Why the Standard Social Skills?

• D&D: Bluff, Diplomacy, Intimidate; Sense Motive
• Fate: Deceit, Rapport, Intimidate; Empathy
• FSuns: Knavery, Charm, Impress; Empathy
• NWoD: Subterfuge, Persuasion, Intimidation; Empathy

Somewhere along the line, it became accepted fact that RPGs with social skills break them down in very similar ways: you have a skill to lie, a skill to persuade without lying, a skill to be scary, and a skill to tell when you’re being manipulated. The occasional game mixes it up a little, either by combining a couple of the skills or by adding one or two others for specialized uses (e.g., NWoD’s Socialize for being the life of the party). But, by and large, it’s common to arrange skills in a way that you will use a different dice pool for social encounters depending on whether you’re lying, being honest, or being scary.

Social combats are hard to model in general. Even in games like Smallville and Technoir where social combat is functionally identical to physical combat, the cadence of the fight is hard to pick up at the table. We’re used to modeling trying to kill people with whatever pacing mechanism any particular game requires, because it’s never going to get in the way of us standing up and just roleplaying out the fight. But for social conflict, it’s natural for most gamers (particularly those that grew up on systems with at most one die roll being involved in any argument) to just roleplay out the scene in character. Adding a social conflict mechanic with a back and forth similar to combat requires you to break up your roleplay in a way that doesn’t feel natural, only roleplaying out a small portion of your speech before pausing to roll and then giving the other side a chance to rebut when you weren’t even done talking. Or you completely abstract the social combat (as the examples in a lot of indie games seem to suggest) by merely stating your intent in the scene and barely saying a word in character. That latter method is a really hard sell to gamers used to doing everything in character that’s at all practical at the table.

But, getting back to the initial point, I believe that part of the difficulty in making a really workable social conflict system is over-reliance on the standard four-skill model of social skills.

From a purely simulation perspective, these skills are weird. I finished reading The Big Con last week, and one of the things it hit home is that there’s not a bright line between any method of persuasion. There may be poor liars that are good at persuading people with the truth (though politics makes that dubious), but there are probably not many excellent liars that suddenly become unpersuasive if they’re telling the truth. Sure, you can buy multiple social skills in most systems, but the game system doesn’t often reward you for avoiding specialization. So you get situations like my paladin in a previous game: as soon as my attempts to convince NPCs drifted from pure fact to concealing information or being evasive, the GM was suddenly justified in asking me to roll my +5 Bluff skill instead of my +17 Diplomacy skill. Despite the fact that, in my mind, it was all part of the social patter required of being the party’s Face, the system didn’t see it that way. If we’d needed the NPC to buy a lie, I should have deferred to the party rogue (which, itself, would have been suspicious).

The inclusion of a social detection skill (empathy/sense motive) creates further complications to roleplay. The active social character is often at a severe disadvantage against a target with a high rank in this skill, because even the simplest and most believable lies can be detected in a way that borders on the magical. Even experienced police detectives often have to have ideal circumstances (such as an interrogation room and facts to catch the target off guard) to reliably detect lies, but RPG characters specialized in empathy can do it in any scenario (frequently against an opponent in the seat of his power). The converse is also true: a character that doesn’t specialize in this skill doesn’t allow its player to make up his or her own mind about a lie, but can be told that even the most bald-faced lie sounds perfectly correct (not that players regularly actually proceed with that assumption when they know they blew their sense motive check or are up against a character that they expect outclasses them in bluff).

Whether or not you believe that the divide in skill is a realistic simulation, the fact remains that it’s part of the problem in making social conflict similar to physical combat. While games typically silo physical combat ability in a similarly weird way (how many martial arts experts are useless with a weapon?), the typical combat offers the ability to contribute with any relevant skill (except in situations where firearms would be too loud or the PCs were disarmed before entering). The martial artist, the fencer, and the pistoleer are each contributing in their own way. But social conflicts are frequently constructed in a way that makes it way more obvious that certain types of skill can’t contribute. We’re trying to befriend this guy, so the party heavy with intimidate can’t help. We’re not actually lying (or we’d blow everything if we were caught in a lie), so the rogue is cooling his heels. Not only do you have the roleplaying need to just let one guy do the talking for simplicity’s sake, there’s little game benefit in the other players trying to contribute anyway.

