Skills should not be superpowers in D&D

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I'm sure he would.

I'm also sure that if you handed him a pamphlet on mountain climbing and some equipment and then came back in a week, he'd be a pretty good mountain climber.

He already is a good mountain climber. Before he got liver cancer, he climbed for 20 years.

[Maxus]

I mean, DnD wants you to believe that a guy with a Str of 1 who is heavily encumbered by his clothes can also be a master climber of mountains, and I think we need to call bullshit on that because even in a fantasy universe that's some tall tales nonsense. You might as well let people use Use Rope checks to lasso hurricanes at that point.

Use Rope to lasso a hurricane actually sounds incredibly awesome.

It'd have to be a long rope.

[hogarth]

K was saying that certain sports can be mentally learned in a short time, but it's all the physical training that makes you seriously good. Then Hogarth compared that to purely mental activities. K didn't say you could learn any mental task in that point. It's a complete fucking strawman.

K said that if you combine skills, you end up with maybe 4 skills. So are you suggesting that Know: History and Know: Physics are two of them? Because that's just stupid.

[K]

K was saying that certain sports can be mentally learned in a short time, but it's all the physical training that makes you seriously good. Then Hogarth compared that to purely mental activities. K didn't say you could learn any mental task in that point. It's a complete fucking strawman.

K said that if you combine skills, you end up with maybe 4 skills. So are you suggesting that Know: History and Know: Physics are two of them? Because that's just stupid.

Hogarth, you fail at reading. I said four skills, then crafts and knowledges.

[hogarth]

Hogarth, you fail at reading. I said four skills, then crafts and knowledges.

Mea culpa. Can you explain what your four skills would be? All-Str, all-Dex, all-Wis, all-Cha?

[Stubbazubba]

In the real world, diminishing marginal returns set in pretty quickly in either physical conditioning or mental conditioning, and then you're just filling in smaller and smaller niches of either physical ability or mental familiarity, until you reach peak human ability. To represent this in an RPG, you'd have to use something with an extremely normal distribution, at least a 3d6, and the variability would have to get smaller and smaller, because someone with a little experience will sometimes beat someone with a little bit more experience, the results are just more variable than honed athletes. More importantly, you should get diminishing returns when you advance skills: The first rank gives you +5, the next +2, the next +1, the next +1/2, the next +1/3, the next +1/5, etc., etc., and then in any kind of rigorous competition there would have to be multiple rolls so as to minimize the effect of any outliers on the die roll.

So, no, Olympic-level swimmers at their peak are not challenged by regular swimming athletes at their peak, but the margin of difference is far smaller than the difference between the swimming athlete and a purely casual couple-times-a-summer swimmer. The difference between the former two is probably measured in seconds, while the difference between the latter two is measured in minutes. This is completely non-linear. In athletic competitions we try to group people based on their relative proximity in skill, so the differences in the results seem significant in that context, but when you zoom out to encompass the whole of human potential, the results are almost indistinguishable from each other. D&D is not designed to represent that level of minute difference in ability, so invoking real-world skill development in an argument about this game in more than the most fundamental conceptual terms is an exercise in stupid.

[Kaelik]

And it doesn't fucking matter if you "know" what Chris Sharma does when climbing since it's going to take years to develop the coordination and experience to actually imitate it well enough to be half as good as he is.

Think very carefully about what you just said.

Do you really think that someone in really good physical condition couldn't climb half as high as Chris Sharma does? Really? After a week or two of practice?

That's the point. Yes, the gab between Chris Sharma and some other really fit guy climbing for a week is huge in the terms we measure climbing, ie, speed, or ability to climb something super fucking hard. But for the purposes of what actually constitutes climbing, those people are much closer to Chris Sharma than they are to me.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I don't quite agree with K's compression of the skill list, but I do think that he is moving in the right direction. Here's how I would compress it:

STR - Athletics
DEX - Stealth, Acrobatics (penalty for low strength), Physical Craft
WIS - Presentation, Influence (with a penalty for low intelligence for the previous two), Perception
INT - Leadership, Academia, Bureaucracy, Mental Craft

And some skills have a specialization to them that can give a varying bonus to them. A specialization of 'classical physics' for Academia gives you a large bonus, a specialization of 'military logistics' for Bureaucracy gives you a medium bonus, a specialization of 'seduction' for Influence gives you a small bonus, a specialization of 'climbing' for Athletics gives you a piddling bonus. The bonuses are a one-time thing. To get past that point you either need the appropriate phlebtonium or you just live with being 'only' a World Class (among unaugmented humans) weightlifter.

