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New Skill or Re-task existing skill?


cjbowser

New Skill?  

18 members have voted

  1. 1. New Skill?

    • Yeah, give me as many skills as you want!
      1
    • Fold it into another. There's only so much room on my character sheet.
      18
    • Skills? Is that like a non-weapon proficiency or something?
      0


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I'm looking for opinions on whether you, as GMs and players, prefer a new skill to fit a concept or have that concept melded with an existing skill.

For example, rappelling. It is a somewhat specialized skill and requires some specific knowledge to do it safely and quickly. If I were to produce a supplement that had characters rappel would you like to see a Rappel skill (or a generic mountaineering skill) or have rappel be handled by a Climb or Jump check?

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I do not know what Rappeling is. However, judging from your post it is something to do with mountaineering. I certainly wouldn't get more specific than mountaineering as a skill.

As for the idea of a new mountaineering skill as opposed to climb, it would depend on the setting. If you are regularly clambering up mountains then the mountaineering skill makes sense. If you are not then I think it should be handled as a full scene of the game - climb rolls, CON rolls to resist cold and others depending on how well prepared the party was.

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I'm looking for opinions on whether you, as GMs and players, prefer a new skill to fit a concept or have that concept melded with an existing skill.

For example, rappelling. It is a somewhat specialized skill and requires some specific knowledge to do it safely and quickly. If I were to produce a supplement that had characters rappel would you like to see a Rappel skill (or a generic mountaineering skill) or have rappel be handled by a Climb or Jump check?

Rappelling is a very specific descent skill. I would say for something along these lines you do want a separate skill. It could be rolled into another skill, like climb, but you would have to figure out modifiers for speed of the rappel, type/quality of equipment, etc.

If you do introduce it as a skill, then I would suggest Rappelling... applying the skill to rappelling, climbing ropes with ascenders, and horizontal crossings with similar equipment. Only a fumble would cause something catastrophic. And because of safety being built into the equipment, base chance would be fairly high.

This skill however, I would NOT apply to actual rock climbing.

SDLeary

Edited by SDLeary
changed skill name
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I do not know what Rappeling is. However, judging from your post it is something to do with mountaineering. I certainly wouldn't get more specific than mountaineering as a skill.

As for the idea of a new mountaineering skill as opposed to climb, it would depend on the setting. If you are regularly clambering up mountains then the mountaineering skill makes sense. If you are not then I think it should be handled as a full scene of the game - climb rolls, CON rolls to resist cold and others depending on how well prepared the party was.

Byron, sorry about that. Here's a definition from dictionary.com

–noun

1. (in mountaineering) the act or method of moving down a steep incline or past an overhang by means of a double rope secured above and placed around the body, usually under the left thigh and over the right shoulder, and paid out gradually in the descent.

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Rappelling is a very specific descent skill. I would say for something along these lines you do want a separate skill. It could be rolled into another skill, like climb, but you would have to figure out modifiers for speed of the rappel, type/quality of equipment, etc.

If you do introduce it as a skill, then I would suggest Rappelling... applying the skill to rappelling, climbing ropes with ascenders, and horizontal crossings with similar equipment. Only a fumble would cause something catastrophic. And because of safety being built into the equipment, base chance would be fairly high.

This skill however, I would NOT apply to actual rock climbing.

SDLeary

Thanks for the feedback, SD. Adding it to an existing skill but stating modifiers in text wasn't something I had considered. Now I have something else to consider. ;)

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Personally I prefer less skills. Its often difficult enough to create competent characters, without adding whole new skills which eat up skill points. :)

Also, unless the new speciality skill is 'vital' to the campaign, it will languish at a patheticly low percentage and never improve to a competent level.

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Personally I prefer less skills. Its often difficult enough to create competent characters, without adding whole new skills which eat up skill points. :)

Also, unless the new speciality skill is 'vital' to the campaign, it will languish at a patheticly low percentage and never improve to a competent level.

Absolutely agree

BRP has an approach, slightly broadened from previous d100 games, or specialisations in skills.

If one has a specialisation in a skill but not the one called for then roll against half of that.

i.e. I have Ride (Horse) at 100% and need to leap onto a camel to pursue the devilish, dastadly villain unfortunately I do not have Ride (Camel). So rather than rolling against base I roll against 50% (half of my highest specialisation)

I have taken my red pen to the existing BRP skill list and folded more skills into meta skills as specialisations. SO that people who want to be spelunkers can be but those who do not will still have a reasonable chance of succeeding.