So what’s the solution?

The easiest answer is to just have one really broad social skill, but that’s probably not something many game engines want to do (if you thought Diplomancers were bad now…). It is worth noting that the standard methods for adding more skills to what a game is focused on creates a paradox of incentivizing the “wrong” builds. For example, it’s way easier to get good at social conflicts in D&D than in combat and it’s way easier to become great at combat in any flavor of WoD than to become adept at intrigue.

The real answer probably starts with the intrigue tactics available in the Song of Ice and Fire RPG (which itself uses pretty close to the standard four skills, except with intimidate as a subset of persuade, so it isn’t a full solution). Specifically, cutting up social skills not by lie/truth/fear/detect but by whatever the verbs are in your social conflict system. For example, if “convince” is a tactic in your system, perhaps that’s the skill and it doesn’t matter whether you’re using lies, facts, or intimidation to convince the target. The trick would be creating a conflict system where any particular social encounter could map victory conditions to more than one such verb in a natural way. And I haven’t quite gotten to that particular holy grail yet.

So am I missing implementations with the standard four skills where they’re a natural fit to the social conflict mechanic? Can anyone come up with a list of verbs that would be applicable to a broad range of social conflicts?

D&D: Level-Locked Skills

Yeah, yeah, I know I’ve done this twice already. This time, rather than solving my issues with margin of success in D&D, I’m instead specifically targeting the high-level divide between specialists and incompetents (i.e., how there’s no way to make a skill DC challenging for one PC without making it impossible for the rest of the group). I’m also trying to do something that’s less invasive so it could be added onto a standard 3.X or Pathfinder game without redoing a bunch of other systems to accommodate. It’s largely based on The Alexandrian’s skill musings, but stripping out the potential 5E system of descriptive qualifiers. It’s also probably similar to 4E’s system in a lot of ways.

Skill Rank

A character’s skill rank is determined by the following factors:

• Character level or Hit Dice: Always add your level to your skill checks (you can either write this in or just remember it so skills don’t have to be updated as often).
• Class Skills: All of the character’s class skills (including those gained by multiclassing) gain a permanent +1 to their rank.
• Feats: Skill bonus feats add their normal value to a skill (+3 or +2/+2). However, only take the highest bonus from feats (i.e., a +2/+2 feat coupled with a skill focus in one of those skills is only +2/+3 not +2/+5). GMs should offer players that initially buy a +2/+2 and want to upgrade it the ability to swap the initial +2/+2 feat out with a second skill focus for the other skill.
• Magic: Add +1 for every +5 that a magic spell or item would normally grant the character for a skill (e.g., a Ring of Jumping gives a +1 Acrobatics instead of its normal +5).
• Racial Bonuses: Racial skill bonuses that give a +2 instead give a +1. Racial (or size) bonuses that give a +4 instead give a +2.
• Other Modifiers: For other skill bonuses not listed, grant +1 per +4 normally gained (e.g., improve jumping ability by +1 for every +10 movement speed and give Rogues a +1 for every +4 they would normally get for Disable Device).
• Mastery: For every 10 skill ranks earned, you can master a skill. Add +2 to that skill’s rank. You can only master a given skill once.

A character also gains a +2 circumstance bonus to a skill check if his or her relevant ability score (not bonus) is equal to or greater than the DC (e.g., an Acrobatics check gains a +2 against any DC 15 or less if your Dexterity is 15). This provides an early reward for natural talent that eventually gives ways to masteries. It provides a continual bonus if you focus heavily on one ability score without letting escalating ability bonus widely extend the skill rank range.

This rank system effectively means that a character specializing in a skill will have a total of +6 (plus a circumstance bonus) greater than an incompetent party member of the same level before magic and other misc bonuses (which will likely only extend the range by a few points until very high levels). Effectively, a challenge that is very difficult for an incompetent party member should still have some chance of failure for a specialist (but the specialist still has a definite advantage).

Difficulty

The DC of an opposed check is the target’s total skill rank +10. Trying to detect a hiding 5th level rogue with a +3 bonus to Stealth (mastered class skill) is a DC 18 Perception check.