Yes, the skills have an unbalanced payout. I don't care. Yes, I don't have a CHA or a CON skill or those stats at all for that matter. I don't care.

[souran]

Do you really think that someone in really good physical condition couldn't climb half as high as Chris Sharma does? Really? After a week or two of practice?

That's the point. Yes, the gab between Chris Sharma and some other really fit guy climbing for a week is huge in the terms we measure climbing, ie, speed, or ability to climb something super fucking hard. But for the purposes of what actually constitutes climbing, those people are much closer to Chris Sharma than they are to me.

Wait, are you arguing that physical conditioning is not a skill in itself?

That seems to be K's point as well.

There is a skill set to utizling your body effectively, and keeping it in shape. Further most forms of athleticism involve repetition to teach mussle memory and hone action to the point of instinct.

The "physical" skills of a game should not be thought of as the "mental" part of game. They are skill set aquired by the long hours of practice at a particular thing. This is the body training above and beyond raw talent.

Why can you purchase them with skill points that are boosted by intellect in D&D? Becuase its an abstraction for ease and stat balance.

If you give an excellent swimmer a weak to learn all they can about mountain climibing they will be better than a guy who was sitting on his couch eating patato chips all day who decides to take up mountain climbing for sure.

So yeah they are closer to Chris Sharma than "you" are. But that doesn't actually make them good. They are superior if the subset of good is compared against "all people who might try to climb." If that person were compared against the subset that is "people with experience climbing" they are probably not even in the top HALF.

Now people have previously pointed out that D&D doesn't really have the granularity to make that distinction. It can really only compare haves and have nots.

Which makes Stubba's point even more potent.

Really skills are basically trained or untrained affairs at the level D&D is looking at them.

Further, getting "Better" at a skill should be handeled as rerolls or some other mechanic that makes players less like to fail at things. Getting to be an expert at something means that you make almost no simple mistakes or errors. It only very rarely means that you can achieve some incredible result, mastering a skill in real life means getting to where you are unlikely to fail.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I think you're barking up the wrong tree with the 'experts never fail at simple tasks', Souran. Even math post-docs make 2nd grade arithmetic errors, Napoleon will sometimes overlook something even amateurs will get, even master swimmers will sometimes get a cramp or twist their body wrong and bellyflop, and even a Shakespearian-trained actor will sometimes stumble over a line.

I support automatic failure for skills while getting rid of automatic successes. I would rather have neither than both however.

[Swordslinger]

You guys with the skill debate are looking at it all wrong. Why are we talking about real world athletes? Did we suddenly start playing GURPS?

The real question is whether fantasy characters who are great warriors (the athletes of fantasy) would have to specialize. Would we be surprised if Conan was good at lifting stuff, climbing, jumping and swimming? In fantasy when your warrior can't swim or climb, that's a drawback, that's not a lack of skill points, because it's unusual when they can't do that.

[souran]

its not that they never fail. Its that they fail very rarley. Which is why it sticks out in memory when experts fail.

That is why a system with rerolls is good. A reroll doesn't give you a much greater chance at completing a very difficult task but it does considerably reduce your likelyhood of failure on a simple task.

[Stubbazubba]

Wait, are you arguing that physical conditioning is not a skill in itself?

That seems to be K's point as well.

There is a skill set to utizling your body effectively, and keeping it in shape. Further most forms of athleticism involve repetition to teach mussle memory and hone action to the point of instinct.

I'd say that's what Ability increases are there to represent; you've trained your body to get everything faster, or nimbler, or what have you, and that's got nothing to do with intellectual quickness, it just takes time and practice. After all, Ability increases certainly don't represent your character becoming innately stronger or smarter or nimbler, but rather that you've developed that aspect of yourself to the point that it's now a significant step up from what it was last level.

its not that they never fail. Its that they fail very rarley. Which is why it sticks out in memory when experts fail.

That is why a system with rerolls is good. A reroll doesn't give you a much greater chance at completing a very difficult task but it does considerably reduce your likelyhood of failure on a simple task.

Hm, I am inclined to agree with this; experts are usually more and more consistent, while progress increases little by little.

What if skills capped low, but additional picks devoted to it would give you re-rolls on low die rolls? I don't know what a balanced ratio of picks to re-rolls would be, but it could be found.

