Tricks with Skills
October 4th, 2010
Hello everyone. As it turns out, I was horribly mistaken last week when I said that this would be Explorer week. Someone apparently thought it would be a good idea to keep the theme-week calendar far away from the place where the website gets updated. Anyway, Explorer week is next week, and this is just a plain old regular week. But today’s article is one that I’m really excited about. I’ve got a lot to cover today so let’s just jump right in, shall we?
It has long been my belief that the mechanics of a game are key in promoting that game’s “feel.” A dark and gritty game will likely have extensive rules for determining how you wound an opponent (often involving lengthy charts which allow for everything from flesh-wounds to one-hit-kills), and will have combat which is highly lethal for everyone involved. Horror games approach this from a different angle, leaving only the player-characters in such a fragile state, with most monsters being terrific killing machines. By contrast, heroic fantasy (such as Dungeons and Dragons) goes out of its way to keep little things like crippling wounds out of the game, and specifically uses a dice configuration which allows for wild upstarts during play, creating a more “pulpy” feel.
Of course, in theory, there are also games which don’t revolve around killing things, and they might have mechanics which stress different things. That’s sort of what today’s article about. You see, in my years as a player, a DM, and now a designer, I’ve slowly but surely begun to learn a very important fact about Dungeons and Dragons: it’s not very good at handling things besides heroic fantasy with lots of combat. This is hardly a bad thing: after all, heroic fantasy with lots of combat is precisely what Dungeons and Dragons is supposed to do. There are other games specifically tailored to other genres and settings.
The idea for this article began fairly recently, when I sat down with some friends to play a game of Pathfinder with a twist. Inspired by some of the background information in our upcoming product, Advanced Arcana, which is primarily a book of new spells, Joshua Zaback (you might know him better as the Grave Plots guy) decided he wanted to run a game in which everyone was some kind of spellcaster, and where the main focus of the game was uncovering arcane lore. A major part of the game, he said, would be research.
I was conflicted. On the one hand, research and the d20 system aren’t exactly best friends. The Decipher Script/Linguistics skill is fine for those games where, really, you aren’t interested in roleplaying the research (which is usually most games. Somehow most people just don’t enjoy the idea of roleplaying an afternoon in the library.), but if it was going to be a major component of the game, well…the way the mechanics break down, I might as well just be making an attack roll at the library: not exactly tantalizing. On the other hand, a game about uncovering lost arcane lore just begs to be run in the “caster edition” of D&D. Where else are you going to find as much potential versatility of spells while still maintaining flavorful, unique identities for each spell (that is, there are systems with more versatile magic, but they tend not to use “spells” in the traditional sense, instead allowing any spellcaster to sort of “mix and match” spell elements within a budget for any given spell, and usually to do so on the fly).
The answer, it seemed to me, was that the game’s research segment would need new rules. I didn’t know how, exactly, but it needed to change from just 1d20 + modifiers vs DC. And that’s about when it occurred to me that, frankly, a lot of skills could use this kind of adjustment, because, frankly, there are very few skills in Dungeons and Dragons that manage to feel any different from making an attack roll. What follows is my attempt to breathe a little life into some of the skills in Pathfinder. With each one, I’ll give a little bit of an explanation as to what I was trying to accomplish here, and why I did it the way I did (the reason this is showing up on a Monday and not a Friday). I encourage you to toy around with these and other alternate mechanics for your own games.
Oh, and that reminds me: I hope it goes without saying that these rules are strictly optional, but, in case it doesn’t, let me make it clear: these rules are strictly optional. There. Problem solved. Without further ado…
Appraise:
Appraise is already rather unique amongst skills in that it’s set up in an intuitive way with a rather clever execution (the “within 20%” failure). For the average game, where buying and selling items is a matter of book-keeping, rather than role-playing, Appraise is already probably more complex than it ought to be (who wants to randomly determine and then calculate a price between 80% and 120% of 8,750 gp in the middle of divvying up a treasure hoard?) in order to achieve maximum flavor. But for games where mercantilism gets a spot-light, appraise has some room to improve.