The DC of an unopposed check is based purely on the “level” of the challenge +10. Effectively, assign an unopposed challenge a level based on at what character level a completely untrained character should have even odds just based on years of generic adventuring competence. For example:

• There’s a pretty decent chance that any adventurer has heard of the basic weaknesses of an appropriately challenging monster, so the DC for knowledge rolls to know about a monster is 10 + CR (with a small increase for monsters that are supposed to be rare and mysterious).
• Even the party fighter eventually gets savvy to what spells are being cast, so a spellcraft DC to identify a spell is equal to 15 + the spell’s minimum caster level (giving those with no spellcraft a 50/50 shot of identifying spells three levels lower than their own wizard can cast).
• In general, written skill DCs in the 10-20 range should be appropriate and actually stay challenging to the party for longer. Do consider collapsing DCs that escalate at a rate of +4 or +5 to +1 in order to match the decline in skill bonus spread.

Note: For a tighter range of DCs and a bigger advantage to specializing, you could go 4E style and halve both bonus from level and DC from level (e.g., a level 6 character only gets +3 from level but that’s okay because level 6 challenges are only DC 13).

Yet Another D&D Skill System, Part 3

Example Skill Checks

The following challenges give an idea of how the system is supposed to run. A couple of things to keep in mind when designing your own:

• A  player with a decent ability score in the skill will average 5 HP damage on a successful check (3-4 average on the d6 plus +1 or +2). A player that has a +4 or better ability score will be able to do 10 damage on a good roll. Therefore, multiples of 5 HP on a task are a good default.
• A skill challenge with several distinct elements, each with their own small HP pool is good for general party members: when they eventually get a successful hit, they can see an immediate difference. A skill challenge with a big pool of HP and a big payoff at the end is good for skill specialists, as fewer of their rolls will be wasted by rolling over a small HP pool.

Criminal

Checks are typically per round.

• Open Lock (Disable): The DC for the skill check is equal to the Break DC for the door (unless the lock is just horribly mismatched to the door quality). The HP is effectively the complexity of the lock (1 for a simple hidden catch, 3 for a 3-pin lock, and up to 10 for something that uses a really strangely shaped key). The lock provides hardness against skill checks equal to its quality (0-5).
• Disable Trap (Disable): The DC for the skill check is from 10-30, based on the deviousness of the trap (use trap level + 10 as a rough guideline). The HP is based on how complex the trap is (1-30); in general, simple mechanical traps will have low HP and complex magical traps will have high HP. Traps also have a hardness rating: this isn’t for the skill check, but is the amount subtracted from actual attacks if players just try to destroy the mechanism of the trap, dealing direct damage to the HP (traps where just bashing it with an axes won’t keep it from working have a very high hardness indeed).
• Use Magic Device (Improvise): The DC for the skill check is equivalent to the listed UMD difficulties in the player’s guide (don’t add any kind of spell or caster level). The HP is equal to the caster level of the item or effect.
• Sneak (Stealth): The HP for the skill check is equal to the number of feet that must be crossed between areas where guards cannot see, +5 per extra party member moving with the group (but every member of the party can roll a sneak check each round). For example, trying to get 3 party members across a 60 foot open space visible from a guard tower would be 70 HP. The DC is equal to 10 + the highest Perception save among guards that might notice the group. Every round where the challenge retains HPs after all PC stealth checks, the guards can oppose a Hide check (see below). If the characters reduce the challenge to 0 HP, they can ambush the guards (gaining a surprise round) on the following round.
• Hide (Stealth): Each round a character is hiding, guards that are paying attention can make a Perception save to notice the hiding characters. The DC is equal to 10 + the lowest Stealth among the hiding characters + situational stealth bonuses (+2 for dim light, +4 for full darkness, +2 for 10%-30% concealment, +4 for 40%-60% concealment). If all guards fail their perception save, the hiding characters can ambush them (gaining surprise round) on the following round (or may simply decide to continue sneaking).
• Shadow (Stealth): As Hide, but the DC increases by +1 for every 5 feet the shadowing character hangs back from the target. The shadowing character gets a bonus for a good disguise check and a penalty for looking distinctive.

Wilderness

Checks are typically per day.

• Forage (Find Sustenance): The DC for the skill check is equal to the prevalence of food in the region (5 for a well-stocked forest or jungle up to 25 for a desert). The HP is equal to 5 per party member per day. Each day the HP total is not met, the remaining HP are deducted from days of rations (e.g., with 5 HP left, deduct 5 days of rations). If there are no rations to meet the remaining HP, the characters begin starving.