[souran]

I'd say that's what Ability increases are there to represent; you've trained your body to get everything faster, or nimbler, or what have you, and that's got nothing to do with intellectual quickness, it just takes time and practice. After all, Ability increases certainly don't represent your character becoming innately stronger or smarter or nimbler, but rather that you've developed that aspect of yourself to the point that it's now a significant step up from what it was last level.

I would say just the opposite. Getting a +1 strength/con/agility is like getting human growth hormone or something similar. It is an increase in potential, not training.
So its exactly like a person just became innately smarter, stronger, or nimbler and it has no basis in reality. It another D&D aspect that puts the game in the realm of the fantasic.

Your ability scores represent your raw talent. Your skills are the training, either physical, mental, or raw experience that goes with repeatedly performing a task.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Gaining a level is increased potential, because it gives you the potential to raise a skill.

Becoming stronger, faster, or hardier is an increase in conditioning because your body has been conditioned to out-perform its previous capabilities.

[K]

Do you really think that someone in really good physical condition couldn't climb half as high as Chris Sharma does? Really? After a week or two of practice?

That's the point. Yes, the gab between Chris Sharma and some other really fit guy climbing for a week is huge in the terms we measure climbing, ie, speed, or ability to climb something super fucking hard. But for the purposes of what actually constitutes climbing, those people are much closer to Chris Sharma than they are to me.

Wait, are you arguing that physical conditioning is not a skill in itself?

That seems to be K's point as well.

There is a skill set to utizling your body effectively, and keeping it in shape. Further most forms of athleticism involve repetition to teach mussle memory and hone action to the point of instinct.

Physical conditioning is stats. Muscle memory is Dex, endurance is Con, and strength is Strength.

DnD wants to say that you can be a moron who knows reams of facts and great recall on one thing but terrible recall and ignorance on other things, a near autistic who is incredibly charming, a weakling who can scale mountains, and a clumsy oaf who can perform the most difficult acts of balance. That's what skill means in DnD.

Not only is that unrealistic, but it's actually a shitty mechanic overall.

I'm actually fine with levels meaning that a person becomes more superhuman, but the way you model that is to just increase people's stats as they level.

As for "skills," you really are better off with "trained" and "untrained" categories. After collapsing the skills, you realize pretty quickly that you don't need them as a subsystem at all. I mean, I'm perfectly fine with the assumption that stats increase across the board as you level and you simply say "make an Int check to figure out that spell."

I think there is a very strong argument to drop everything but crafts and professions as trained and untrained and just assume that as an adventurer you know about spells and magic, can ride a horse, activate magic items, disable traps, charm people, use rope, spot dangers, etc., at some level of proficiency. I mean, it's actually hard to find examples in fiction where the heroes are not expected to do all these things.

That way, the high CHA guy is the face, instead of the way it is now where everyone dumps CHA and the rogue is the face because he has the skill points and the class skills that make up for his CHA of 8.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I don't think that's the way to go, because you still want to model intra-NPC mechanics without it being done entirely by DM fiat. The fact that Napoleon has 4 INT, 5 Bureaucracy with a Military Tactics specialization for an 13-die pool while Alexander Hamilton has 4 INT, 3 Bureaucracy, with a Business specialization for 7 die in the dicepool while George Washing has 2 INT, 3 Bureaucracy, and specialization in Military for an 9 die-sized dicepool is extraordinarily helpful for roleplay and setting building.

I think that the current skill lockout system of 3E and 4E D&D is bullshit, but complete abstraction is not the way to go. Even if you personally don't care how much better Tan-Tan the Artificer is with wandcraft than Zalmar the Wizard, people do care how much better Masamune is at Blacksmithing than Melchior.

[K]

I don't think that's the way to go, because you still want to model intra-NPC mechanics without it being done entirely by DM fiat. The fact that Napoleon has 4 INT, 5 Bureaucracy with a Military Tactics specialization for an 13-die pool while Alexander Hamilton has 4 INT, 3 Bureaucracy, with a Business specialization for 7 die in the dicepool while George Washing has 2 INT, 3 Bureaucracy, and specialization in Military for an 9 die-sized dicepool is extraordinarily helpful for roleplay and setting building.

It's literally no different than just saying that those three guys have different Int scores.

Heck, if you want to nuance it up, you can give circumstance bonuses to some checks if someone has Trained for a Profession (the guy with Profession: Military Commander at Trained gets a +2 to military strategy checks for your nation and the guy with Profession: Trader gets a +2 to trade negotiations for your nation).

I mean, it's not a stretch of the imagination to say that some leaders are kind of dumb, but through corruption or force have gained power and live in a third-world hellhole, while others are smart and good at nation-building.

