made for more frequent experience rolls? Would it help prevent swapping weapons frequently if you could roll a chance increase every round instead of every adventure? Would it slow combat down too much? What if instead of one experience box you had 10? Would characters grow too quickly? I'm looking for a solution to the somewhat illogical mechanic that you can only improve at something once per adventure. It doesn't make sense to me that once you successfully strike with your sword that's it, you either improved or didn't for this adventure. I think using your sword more should increase your chances, and I'm looking for a smooth mechanic that can reflect that thought. Or maybe I can be shown the logic from the by-the-books point of view.