Mundane

Checks are typically per week unless otherwise noted.

• First Aid (Heal): This check is per round. The DC for the skill check is 15. The result of the damage roll heals the target up to a maximum of 0 HP. Any successful check stabilizes the target.
• Long Term Care (Heal): The DC for the skill check is 15. The result of the damage roll heals the target (to a maximum of total HP).
• Treat Poison/Disease (Heal): This check can be made once per period of the poison/disease. The DC is the save DC of the effect. The damage is a bonus to the target’s next save against the effect.
• Create Mundane Item (Craft): The character must provide half the value of the item (this is the “cost”) in materials. The DC of the check is 5 if the item’s cost is less than 20 CP, 10 if the cost is 2-19 SP, 15 if the cost is 2-19 GP, and 20 if the cost is 2+ PP. The HP is equal to the cost (in whatever coin the DC was based on) rounded up (e.g., an item that costs 25 GP/2.5 PP would be DC 20 and have 3 HP). When the HP are reduced to 0, the item is completed.
• Earn a Living (Profession): Choose a DC from the chart below. Once the listed HP are reduced to 0, the character earns the listed GP.

DC	HP	GP
5	15	5
10	20	10
15	26	20
20	33	40
25	41	80
30	50	150
35	60	300

Yet Another D&D Skill System, Part 2

So you’re rearranged the skills down to a handful of broad categories as discussed last week. But you’re not done yet: now it’s time to use that to make skills work even more like the combat system. Why? Because the combat system is fun and the standard use of skills aren’t often as much fun.

This system takes inspiration from this Rob Donoghue post and my previous attempt at a skill revision.

When should you make skill checks and skill saves?

When using this method for skills, it’s important to ask yourself some questions before asking for a skill check from your players:

• Is there a limited amount of time to accomplish the task before something happens?
• Does something negative happen regularly until the PCs accomplish the task?
• Does accomplishing the task have some independent benefit to the PCs that would be useful to get sooner (even if there’s no ultimate time limit)?
• Will degree of success at the task create a difficulty for opponents?

If none of these things are true, you probably don’t need to roll a skill check. Either the thing is possible, and the PCs accomplish it after a reasonable amount of time, or they quickly realize that it’s outside their competency for now. This is the essence of the typical Take 20 rule as well. For this system, pretty much every skill check is effectively a skill challenge, and it might feel cumbersome to assign HP to every task. So don’t: only make skill rolls when it’s actually interesting, and just allow players to succeed after what seems like a relevant amount of time for their skill bonus if there’s no time pressure.

This advice also applies to skill saves, even though they’re comparatively more simple. In particular, what has become Athletics saves were previously skills that were almost always rolled. It may be a reflex action to ask for a Climb check, or a Jump check, or whatever any time the PC tries to do something. Again, resist this urge and only ask for skill saves when the consequences of failure are interesting. You probably don’t need to make a roll to climb up a 5 foot wall with a lot of handholds outside of combat. Even in combat, you could probably just assess that it counts as difficult terrain and make it cost double to climb. The idea of making these things saves implies that they’re only rolled when something has gone wrong: “You’re halfway up the face of the mountain, then suddenly BEES! Make an Athletics Save to hang on and keep going.”

Skill Damage

Each skill has a base damage of 1d6 + Ability Mod. For example, a successful use of Knowledge rolls 1d6 + Int bonus.

Skills can get critical hits in the same way as attack rolls: roll a 20 for a threat and then succeed on a second roll against the same DC. Skill specialties increase the threat range to 19-20 for that particular use (e.g., a character with specialty Religion make general knowledge rolls at threat range 20 but Religion-based Knowledge rolls at threat range 19-20). Skills double their base die and bonus on a crit, but not bonus dice (see below), just like combat criticals.

Skills can make iterative attacks similarly to attack rolls. When the base skill hits 6, 11, and 16, you get another skill roll at the regular penalties whenever you can make a “full skill check.” In combat, this works the same way as attacks: on any given round, the character can either move and make one skill check, or make multiple skill checks with only a 5 foot step. Out of combat, particularly for checks that represent more than one round of activity, it’s a little more nebulous what counts as “having to move.” In general, assume that a character that is distracted and/or doing other non-skill things while working on the task gets only a single roll per check, while a character that’s fully dedicated to the task can make a full skill check and take the iterative rolls.