To get back to DnD, I have no problem if the Trained alchemist is better at checks to identify potions and the trained poet is better at impressing elves.

[Swordslinger]

I think that the current skill lockout system of 3E and 4E D&D is bullshit, but complete abstraction is not the way to go. Even if you personally don't care how much better Tan-Tan the Artificer is with wandcraft than Zalmar the Wizard, people do care how much better Masamune is at Blacksmithing than Melchior.

Do they? Does it really matter? How many levels of granularity for master swordsmith do you really need?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Heck, if you want to nuance it up, you can give circumstance bonuses to some checks if someone has Trained for a Profession (the guy with Profession: Military Commander at Trained gets a +2 to military strategy checks for your nation and the guy with Profession: Trader gets a +2 to trade negotiations for your nation).

We know that that +2 circumstance crap doesn't fucking work, even for sensible RNGs, so I don't know why you're advocating it as a replacement.

I mean, seriously, if George Washington was fielding troops against Napoleon we know that he would lose most of the engagements. He wouldn't do as badly as General McDouche and he'd certainly outperform Steve the Crap-Covered Farmer, but it's pretty clear that he's outclassed. Your system can't represent this basic level of granularity without it being and feeling totally arbitrary so you may as well just be playing magic tea party.

Do they? Does it really matter? How many levels of granularity for master swordsmith do you really need?

At the very least you need: Legendary Blacksmith people tell stories about (because that's a trope in fiction), Reknowned but not Epic Blacksmith, Competent Blacksmith, Mediocre Blacksmith, and Untrained.

It that seems strange to you consider this: people generally don't give a toss whether Superman is competent at his job of being a news reporter or not because it won't affect the vast majority of his adventures whether he's constantly on the verge of being fired or has a Pulitzer Prize. PCs, especially higher-powered ones, aren't really reducible to a skill check so Superman's reporter-ness can be left in flux.

If a NPC reporter however gets all pissy and declares to the PCs that he's going to run a smear campaign the PCs need to know or at least have a feel whether this is going to blow up in their face hilariously and karmically or whether it'll be effective enough to get them kicked out of the peace conference they're supposed to attend and have the police come a'knocking for the latest crimes, with of course a couple of results in the middle like 'people give your PCs the stink eye for a couple of weeks but forget it after some good deeds' or 'you become a joke on the national news and your celebrity friends and sponsors start distancing themselves from you'. The same goes for the above blacksmith. Or military leader. Or anyone really.

IOW, while it isn't important to model the various kinds of success Superman can achieve in the newspaper business, it's extremely important to know what Jimmy Olsen and J. Jameson can do for you.

[echoVanguard]

We know that that +2 circumstance crap doesn't fucking work, even for sensible RNGs

I'd be very interested as to how you could back up this claim, Lago. Most of the math in my research indicates otherwise.

echo

[CatharzGodfoot]

At the very least you need: Legendary Blacksmith people tell stories about (because that's a trope in fiction), Reknowned but not Epic Blacksmith, Competent Blacksmith, Mediocre Blacksmith, and Untrained.

It that seems strange to you consider this: people generally don't give a toss whether Superman is competent at his job of being a news reporter or not because it won't affect the vast majority of his adventures whether he's constantly on the verge of being fired or has a Pulitzer Prize. PCs, especially higher-powered ones, aren't really reducible to a skill check so Superman's reporter-ness can be left in flux.

If a NPC reporter however gets all pissy and declares to the PCs that he's going to run a smear campaign the PCs need to know or at least have a feel whether this is going to blow up in their face hilariously and karmically or whether it'll be effective enough to get them kicked out of the peace conference they're supposed to attend and have the police come a'knocking for the latest crimes, with of course a couple of results in the middle like 'people give your PCs the stink eye for a couple of weeks but forget it after some good deeds' or 'you become a joke on the national news and your celebrity friends and sponsors start distancing themselves from you'. The same goes for the above blacksmith. Or military leader. Or anyone really.

IOW, while it isn't important to model the various kinds of success Superman can achieve in the newspaper business, it's extremely important to know what Jimmy Olsen and J. Jameson can do for you.

You can get pretty good granularity with only Untrained, Trained, and Mastered, plus an attribute. If the progression is 0/4/8 and you use D&D attributes, you have all the integers in the interval [-4, 12].

Reporting may also involve more than just Profession (reporter) checks, including Sense Motive, Gather Info, Sneak, and so forth. This gives even more granularity.

