If you've read my previous posts, you'll have seen the word "Skills" crop up. And possibly you've been filled with dread.
The lack of any real skills system was the bane of 2nd edition D&D and a prime target for improvement. The D&D designers dutifully churned out a comprehensive but mundane skills system for the 3rd edition.
Hold on a minute though... ever played Rolemaster? That had a skills system too. My, that was complicated! Writing a character sheet was a bit like filling in a tax return. And when you went up a level, all of it had to be updated. A good game, Rolemaster, but excessively complex.
So back to 3rd edition D&D. The designers were sensible. They didn't go to crazy. But still, there was a fair amount of annoying upkeep, and complications such as skill synergy, and the irritation that although your rogue could sneak about pretty well, there was no point in anyone else even trying.
Another problem was the infinite number of possible skills. The designers fudged this with generic skills like "Knowledge" which you would then choose a knowledge area. But it was a bit iffy.
With 4th edition, the designers obviously wished to remove the drag of all these different skills having all these different values, and probably also wanted to allow the whole party to sneak a bit, if not as well as the rogue. Laudible, but I'm not hearing good things about it. As I understand it, you pick a few skills to be "trained" in, and you are thus better at those skills by a set amount. And skills are tied directly to level too. Which does save you the time of writing them down, I suppose..
There's one more game I'd like to mention in relation to skills. You've guessed it - Star Wars 2nd Edition! This had a number of attributes (Physical, Mechanical, Technical etc) and skills were added to those. But if you didn't have, say, the Mend Droid skill, you could use your Technical attribute instead. Neat, eh?
You have to have a skills system. It has to have a lot of skills. But at the same time, I personally dislike having to keep track of so many numbers and so many modifiers.
Elementary, My Dear Watson
Elements Eight includes a lot of new-ish ideas. Some are good, some are bad, most the jury is still out on. This is, in my opinion, one of the good ones.
In Elements Eight you have 5 Attributes (Strength, Fitness, Coordination, Intellect and Perception); and you have 5 Talents (Practical, Martial, Analytical, Emotional and Magical).
Attributes and Talents each range from roughly 1 to 10.
Each skill is composed of an Attribute and a Talent added together. So the Jump skill is your Fitness + your Practical; whereas Balance is Fitness + Analytical. And Wit is Intellect + Emotional, while Intimidate is Strength + Emotional.
Here's an example of how this looks:
The Skills Table
I made a table with the Talents down one axis and the Attributes down the other. It took a few tries to get the right Talents and Attributes, but with the set described above, the skills fit pretty neatly. All the skills are described by just 10 numbers (5 Attributes and 5 Talents).
Note that that's not a final list of skills; there are some skills that are in there for development purposes, some which may be changed, renamed and so forth.
Combat in Elements Eight is based on five offensive and five defensive skills, scattered across the Practical and Martial talents (and one Analytical, which is a favourite for casters). Different types of melee class are formed fairly intuitively. You have your duellist type, your agile type, your knight type... all depending on what your Attributes and Talents are.
The lack of any real skills system was the bane of 2nd edition D&D and a prime target for improvement. The D&D designers dutifully churned out a comprehensive but mundane skills system for the 3rd edition.
Hold on a minute though... ever played Rolemaster? That had a skills system too. My, that was complicated! Writing a character sheet was a bit like filling in a tax return. And when you went up a level, all of it had to be updated. A good game, Rolemaster, but excessively complex.
So back to 3rd edition D&D. The designers were sensible. They didn't go to crazy. But still, there was a fair amount of annoying upkeep, and complications such as skill synergy, and the irritation that although your rogue could sneak about pretty well, there was no point in anyone else even trying.
Another problem was the infinite number of possible skills. The designers fudged this with generic skills like "Knowledge" which you would then choose a knowledge area. But it was a bit iffy.
With 4th edition, the designers obviously wished to remove the drag of all these different skills having all these different values, and probably also wanted to allow the whole party to sneak a bit, if not as well as the rogue. Laudible, but I'm not hearing good things about it. As I understand it, you pick a few skills to be "trained" in, and you are thus better at those skills by a set amount. And skills are tied directly to level too. Which does save you the time of writing them down, I suppose..
There's one more game I'd like to mention in relation to skills. You've guessed it - Star Wars 2nd Edition! This had a number of attributes (Physical, Mechanical, Technical etc) and skills were added to those. But if you didn't have, say, the Mend Droid skill, you could use your Technical attribute instead. Neat, eh?