When iterative rolls are allowed, the character can do multiple things that count as the same skill, but cannot mix skills. For example:

• A Rogue with base Criminal 6 attempts to remain in Stealth while working to Disable a trap.
• A Wizard with Knowledge 6 attempts to Research in a library where he needs Linguistics to translate the books.
• A Bard with Social 11 attempts to Perform and entertain the crowd but also Persuade them and also Sense Motive to see how he’s doing.
• A Cleric with Mundane 11 uses Heal to manage his infirmary while working two separate other Professions.
• A Ranger with Wilderness 11 is trying to Track a target cross country while helping his party Orienteer and Find Sustenance.

Magic items or spells that would normally give a skill bonus instead give a damage bonus for that application of the skill:

• If the bonus is less than +5, add half the bonus to the damage (e.g., a skill bonus +2 translates to +1 damage for that type of skill).
• If the bonus is +5, add 1d6 to the damage (that isn’t multiplied on a crit). Add an additional +1d6 for every +5 (e.g., a +15 is +3d6).
• If the bonus is greater than +5 but not evenly divisible by 5, combine the two methods (e.g., +7 becomes +1d6+1).
• For bonuses that apply to saves, add half the usual bonus to the save (e.g., Jumping +10 translates to a +5 bonus to Athletics saves related to jumping).

Finally, GMs may wish to award permanent increases to the size of a skill’s base die as a reward for various accomplishments. For example, the party gains titles in a small kingdom and the GM gives the spymaster Criminal 1d8, the warden Wilderness 1d8, the royal librarian Knowledge 1d8, and everyone else Social or Mundane 1d8.

(Next week, my intention is to provide example challenges.)

Yet Another D&D Skill System, Part 1

A few weeks ago, Harbinger posted about skills in D&D and got me thinking about them again. As I’ve noted before, the skill system introduced in D&D 3e feels a bit tacked on. Attacks and Saves in D20 are typically a simple check against a target number (AC or Save DC), with success potentially allowing you to roll damage but margin of success never being important: checks are primarily binary pass/fail (with the exception of criticals). Meanwhile, skill checks very often imply that there is a margin of success component: even with a fixed DC, there is often a difference between failing by more or less than 5. Knowledge challenges are frequently broken directly into MoS, with each staggered success giving more information.

Additionally, the skill system doesn’t progress at all similarly to the attack and save systems (though 4e makes them more similar): it’s possible to completely neglect a skill or twink it to absurd levels in a way you can’t with attacks or saves. This makes it very hard at higher levels to set a reasonable skill DC. Even by 10th level, a silver-tongued Sorcerer or Bard could have a Bluff check well over +20 while a Cha-dumping Fighter or Wizard could still have it at a penalty. It’s next to impossible to plan a challenge where all members of the party will have to roll the same skill, and it’s even hard to accurately gauge a good DC for a skill only a single player needs to roll: the difference between a skill specialist and someone who’s merely good at it is also huge.

So this time through, my first step is to combine down all the skills into eight categories and alter their progressions to work like attack bonus and saves. (Hopefully) next week, I’ll look into ways to use this modified skill system to move even more in line with the other D20 systems to provide a more consistent out of combat experience.

Skills

Most non-combat actions are covered by five broad skill categories, each with approximately six skill specialties. A character may attempt any of the actions within the skill category, but a character might have a greater bonus in a particular skill specialty (e.g., A rogue might have +10 to Criminal in general, but +12 to Disable and Stealth). Skills are typically active: the character chooses to attempt them rather than being surprised by the GM. Further, in the full system, skills will often require a series of rolls to accomplish a task (much as it often takes a series of attack rolls to defeat a target).

