The Drawbacks of Conventional Skill Systems
There are better ways.
Skill systems in tabletop RPGs are a response to two design questions : “can the character do [thing]?” and “how well can the character do [thing]?” A primary force drawing serious players to these games is their interest in reasoning about outcomes, and these questions directly address this concern.
However, even though skill systems often do answer both of these questions, conventional implementations bring along serious design downsides.
An Example
Consider a tabletop RPG with a military setting. The designer shows us three types of characters—Soldier, Medic, and Scout—which are the intended player classes. During the course of play, a party of three Soldier characters sees one of their number downed by a shot from a sniper. They drag the downed Soldier to cover, and the question arises: “can I do something to heal or revive him?” The answer has far-reaching consequences.
High-Contrast Design
The cleanest answer to this question is, “no, you'll need to find a Medic.” If the Soldier, Medic, and Scout classes are all given exclusive domain over particular game mechanics, it underscores their role in the game and simplifies questions like this.
A Thief in AD&D would never even reach the point of asking, “can I Lay On Hands to heal my wounded ally?” just as the Paladin would never attempt to Hide in Shadows. These concepts are placed by the designer strictly within the boundaries of the relevant classes.
Serious players function in tabletop gaming by interpolating between well-established anchor points. Player objections to strict boundaries will highlight the conflict between this interpolation and the designer’s vision of a clean split of functionality. “Healing/medicine exists in the game, and my character is a perfectly capable functioning adult. Isn't there something I can do?”
Some interpret this as an appeal to realism/verisimilitude, but I think most remarks like this use realism as a justification for the remark rather than it being the cause. Players who are paying attention are always interpolating in this way, and that isn’t necessarily negative—interpolation is a weapon that can be put in service of good or evil.
Universalist Design
An entirely different answer to this question would be, “roll a Healing skill check to see if you heal him.” Anyone familiar with later iterations of D&D will recognize this design.
Universalist designs take elements which would otherwise be locked behind class membership and make them available to anyone. Part of the appeal is the simulation aspect it provides—we can compare two characters in the game by looking at the scores of their skills. This character has Breadmaking 4, and that one has Piloting(Astromech) 2. Skills and scores give us an idea what the character can do and how well—answering those two essential design questions.
This approach has serious issues. Although these problems are not a necessary consequence of a universalist design, we see in practice that these patterns lend themselves heavily towards loss of distinguishability between system actors, awkward interpretations of states and outcomes, and a lack of supporting systems.
1. Distinguishability Loss
Imagine the text under the Medic class was "You gain +5 to your Healing skill" and nothing else. This extreme example illustrates the first problem—the more universalist our design, the more difficult it becomes to identify meaningful distinctions between characters. As a system approaches complete universalism, each character moves closer to being an indistinct blob of degrees of mastery.
This might be a desired, or at least partially desired, outcome for the designer. There is a vague attraction to the idea of any actor in a tabletop RPG following the same rules, being subject to the same considerations, and being set apart only by their particular distribution of scores.
But something isn’t right. Primeval whispers tell us that powerful stories, important events, and legendary figures have staying power because of their archetypal nature. Designing a system where everything is of, by, and for the same brown mud as everything else is designing a failure—even if we succeed.
On a more pragmatic note, this indistinguishability isn’t impermeable. After all, an expert in the system can carefully analyze a character and form a precise idea of their capabilities. But there is a communicability problem. A comparison between a sword and axe is a lot more intuitive, accessible, and immediate than a comparison between two surface-to-air missile designs. For the latter, we must resort to lists of specifications to build a mental model of which is better.
Serious players are fully capable of creating memorable characters (and campaigns!) in such systems, but that is despite this design choice.
2. Interpretation Problems
If Jebbro has +13 to [idea] and Brojeb has +14 to [idea], then we can say that Brojeb is undeniably better at [idea] than Jebbro. If these bonuses are on a D20 scale, Brojeb has a 5% edge over Jebbro.
Some of you are nodding your heads like this makes perfect sense, but people do not evaluate anything except deterministic machines and tools in this way. Intelligent evaluators instinctively organize the skill of others by simple classifications like Novice, Intermediate, Expert.
Even in situations where candidates are highly filtered, we still do exactly the same thing on a different scaling. If everyone in the room is an Expert-level hacker, we start to break them down further (only if necessary!) into Expert, Master, Wizard—but these are all just expressions of Expert. In a context where we have to consider a legal team and an IT squad together, we revert immediately back to Novice, Intermediate, Expert in both cases without missing a beat.
Having our list of ideas with numbers next to them subtly changes our interpretation of dice rolls for the worse. If someone starts rolling very well, we are unconsciously placed in a mindset to sardonically comment, “wow, very skillful today.” Or worse—we interpret bad dice rolls as dunce-level failure.
This is even more emphatic when we must compare rolled results. If a Medic has +5 to Healing and rolls a 4, he has the same result as a Soldier with +0 rolling a 9. Did the Soldier really just achieve Medic-level Healing ability in that one moment? It’s a difficult situation that many experienced players have trained themselves to overlook or laugh off, but there is not a brief and coherent answer to this question.
In an ideal system, dice rolls represent the whims of Fate—we are discovering what happened or what the circumstances were. Picking an easy-looking lock and failed? It was much more difficult than it appeared. Opening a sophisticated vault as a novice? It malfunctioned or someone forgot to engage the locking mechanism fully!
