TNE: Sell me on skills.

[Username17]

If you already have ability and stat customization, skills are completely useless.

True.

Until you define your terms, you're just playing word games.

Also true.

Words like attributes, skills, abilities, powers, feats, schticks, perks, and talents don't actually mean anything in any abstract context. They are only ascribed a meaning by the game system nailing them down with mechanics for acquiring, rating, and using them. So to an extent this discussion is entirely pointless.

But there is a couple deeper questions that this discussion is talking around

• Should the things you do be numerically rated?
• Should the things you do that are "major" come in on a different set of points than your "minor" things?

The answers to both are "it depends." For a level based system, the answers are probably "no, yes" and for a skill based system the answers are probably "yes, no."

-Username17

[ckafrica]

I guess to refine the question, do we need a numerated skill system where I have ride 5 as opposed to ride 10? What exactly does it say about my character that I have a 23 ride?

If the point is to say I am a trained rider, is it not just easier to have qualitative level of skill/ability rather than quantitative? And if we choose qualitative skill levels how exactly are they different from abilities?

[Fuchs]

For opposed tests, quantitative is better. One could have set dcs for most tasks, but use opposed tests for those cases when it matters how fast, or how much better or worse than someone else you do something.

[Just another user]

The only reason to have skills is if it is important that a character at a given level be able to have a variable amount of skill in a variable number of abilities while still being level appropriate. This means that if you want skills, three things need to happen:

1] A character with 5 Climb, 5 Jump, 5 Sneak and 5 Charm needs to be just as powerful as someone who has 20 Charm.

This only if '5 Climb, 5 Jump, 5 Sneak and 5 Charm' have the same cost of '20 Charm', which AFAIR happen only with D&D/D20 system. In many of the other systems that I can remember skills usually don't have the same cost for all their range, in generally terms what happen is that with the points/slots/other necessary to bring a skill from 'very good' to 'extremely good' you could bring two or more skills to 'good enough'. Also D20 system is the only system I can think of where a skill to be useful must be as high as you can make it.
In, for example, GURPS to have a skill at 30+ is not exactly useless but is not (usually) the more efficient way to spend your points, the same thing apply, more or less, in all the other systems I can think of, But in D&D where skills DCs are usually level dependent, they had to put a skill cap to stop people from starting with 20 ranks in diplomacy or move silently at 1st level. And these, incidentally, (I mean costant increase cost for skill and DCs linked to level) are IMHO the two biggest problems with D20 skills system.