Criminal (Dex; suffers from the Armor Check Penalty)

• Disable: Break a device or open a lock (Disable Device and Open Lock)
• Disguise: Change appearance of self, others, items, or text (Disguise and Forgery)
• Escape: Get out of bonds or imprisonment (Escape Artist)
• Improvise: Make use of unknown magic or devices (Use Magic Device)
• Legerdemain: Hide or filch objects (Sleight of Hand)
• Stealth: Prevent detection (Hide and Move Silently)

Wilderness (Con)

• Dungeoneer: Prepare for threats underground (Knowledge: Dungeoneering)
• Find Sustenance: Hunt or gather food in the wild (Survival)
• Gather Components: Find useful items in the wild (Survival and Knowledge: Nature)
• Handle Animal: Train or persuade an animal (Handle Animal)
• Orienteer: Know directions, predict weather, and find shelter (Survival and Knowledge: Geography (Practical))
• Track: Follow a trail of a specific target (Survival)

Knowledge (Int)

• History: Reference historical facts and significant locations (Knowledge: History and Knowledge: Geography (Theoretical))
• Linguistics: Decipher writing and languages (Decipher Script and Speak Language)
• Magic: Identify and interpret magical information (Knowledge: Arcana and Spellcraft)
• Religion: Explain religious and dimensional theory (Knowledge: Religion and Knowledge: The Planes)
• Research: Find additional knowledge with access to a library or find clues in a room (Search and New)
• Science: Understand architecture and mechanisms (Knowledge: Engineering)

Mundane (Wis)

• Appraise: Ascertain the value of an item (Appraise)
• Craft (Specific): Create a certain category of item (Craft)
• Heal: Apply medical techniques to injury or disease (Heal)
• Profession (Specific): Engage in a particular trade (Profession)

Social (Cha)

• Bluff: Convince others of lies and partial truths (Bluff)
• Perform: Engage in various kinds of artistic expression (Perform)
• Persuade: Make others do what you want (Diplomacy and Intimidate)
• Rumors: Keep abreast of the lower classes and their knowledge (Gather Information (Common) and Knowledge: Local)
• Sense Motive: Understand the secret intentions of a person or group (Sense Motive (Active))
• Society: Move among the upper classes and know their ways (Gather Information (Noble) and Knowledge: Nobility)

Saves

Some areas that were previously skills are now expressed as three additional saves. Unlike skills, saves will typically be reactive: the GM will request a roll when something unexpected happens. In particular, this changes how athletic challenges are framed: a character doesn’t explicitly need to make an Athletics check to climb a wall or jump a pit if it’s a reasonable size and there is no time pressure, but may need to make a save based on external difficulties (such as wind or unexpected slipperiness) or if there is an impending threat that may break concentration.

• Athletics (Str): Physical activities that rely on strength and stamina rather than agility (Climb, Jump, Swim)
• Perception (Int): Avoiding surprise, countering stealth, and other reactive awareness (Listen and Spot)
• Grace (Cha): Resisting social attacks, making a good first impression, and impressing when dancing or otherwise acting poised (Sense Motive (Reactive) and Perform (Dance))
• Normal Saves: Balance, Ride, and Tumble checks become Reflex saves; Concentration becomes a Will save

Figuring Saves and Skills

Saves

• Good: Level/2 + 2 (as Rogue Reflex)
• Bad: Level/3 (as Rogue Fortitude)

Class	Athletics	Perception	Grace
Barbarian	Good	Good	Bad
Bard	Bad	Bad	Good
Cleric	Bad	Good	Good
Druid	Good	Good	Bad
Fighter	Good	Good	Bad
Monk	Good	Good	Good
Paladin	Good	Bad	Good
Ranger	Good	Good	Bad
Rogue	Bad	Good	Bad
Sorcerer	Bad	Bad	Good
Wizard	Bad	Good	Bad

Skills

• Fast: Level x 1.0 (as Fighter BaB)
• Medium: Level x 0.75 (as Cleric BaB)
• Slow: Level x 0.5 (as Wizard BaB)

Class	Criminal	Wilderness	Knowledge	Mundane	Social
Barbarian	Medium	Fast	Slow	Medium	Slow
Bard	Medium	Slow	Medium	Slow	Fast
Cleric	Slow	Slow	Medium	Fast	Medium
Druid	Slow	Fast	Medium	Medium	Slow
Fighter	Slow	Medium	Slow	Fast	Medium
Monk	Medium	Slow	Medium	Fast	Slow
Paladin	Slow	Medium	Slow	Medium	Fast
Ranger	Medium	Fast	Slow	Medium	Slow
Rogue	Fast	Medium	Slow	Slow	Medium
Sorcerer	Medium	Slow	Medium	Slow	Fast
Wizard	Slow	Medium	Fast	Medium	Slow

Skill Specialty

A Skill Specialty is a +2 Competence Bonus to a skill that increases to +4 at 10^th level. It replaces the Skill Focus feat.