You have to have a skills system. It has to have a lot of skills. But at the same time, I personally dislike having to keep track of so many numbers and so many modifiers.
Elementary, My Dear Watson
Elements Eight includes a lot of new-ish ideas. Some are good, some are bad, most the jury is still out on. This is, in my opinion, one of the good ones.
In Elements Eight you have 5 Attributes (Strength, Fitness, Coordination, Intellect and Perception); and you have 5 Talents (Practical, Martial, Analytical, Emotional and Magical).
Attributes and Talents each range from roughly 1 to 10.
Each skill is composed of an Attribute and a Talent added together. So the Jump skill is your Fitness + your Practical; whereas Balance is Fitness + Analytical. And Wit is Intellect + Emotional, while Intimidate is Strength + Emotional.
Here's an example of how this looks:
The Skills Table
I made a table with the Talents down one axis and the Attributes down the other. It took a few tries to get the right Talents and Attributes, but with the set described above, the skills fit pretty neatly. All the skills are described by just 10 numbers (5 Attributes and 5 Talents).
Note that that's not a final list of skills; there are some skills that are in there for development purposes, some which may be changed, renamed and so forth.Combat in Elements Eight is based on five offensive and five defensive skills, scattered across the Practical and Martial talents (and one Analytical, which is a favourite for casters). Different types of melee class are formed fairly intuitively. You have your duellist type, your agile type, your knight type... all depending on what your Attributes and Talents are.
My big fear with this system was that characters would be too good at some things that they shouldn't be good at. For example, a rogue might have a high Perception attribute and a high Analytical talent and come out as being a strong tracker. This is a weakness, but not a critical one. You do indeed get some characters being good in skills that, in other games, might be more restricted. But said skills are not wholly inappropriate. Rogues being good at tracking isn't such a stretch.
Certain resistances are also on this table. Resist Fear, for example, is Emotional and Strength.
Any skill you can conceive of can probably be mapped onto this system.
There are some weak points. Not a lot of skills come under Martial and Intellect. But still, no Attribute or Talent can be ignored without drawbacks. There isn't really a "dump stat" in the same way as Charisma often was for D&D.
So there it is. Five Attributes, five Talents, six Gifts and three Motivations. There's some other bits and bobs on a character sheet... but, for the main part, a character is described with 16 numbers and 3 words.
To my mind, the absolute biggest weakness of this system is that I find it really hard to make characters that are very different, precisely because there's no dump stat. Being a cautious fellow, I end up with characters who are rather average. However, this can be resolved by the use of Class builds. Or just by not being such a wuss.
When writing the skills table, I added a couple of skills that will perhaps be unfamiliar to roleplayers, or made them do slightly different things.
Stride is one of these skills. In some systems, this is fairly represented by a "Wilderness Lore" or something similar. But in Elements Eight, Stride specifically means your ability to travel long distances. I had Aragorn from Lord of the Rings in mind when I created this skill; the way he lead the hobbits across country to escape from the Black Riders. You'll see later how I've made spells which can enhance or restrict this skill; setting the will of the countryside against someone, causing it to rain or snow. Think of how the mountain passes were closed to the Fellowship.
You may notice that Grapple is an analytical skill. Grapple is a last ditch defence. When you have no other choice, you drop your weapons, grab hold of the enemy and don't let go. What's interesting about this is that it is often the first resort of casters and other non-combat types. This means that casters aren't sitting ducks with low hit points. They can hold the enemy off. But just one enemy, and in a very limited way, and a more melee orientated character can choose their weaponry and skills such that they become caster killers.
There are lots of interaction skills. In the same way as melee combat is based on an attack and a defence, so is diplomacy. There are three diplomacy defences; Stoicism, Guile and Insight; and each defence is better against certain diplomatic "attacks".
Stealth is handled in a similar way. You have Sneak versus Spot, and Hide versus Search. However, Search will always beat Sneak; and Spot will never beat Hide. So why bother with the Spot skill? The answer is that Spot is passive.
There's a skill called Omens. This has yet to be fully fleshed out. But I was always struck in Lord of the Rings how certain, more powerful characters just seemed to know more than other characters. I can't remember if it's in the books, but in the third film Legolas has that speech about "The stars are veiled; the eye of the enemy is moving". And he didn't cast a spell. I wanted to include some mechanics for this; using the Lore and Omens skills; but it remains to be seen whether there will be a practical way of implementing them. If anyone has any brainwaves, I'd be delighted to hear them.
No comments:
Post a Comment