Different skill checks want different things, and what Appraise really wants is “realism,” which is a sneaky way of saying complexity. A mercantile campaign wants complex economies. Even if what the players are buying and selling is priceless relics (as opposed to, say, running a trading caravan), with anything even vaguely resembling a rudimentary economy, the question stops being “how much is it worth” and instead becomes “how much is it worth…to the right person.” This honestly isn’t that much of an adjustment to Appraise itself: you’re still going to be making your Appraise check as normal. But instead of “here’s how much it’s worth” (or, more likely, in addition to “here’s how much it’s worth normally”), you’ll get a whole bunch of information about who might want this item and why, allowing you, the player, to make some interesting decisions about who to take it to. The table might look a little something like this (you would get all relevant information whose DC you met or beat):
This obviously requires a certain amount of work on the DM’s part, and in a lot of games, it won’t really be worth the trouble (of course, in a lot of games Appraise never gets used. This variant is really only for games that really want to go through the trouble). As I said, realism is a sneaky way of saying complexity when it comes to game design, which is why usually it’s a bad idea to have too much of it, except in the areas you want to shine your spotlight on. Another option is to have a big table with modifiers based on the player’s background (ie. dwarves like metal) which cause them to increase or decrease their estimate by a certain percentage, with every so-many ranks in Appraise negating a certain amount of the error margin, but frankly, I’m not sure there’s ever a game that’s going to appreciate that level of detail.
Craft:
This is the skill that gets picked on the most by critics of the d20 system, and, as far as I’m concerned, they’re dead on. Craft is the most boring, useless skill that you can think of. I would honestly take Knowledge (geography) over it every single time.
Unfortunately, there’s only so much that can be done with Craft. Anyone interested in crafting anything cool will need to take the Master Craftsman feat, and I recommend that a Craft-heavy game hand that out for free.
Craft’s problem isn’t that it requires weeks of game-time or dozens of d20 rolls. This is actually probably Craft’s biggest strength, as it is both flavorfully appropriate and helps to set it against many of the other skills. The problem is that each of those rolls really only matters in a “pass/fail” sort of way: if you’re bothering to craft something, you don’t really care how long it takes. Besides, when it comes to crafting something, there’s usually only so much you can do before you have to quit: if it takes four months to make a good sword, spending extra time on each step so that you instead take four years isn’t going to make a better sword.
No, what Craft needs is to flip itself over: a given item takes X rolls. Depending on your total score over those X rolls, the final item’s quality varies. Of course, if you want to rush it, you can always choose to use less rolls, but that’s going to impact your quality. The problem here is that, as far as I can tell, this is basically doomed to be game-breaking, at least for the sorts of items the game cares about (crafting an exceptional butter-knife would allow you to sell the butter-knife for extra gold, which may or may not spiral out of control in the same way as the infamous ladder/10-foot pole issue). The best answer I can think of is to allow an item to be “super-masterwork,” increasing the effects of its masterwork status, but preventing that from stacking with magical items. But I’m not comfortable enough with the idea to make a table or anything, because I’m concerned that even that is likely to spiral out of control.
If you can come up with a solution to the Craft problem, send me an e-mail, or make a post in our forums, ‘cause I’d certainly love to hear about it.
Heal:
A quick aside about Heal, before I move on to skills I feel I might actually be able to do something with: Dungeons and Dragons doesn’t really lend itself well to what Heal wants to do. As a heroic fantasy game, D&D isn’t going to be giving Heal a lot of broken legs or detached arms to fix. Frankly, the fact that Heal can even solve bleed damage is a little surprising to me, considering how much it gets the short end of the stick. Personally, I believe that skills like Heal shine their best not when the game rewards you for using them (like D&D pretends to with first aid and long-term treatment), but rather punish you for not using them. D&D isn’t the only game like this, either: Call of Cthulhu, for example, treats its healing in basically the same way (though, admittedly, regaining even 1d3 hit points in Call of Cthulhu is a little more impressive than it sounds). Really, what I think a skill like Heal wants is a game where most—perhaps all—wounds serious enough for you to take damage are also serious enough for you to debilitate yourself or be in danger of bleeding to death or passing out. That’d make first aid seem a little more impressive, eh?