When we start interpreting dice rolls as a measure of effort or skillful application, even unconsciously, we lose alignment with this most perfect interpretation.
3. Lack of Support Systems
Anyone that has played D&D 3.5 knows its skill system to be a prime example of the flaws of a universalist design. However, the Jump skill really stands out from the rest in a positive way.
More than just an idea with a number next to it, the Jump skill is integrated with the movement system. Usage results in movement and is something that can be done only when a character is moving. It has an attached set of tables conveying precisely how to interpret the outcome of a roll.
The Jump skill has an attached score, its bonus, that directly ties into a set of quantifiable outcomes. This input-output matching is a well-aligned design, and it results in the Jump skill being an intuitive and fitting addition to a skirmish-scale game that D&D 3.5 is clearly set up to be.
Unfortunately, the Jump skill is the exception that proves the rule here. Most of these systems were probably not originally envisioned this way, but we have example after example of skill lists churned out with barely a paragraph attached to their meaning or interpretation.
The lack of supporting systems causes a general ambiguity in reasoning about the outcomes of actions. A particularly egregious example is the Knowledge skills which are subdivided into their own sub-list of types—and none of them with more than a sentence devoted to conveying their purpose or intent.
An example which stands out to me as entirely opaque design is the Traveller skill Science, which is described in this comically bleak way in the second edition:
The Science skill covers not just knowledge but also practical application of that knowledge where such practical application is possible. There are a large range
of specialities.
Aside from the sub-list, this is all that’s ever said about a skill which conceptually covers all of known material reality. Creative and intelligent players can utilize this skill to good effect, but it’s because of their own blessed talent and devotion rather than anything the designer gave them to chew on or work with.
As a referee running into these systems, you really have to earn your keep to make room for skills like this without them being gatekeeping devices, I-Win buttons, or useless point fodder.
One last problem with this ambiguity is that players gradually adopt an inverse decision-making process. Rather than reasoning about outcomes through a concrete understanding of connected systems, they come to see skills as the endpoint of a black box process. If every problem we encounter ends up in a read-through of the skill list, we start to see the skill list as the solution to every problem and can only conceptualize problems in terms of their relation to skills. Hammer; nail.
The difference between “how am I going to solve this problem?” and “which skills are the most applicable to this problem?” is subtle but of extreme importance.
Something In Between
Between a high-contrast design and a universalist design, there is a lot of space. We can begin with a universalist design and corral parts of it into well-defined boxes. Or we can take a high-contrast design and release some of the pressure. Methods like these are how tabletop RPGs commonly get assembled.
But there is an asymmetry in traveling one way vs. the other.
If we go too far in the direction of a high-contrast design, we create (unwanted) tension between the players’ desire to interpolate and the restrictive access to functionality. But successful board games do this all the time, and players learn to recalibrate their interpolations to fit the strictures.
If we go too far in the direction of a universalist design, we open ourselves to the problems above. They can be addressed in a more detailed way in whatever system we’re developing, but the weight of these problems and the anti-patterns of play that have culturally developed around them strongly imply that we should begin with a high-contrast design skeleton instead.
The Way Forward
As far as practical implementations go, membership-based “skills” are a compromise for when we want to keep clear divisions but allow for shared participation. Two good examples of this are D&D 3.5’s feat system and ACKS's proficiency system. Even though 3.5 is infamous for its design decisions, the feat system works cleanly. Special mechanics and alternate systems are available to anyone willing to pay the entry price.
A binary membership system answers the “can I do it?” question but not “how well can I do it?” If this is truly necessary to address (it often isn’t), then it is much better to make a system for the functionality rather than a skill in the conventional sense.
For a game in a futuristic ground combat setting, it is probably sufficient to know whether someone can pilot a spacecraft. On the other hand, if the game has dueling spacecraft as a key feature, then knowing that my pilot has a +4 bonus to a roll that decides the outcome of a battle is less than satisfying. More design elements are needed to ensure that spacecraft duels are rich experiences (in inputs and outcomes) instead of mere die rolls.
There is so much more that we could mention here, but the important takeaway is this: we need to be implementing more systems and removing more ambiguity. Conventional skill systems work against both goals. And after years of people wrongly “evolving” D&D into its current state, we can clearly see the drawbacks of these skill systems in contrast to the old ways.
An interesting note is that Classic Traveller's skill system is closer to D&D 3E Feats or ACKS Proficiencies than to later Traveller Skills of D&D 3E Skills. In many cases, outside weapon specializations ("weapon skills"), the skill level matters less than whether or not you have the skill.
Thoughts on the whole — Novice, intermediate, expert.
I’ve done away with classes in my system, and I go straight to powers and skills, and to avoid the mud analogy, I created the idea of Primary/Supplementary/Secondary/and Tertiary levels — Primary powers fully unlock, Supplementary powers almost completely unlock, Secondary partial unlocks, and Tertiary is bare bones unlock.
When I thought while reading your blog I can go one level deeper — Primary powers and skills can be considered at novice (1-4 levels of the ability), Intermediate (5-8 levels of the ability), and Expert (9-12 levels of the ability), so even basic abilities in a power or skill will have seamless upgrades as you get better (though many already have that applied in the description).
Thanks for sharing this!