D&D Skill Challenge (w/New System): Survival

See last week’s post for the new skill system in question. Summary: skill rolls are made against a static DC with no Margin of Success. Skill ranks add to skill “damage” instead of skill “attack roll” and are a bonus to 1d6.

As mentioned, I think this system, using an attack and damage concept, may make it a lot easier to do 4e-style skill challenges by breaking them down into something that feels much  more like a fight. Here is an example skill challenge, with more to follow if I’m inspired.

In all situations, non-standard skills might substitute for standard ones with an appropriate description (though they may take a -2 penalty). Particularly interesting descriptions of using appropriate skills gain a +2 bonus.

Crossing the Wilderness

Use this skill challenge whenever the PCs must travel overland for more than a day without the benefit of roads. It’s used to track how long the journey takes, how much food the PCs consume, and how many random encounters they have. Each round of rolls represents one day of travel.

Goal: Distance

DC: 10 for fairly clear terrain with a map, 15 for obstructed terrain or clear with no map, 20 for obstructed terrain with no map or truly confusing terrain

HP: 1 per mile between starting location and goal (special: the goal cannot take more damage in a single day than the slowest character/mount’s movement rate)

Standard Skills: Survival, Knowledge: Geography

The main goal of this skill challenge is distance traveled. Once this goal is defeated, the PCs arrive at their destination.

Goal: Food Supply

DC: 10 for well stocked forests with plentiful game/berries, 15 for a normal area where foraging is possible, 20 for areas that are desolate (special: +5 for areas where water is hard to come by)

HP: Base HP equals days of rations carried by the PCs (special: success at this goal actually heals it, as it represents the party’s food resources; it has no upper HP limit; double the base HP if you regard rations as enough for the whole meal rather than intended to supplement foraging)

Standard Skills: Survival, Stealth (for hunting)

A secondary goal of this challenge is to keep all travelers fed. The HP of this goal decreases by 2 per traveler per day. If it hits 0, all travelers become Fatigued. If it hits -10, all travelers become exhausted. If it stays below -10, begin applying starvation rules. Uses of food-creation magics do not use the day’s action and heal this goal by +1/day of food per person created.

Goal: Obstacles and Bad Weather

DC: 10 for small streams, rocky footing, or light weather; 15 for long streams, large hills, or heavy weather; 20 for long rivers, impassible mountain ranges, or torrential weather

HP: 6 per “instance” (this may be increased for multiple hexes of bad terrain or days of bad weather)

Standard Skills: Survival; Acrobatics, Climb, or Swim (obstacles); Various professions or knowledges (weather)

These goals appear at set locations or times of the journey, based on the map or a weather table. While in play, they heal the Distance goal by 2d6 per day per obstacle/weather goal, representing having to go around the obstacle or being slowed down by the weather. Defeating this goal indicates getting past the obstacle or coming up with ways to counter this particular set of weather.

Goal: Random Encounter

DC: Highest Stealth score of encountered enemies

HP: 1 HP for each enemy to be encountered

Standard Skills: Survival, Perception, Stealth

Whenever the GM rolls a random encounter for a day, the players should be informed before making their rolls, in order to allocate rolls to dealing with the encounter. If the PCs do not defeat the encounter goal, the random encounter proceeds normally, and receives a surprise round at whatever time and location it normally would have happened. If the PCs do defeat the goal, they can choose to ambush their attackers (getting a surprise round and arranging themselves on the battle map after the enemies are placed) or bypass the encounter entirely (though some encounters may pursue them for multiple days if bypassed).

D&D Skills: Margin of Success vs. Independent Dice

Last week, I talked about possible changes to the Dragon Age mechanic to counter the perceived issue that great success was more likely for low skill. I left one solution off: going directly to the In Nomine mechanic of rolling an independent d6 as the Dragon Die, rather than using one of the dice rolled. I started to think about why that wasn’t even an option for me, and it came down to the weirdness of In Nomine being that skill was completely independent of success level. As a player, it can be annoying to roll on something you’ve put tons of points into to get really good at, but have your actual results completely out of your control: the third d6 is going to do what it wants whether or not you can fail on the results of the first two.