Al

Rule Zero: Don't be on fire

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Yeah, it depends. If the campaign is all about mountaineering, then separate skills for this sort of thing are fine. Personally, I'm not into that sort of thing so, to me, it's just a part of the Climb skill.

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I'm looking for opinions on whether you, as GMs and players, prefer a new skill to fit a concept or have that concept melded with an existing skill.

Is it a technique that has limited distribution in the setting? Or is it a unique technique TO the setting? In general, Skill list creep is a bad thing - it's one thing to stats NPC's with quirky specific skills, but adding skills to the list a player character has to divvy points between should be approached with caution.

For example, rappelling. It is a somewhat specialized skill and requires some specific knowledge to do it safely and quickly. If I were to produce a supplement that had characters rappel would you like to see a Rappel skill (or a generic mountaineering skill) or have rappel be handled by a Climb or Jump check?

In a modern campaign, Abseiling is simply part of the Climbing skill - any climber beyond 25% has probably used the technique and certainly Professional Climbers (51%+) would know it well, know what equipment they need and be able to talk novices through using it. In a 15th Century, wars of the Roses era campaign the technique has not been invented, so no one knows it - you could consider allowing a master Climber (90%+) to invent it.

In general, specialist, specific techniques I'd restrict by skill level, rather than as a skill.

Cheers,

Nick

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I'd say that in this example it would depend on how the climber learned the Climb skill.

If he was good at climbing trees, went on to work as a cat burglar and specialised in climbing walls without ropes then I'd say he needed a new skill. If he was a mountain climber who used ropes then I'd say it was part of his skill.

What you could do is use Climb with a penalty unless the PC has shown proficiency in rappelling, in which case the penalty is 0. PCs could also buy off a penalty through use of the skill.

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Well, now I know what Rappeling is I definitely wouldn't give it its own skill as it is a specific area of mountaineering which is in turn a specific area of climbing. As frogspawner said above, if the campaign is all about mountaineering then having different aspects of it as different skills is worthwhile. Otherwise it is just skillcreep and it should be avoided imho.

Here is how I would handle a campaign that involves spending several sessions in the mountains.

* Make it clear to players that's where we'll be and tell them that therefore Knowledge (Region : Mountains) would be a useful skill as would Climb.

* In situations where ordinary climbing ability would be enough simply have them roll against the Climb skill.

* In situation where specific mountaineering knowledge would be useful to climb I'd have them roll the Climb skill but make it a difficult action (pg. 177). Then I would allow them to add 1/5 of their Knowledge (Region : Mountains) skill to their Climb skill as per the complementary skills rules on pg. 50. (I'd add this after their Climb skill has been halved, otherwise you're only adding 1/10 and that is nigh on pointless).

If the latter is happening often I would encourage players to note the total of half their Climb plus 1/5 their Knowledge (Region : Mountains) somewhere on their character sheets so that they're not working it out all the time.

Since Climb is always useful and knowledge of the mountains is useful for finding good shelter and such as well as for mountaineering players won't feel restricted by having to focus skill points on something very specific.

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Personally I prefer less skills. Its often difficult enough to create competent characters, without adding whole new skills which eat up skill points. :)

Also, unless the new speciality skill is 'vital' to the campaign, it will languish at a patheticly low percentage and never improve to a competent level.

That was my thought as well, but I'm writing this for you guys first and myself second, so I wanted to get a general feel of your feelings.

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Is that is is a bad idea to come up with new skills whole hog to cover specific tasks, but that it is fair game (and indeed, necessary) to come up with "genre skills" that address tasks that either 1) come up again and again in a setting and that it would not be logical to assume that everyone walking around in the setting has; or 2) that are necessary to tell the story.

By way of example, in AtA I have Survival (which is a modified/expanded on Natural History tweaked to the setting)--something that everyone breathing has due to the setting. I also have "Religion", which is a Dark Ages specific skill set not dealing just with religion, but with filling the role of a medieval cleric (literacy, calendar familiarity, bookkeeping and enterprise management, in addition to orthodoxy).

In, say, oh, a spy setting (was "Top Secret" a clue?) I would consider new skills appropriate to genre roles: Commando might reflect combat raids (raid tactics, demolition); Infiltration might cover sneaking into secure places (including defeating security systems, rapelling down a building); Twist Allegiance might cover a Bondian ability to seduce or otherwise befriend enemy operatives, sense who might be conflicted, or intuit double agents; Technobabble might include hacking systems, understanding fringe science, and the like.