Knowledge/Linguistics:
These, obviously, are the skills that launched this proverbial ship, and will also be the last skills we cover today (though if this article is popular enough, I may revisit the topic with some other skills, either here or in From the Workshop). As I was flipping through the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook examining the various skills, I realized that I was incorrect above when I said that Pathfinder handles research like an attack roll on the library. It turns out that Pathfinder doesn’t handle research. Knowledge tells you what you already know, but can’t be used to look something up, and Linguistics will let you decipher texts in a foreign language, but is of little use in poring through books to find the answers to your problems.
As a college graduate who dabbled in ancient history (who didn’t, really? Oh. A lot of you? I’m really nerdy? Fair enough, I guess) I can say with a certain amount of certainty that when it comes to the kind of research that requires digging through obscure texts to piece together fragments about your topic of interest, because it is too obscure/forgotten to just have a library section dedicated to it (have you been to a university library, by the way? I highly recommend trying it sometime. They have sub-sub-sub-sections, and books on just about any topic you could imagine. You want to read a book about a book about a single Shakespeare play? These are your people.), that the best skill is going to be Linguistics. The problem here isn’t what you know, or how much you know about it, it’s knowing where to look and being able to determine which pieces of information are going to be of potential importance, and which aren’t. For those of you who prefer an older version of d20 to Pathfinder, you’ll want to use Decipher Script, instead.
So, we’ve picked a skill. How do we keep it from being a Linguistics attack against the library? We don’t…precisely. First, the DM secretly makes a Linguistics check for the player. This represents an 8-hour day of research. The DM sets a DC, determined by the rarity of the knowledge (though probably only from 5 to 15, keep reading), and if the player succeeds, he gets one piece of information. This isn’t the same kind of factoid that gets handed out with a Knowledge check, however. It’s a fragment. You might learn, for example, that the dragon you’re looking for lives in a forest, or that his favorite food is deer. The information might not even seem (or, if your DM is particularly cruel, be) all that relevant at first, either. To help with this, and to make the research process a little more interesting, for every 5 points by which you exceed the DC, you get another little factoid.
But we’re not done yet. You see, when doing extensive research like this, you often come across information that looks like it might be helpful but actually isn’t, not to mention lots of information that just plain isn’t useful, in addition to information that doesn’t look useful but actually is. So, each time you sit down to do some research, you make a second Linguistics check. This check’s DC is also determined by the rarity of the topic you’re researching, but the DCs will be between 30 and 50 (roughly) and rarer topics will have lower DCs. For every 5 points by which this second check fails to meet this DC, you also learn a piece of useless, red-herring information. Some of it is obviously useless, and some of it looks like it might be useful, but really isn’t.
When you’re done, you should have a pile of information, and no idea how much of it is useful or even necessarily true. Here you can use your Knowledge skills to help trim the fat, or maybe some Intelligence or Wisdom checks to get DM hints that a certain piece of information is more or less valuable than it looks.
If done correctly, this should provide players with a fun and challenging puzzle which eventually results in their getting the information they’re after. What that means, DMs, is that, essentially, when running a challenge like this, you should take the information that the PCs are looking for, break it up into a bunch of little pieces, and then let them put them back together. In the above example, unless the fact that the dragon likes to eat deer will be important (perhaps deer are a sacred animal in a certain region, or one of several forests in the area has a particularly high or low deer population) it would be herring information, rather than helpful information (unless they wanted to bribe the dragon later, in which case it might be very useful indeed).
Not only does this system get away from the importance of the dice roll (you can always find more pieces of information the next day), and help keep a flavor of studying and poring through books, it also encourages players to learn more and more information about the setting and its history, which is something most DMs love to hear.
So, hopefully you found something here which piqued your interest and got you thinking about how to run different styles of games. Join me next week, when it really will be Explorer week, and in the meantime, don’t ask what you can do for your game, as what your game can do for you.