skills Uniting the Driving, Riding and Sailing practical skills

[Averion]

Hello there,

While I've been reading the OpenQuest 3rd Edition core book, I've encountered a really interesting approach on page 220 about the sacred cows of D100 Gaming. In my opinion that's the right approach in order to revolutionise the D100 systems for breadth of audience. Some of the D100 systems remind me of GURPS when it comes to the number of skills a person might not have any incentive to touch (whether the referee or the player).

What do you think about the constantly recurring Driving, Riding and Sailing skills? They do seem kind of redundant to me, as despite the fact that there are differences between various transports, I don't think they're a particularly frequent choice of many players around - to the point that my players even frown at the idea of these three skills being separate, thus personally I have merged them into one single Drive skill that handles all kinds of mounts and vehicles akin to how Vampire the Masquerade or some other systems already handle it.

A lot of beautiful work has been done on uniting the skills within OpenQuest to avoid having so many smaller skills that practically nobody is decent at. I think rather than being present by default, at most these skills should have been an option to choose, as not every setting might feature ships, or even vehicles, or mounts - for example a setting that's based on floating islands might not find much use for the sailing skill, thus the optionality of the aforementioned three skills in particular, contrasting to the many other generally much more useful ones.

[Questbird]

There's some good discussion of stripping down skills to the basics in this thread:

Many of the current crop of Free League games like Coriolis and Forbidden Lands are doing similar things, simplifying the skills to a manageable core. Coriolis has a single 'Pilot' skill for all vehicles. I would probably at least distinguish animal control/riding from vehicular travel. You're right in that not every game would need all of those skills. A campaign set in the old Inca Empire would have no need of Riding, Sailing or Driving! (Actually not quite true; there would have been animal handling though not riding, and some boating would have happened on the coast or mountain lakes).

[Averion]

5 hours ago, Questbird said:

There's some good discussion of stripping down skills to the basics in this thread:

Many of the current crop of Free League games like Coriolis and Forbidden Lands are doing similar things, simplifying the skills to a manageable core. Coriolis has a single 'Pilot' skill for all vehicles. I would probably at least distinguish animal control/riding from vehicular travel. You're right in that not every game would need all of those skills. A campaign set in the old Inca Empire would have no need of Riding, Sailing or Driving! (Actually not quite true; there would have been animal handling though not riding, and some boating would have happened on the coast or mountain lakes).

That's a really interesting thread, thank you for pointing me towards that one! 🙂 

Indeed, I think both of us can agree that D100 Games such as OpenQuest and/or Revolution D100 are taking the right approach of reducing the skill clutter, however I suppose fine-tuning the D100 Games is an endless journey. 😛 

[RosenMcStern]

9 hours ago, Averion said:

I suppose fine-tuning the D100 Games is an endless journey. 😛 

But the journey itself is its own reward 🙂

[dvdmacateer]

23 hours ago, Averion said:

Hello there,

While I've been reading the OpenQuest 3rd Edition core book, I've encountered a really interesting approach on page 220 about the sacred cows of D100 Gaming. In my opinion that's the right approach in order to revolutionise the D100 systems for breadth of audience. Some of the D100 systems remind me of GURPS when it comes to the number of skills a person might not have any incentive to touch (whether the referee or the player).

What do you think about the constantly recurring Driving, Riding and Sailing skills? They do seem kind of redundant to me, as despite the fact that there are differences between various transports, I don't think they're a particularly frequent choice of many players around - to the point that my players even frown at the idea of these three skills being separate, thus personally I have merged them into one single Drive skill that handles all kinds of mounts and vehicles akin to how Vampire the Masquerade or some other systems already handle it.

A lot of beautiful work has been done on uniting the skills within OpenQuest to avoid having so many smaller skills that practically nobody is decent at. I think rather than being present by default, at most these skills should have been an option to choose, as not every setting might feature ships, or even vehicles, or mounts - for example a setting that's based on floating islands might not find much use for the sailing skill, thus the optionality of the aforementioned three skills in particular, contrasting to the many other generally much more useful ones.

Then you have the utter nonsense of games like Alien were skateboarders are also  ace fighter pilots. There are already plenty of games that do this.  This an issue of using generic character sheets instead of specific  sheets .

Edited August 6, 2021 by dvdmacateer