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I know people who view skills as “universal truths” – these are the “real skills” and those aren’t. I don’t do this, instead when I start a campaign I decide if I am going to use what I call an “open” or “closed” skill set. In a closed skill set I list all the skills that I will ever require in the game, and then the players will know from the start how to focus their limited character resources. (This approach is consistent with my view that mechanics take the role that cinematograph does in movies – they both draw the attention to those details that are important to the director’s vision of the story.) If I was doing a mountain climbing game, I might have three or four different climbing skills on the skill list, but I might not have any, for example, artistry skills.

In an open skill game, I let the players freely create skills that describe their characters (freely – within reason), and then I judge each situation as it comes up regarding the applicability of the skill. For example, a 1920’s horror game, I might call for a History roll. One player whose character does not have the skill might ask if he can use Archeology. Depending on the situation, I might say “sure, but at a -15%” or what ever.

For the record, over the last couple of years I have been leaning a lot more towards closed skill games.

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With Sword & Spell I added a few new skills but more than that I renamed some skills to be more befitting of the genre. For example Fine Manipulation became Pick Locks, Slight of Hand became Pick Pockets, and Technical became Traps. In any other fantasy game I would have just left them as they were, but I was looking for a more "classic" feel to the terminology.

I changed most if not all of the Knowledge specialties to Academic Lore, Animal Training, Blasphemous Lore, Earth Lore, Folklore, Poison Lore, Politics, Religious Lore, Streetwise, and Wilderness Lore because they sounded more fantasy to me.

I did the same thing in other areas as well, like calling Allegiance, Alignment and even Appearance, Charisma. None of these aesthetic changes make the information unusable to someone not playing a Sword & Spell game but go a long way adding to the feel I'm trying to achieve.

My feeling on shortening the skill list is to go for it, to an extent. I was unhappy with what Mongoose did with their skill list, Athletics for example. I don't like the idea of someone getting better at climbing because they succeeded at a roll to swim. But I do like having a Sword skill or an Axe skill that covered each entire category of weapons.

Rod

Edited by threedeesix

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With Sword & Spell I added a few new skills but more than that I renamed some skills to be more befitting of the genre. For example Fine Manipulation became Pick Locks, Slight of Hand became Pick Pockets, and Technical became Traps. In any other fantasy game I would have just left them as they were, but I was looking for a more "classic" feel to the terminology.

I changed most if not all of the Knowledge specialties to Academic Lore, Animal Training, Blasphemous Lore, Earth Lore, Folklore, Poison Lore, Politics, Religious Lore, Streetwise, and Wilderness Lore because they sounded more fantasy to me.

Rod

Is that is is a bad idea to come up with new skills whole hog to cover specific tasks, but that it is fair game (and indeed, necessary) to come up with "genre skills" that address tasks that either 1) come up again and again in a setting and that it would not be logical to assume that everyone walking around in the setting has; or 2) that are necessary to tell the story.

In, say, oh, a spy setting (was "Top Secret" a clue?) I would consider new skills appropriate to genre roles: Commando might reflect combat raids (raid tactics, demolition); Infiltration might cover sneaking into secure places (including defeating security systems, rapelling down a building); Twist Allegiance might cover a Bondian ability to seduce or otherwise befriend enemy operatives, sense who might be conflicted, or intuit double agents; Technobabble might include hacking systems, understanding fringe science, and the like.

I plan on creating genre skills, ones that are high level umbrella skills along the line of Craft and Knowledge. Other skills will be renamed to be apropos to the genre that came in from cold...

There will, of course, be extensive playtesting required. Hopefully some of you will be willing to lend a hand.

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I couldn't actually answer the poll because the answer is "It depends." Depending on the exact campaign and its focus, sometimes I want detailing in skills that I don't in others (though I'm firmly of the opinion that BRP style games with a lot of skills benefit from some defaulting to other related skills the same way weapon skills often have).

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So would I, actually.

To be fair, in virtually all settings it is. There are few games in which every skill would be a vaild skill for PCs to take. (I am of the opinion that drive can be made a subset of ride before motors exist, for example.)

What I'd like to see are character sheets specialised for every setting and ones specialised for the various powers in those settings. I'd have thought it could be published pretty cheaply, esp. if sold as a PDF (one of the few things I'd consider buying in PDF, actually). Someone with more talent at design than me get onto this... IMMEDIATELY!

If this already exists, please point me to it.

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