But then I started thinking about D&D, and realized that weapon damage was basically a similar independent system, and had always been. Your attack bonus (or THAC0) is essentially just a delivery system for your damage dice; after it gets to a certain point, it makes a bigger difference to get better weapons or more damage dice adds than it does to increase the attack bonus further. Conversely, if your attack bonus is terrible, wielding a greatsword isn’t that great of an option when someone else is hitting five times as often with a dagger. There are certain ways (like Power Attack), to convert attack to damage and vice versa, but it’s never via Margin of Success. An attack roll is always a binary proposition: if no, then nothing happens, if yes, then you get to roll your damage. This has the effect of allowing monster AC to be a secret, and also to speed up play: nobody has to subtract AC 16 from a roll of 23 in the middle of battle, which, being two-digit subtraction, can be a little slower than adding a few single digits.*

The weird thing about this is that the skill system introduced in 3e is very directly a MoS system, not an independent one. Many skills have a set, linear chart of results (each +1 to your Jump check is another foot), and almost all modules will include a series of results of increasing success on information-gathering skills (usually in increments of 5). This means that D&D essentially has a schizophrenic core mechanic: for combat, your d20 bonus needs to be exactly good enough to meet the DC, and anything better is wasted. For everything else but combat, you want the highest bonus and roll conceivable, because hitting the DC is the most minimal of success.

I wonder if there might not be a way to simplify skills closer to the old Non-Weapon Proficiency days while still keeping the new-school gamers happy, by drastically reducing skill spread but increasing the mutability of the independent die result. This could have a bigger effect on reducing the unpredictability of high level play (e.g., one player with a +30 Climb and one with a -3; how do you put in a mountain climbing challenge?) without 4e’s homogenization of the skill ranks.

One idea is to keep all existing skills, but drop all ranks from the skill bonus. A skill bonus is Attribute modifier + Racial Bonus + 3 (if a class skill). Doing this makes the potential spread at level 1 something like -1 to +9 for most skills, and the top end should only increase by a few points throughout all the levels without magic or skill focus: DC 15 remains relevant to level 20 as a target that’s easy but missable for the best of the skill monkeys while still possible for those that have no points in it.

Meanwhile, ranks become directly related to the results of the roll on an independent die. I’d suggest a standard d6+Ranks for the effects result of the skill. You’ll probably want to give out half as many skill ranks and cap them to half Level (min 1), as they’re suddenly a lot more meaningful. That way, at level 1, a character that specializes in a skill will be at least 25% more likely to succeed, but will only get an average of 1 point higher on successful rolls. This should allow you to govern information challenges much more easily (a 6th level module can assume a spread of 1-9, with 1-2 being essentially automatic, 3-6 being pretty easy to get, and 7-9 being increasingly unlikely). For skills with an existing MoS chart, figure out how much is basic difficulty and how much is a target number that only high level characters are supposed to hit, and then divide the difference by the potential meaningful results on the die. For example, a running jump might be DC 10, a standing jump is DC 15, and the result of the die x4 is the feet jumped across and x1 is the feet jumped up.

This system uses a base d6, but that opens up the possibility of lowering the die to a d4 or less for specific hindrances, or, more importantly, giving out bigger dice for special training. Players love getting special training and bigger dice.

Ultimately, this system seeks to accomplish two things:

1. Making the skill system for D&D 3e+ work more like the weapons system in its use of binary DCs and independent results dice.
2. Compress the degree of meaningful success results so DCs don’t have to skyrocket at high levels to provide a challenge for those focused in the skills, while still giving those that choose to focus a direct bonus on the effects of the skills. At high levels, the independent dice should mean that every PC has a chance of success at every non-specialized skill check, but those with lots of ranks in the skill will have much more significant actual result. For example, everyone in the party can climb the mountain… the guy with 10 ranks in Climb will just do it much faster.

Interestingly, this system might make it easier to do 4e-style skill challenges as well: give each challenge hit points and an AC exactly like a monster, and give especially appropriate skills a circumstance bonus and inappropriate ones a circumstance penalty. If everyone can contribute at least 1d6 to the damage, it becomes a much more reasonable option to try to help directly rather than just using Aid Another.

* And if it’s not a problem for you, I’d suggest you try adding MoS to damage in some way (say, an extra d6 for every 5 points you beat the AC) and let me know how it goes. It might be very neat .