[hogarth]

At the very least you need: Legendary Blacksmith people tell stories about (because that's a trope in fiction), Reknowned but not Epic Blacksmith, Competent Blacksmith, Mediocre Blacksmith, and Untrained.

It's totally okay for Legendary Blacksmith to be a prestige class (even if PCs aren't excited by it). In fact, I think there are at least 3 Legendary Blacksmith-style prestige classes in 3.5E!

I would argue that there isn't a need for "one +1 bonus short of Legendary Blacksmith". Who needs that guy?

[souran]

Physical conditioning is stats. Muscle memory is Dex, endurance is Con, and strength is Strength.

That is simply NOT the case. Atheletics, Acrobatics, and Endurance are the CONDITIONING. They are keyed off the ability score in question and NOT intellegence so they are clearly NOT the "mental" side of these abilities.

Your stats are are raw and untrained capacity, nothing more. If you elminate these as skills you destroy the granularity between a person with talent and a person with conditioning. That may be fine or it may not.

However, the skill system probably does actually need these skills to make your diffuclty/level curve come out correct. Otherwise you need one chart for skill based tasks and another for non skill tasks.

DnD wants to say that you can be a moron who knows reams of facts and great recall on one thing but terrible recall and ignorance on other things, a near autistic who is incredibly charming, a weakling who can scale mountains, and a clumsy oaf who can perform the most difficult acts of balance. That's what skill means in DnD.

Actually it does'nt really mean this at all. The only real thing we have to base what a stat "means" on is int where we know that 3 is animal intellegence. Even this is crap because animals show very different levels of intellegence.

We also know that 0 in a physical score is physically crippled to the point of immobility and 0 in a mental stat is comatose. A person with a low charisma might have a speach impediment or a stutter and therefore they could quite realisitcally overcome there innate disadvantage with practice. The novilzation of characters with defined low intellegence is almost never STUPID but instead "simple" or without a particularly complex view of the world (Cameron).

Not only is that unrealistic, but it's actually a shitty mechanic overall.

I'm actually fine with levels meaning that a person becomes more superhuman, but the way you model that is to just increase people's stats as they level.

As for "skills," you really are better off with "trained" and "untrained" categories. After collapsing the skills, you realize pretty quickly that you don't need them as a subsystem at all. I mean, I'm perfectly fine with the assumption that stats increase across the board as you level and you simply say "make an Int check to figure out that spell."

Altough the "realism" and "granularity" arguements for skill ranks are just not worth the hassel they create. If you have two players who have taken the skills to be stealthy the difference should be their stats, not who was dinking with skill point games. Further, usually the trained/untrained method is enough to seperate a test into "should pass/can pass" groups.

The skill system is not any more unrealistic than anything else about D&D. The idea that stats should be what increases I think is kind of an odd notion, but thats really because of the difference between what we think stats represent. If stats include their own condtioning then having them increase makes sense. If stats are the innate makeup of a person then they really shouldn't.

I think there is a very strong argument to drop everything but crafts and professions as trained and untrained and just assume that as an adventurer you know about spells and magic, can ride a horse, activate magic items, disable traps, charm people, use rope, spot dangers, etc., at some level of proficiency. I mean, it's actually hard to find examples in fiction where the heroes are not expected to do all these things.

That way, the high CHA guy is the face, instead of the way it is now where everyone dumps CHA and the rogue is the face because he has the skill points and the class skills that make up for his CHA of 8.

Its important that player characters feel like they have the skill set to do their jobs. Every character should be assumed to know how to ride, swim, read the most common language, understand the level of common mathematics of his era, know about the technolgies of his level of civilzation to a general level.

Does this mean there should be seperate swim and climb skills, almost certaintly not. If your game has two characters who need the differeances between swimming and climbing to be relevant to the game and characters in order to differentiate themselves then they have playspace issues and this is not going to really help.

On the other hand there are a number of different characters who are portrayed as "better riders than average" or for whom the relationship to their horse/mount is important to hteir character. Zorro, Gandalf, the Lone Ranger and lancelot are all renowned for their level of horsemanship. This might make ridding a suitable skill area but it should make it so they can do "tough" things relabily, not that they are super human on horseback.


Again, skills should make people seem more complete, not less. Either you have fairly broad skill categories and you ignore the ugly aspects like swimmer mountain climbers or you make everything a really specific skill and give everybody dozens of skill points.

Honestly for a functional game the first seems like the only workable option.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Your stats are are raw and untrained capacity, nothing more.

Why?