Skills do nothing. Game design poison: nerdrage episode #1.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I was obviously talking about 3.5 where appraise doesn't work on magical items. I even pointed that out in my post

And I said:

I won't argue that a lot of the skills in D&D are too salami-sliced to be of any use or are too easily obviated by spells but still, is it really THAT hard to think of a game where:

I realize that 'to think of a game where' was too ambiguous, because it could mean 'a particular gaming session that uses 3.5E D&D' or 'any generalized gaming system'. But I meant the latter. And considering what the OP was going on about, I also think that it's more of interest.

[Red_Rob]

I also chose the Tussoc is an idiot response. His thesis is "skills don't do anything", but then even he admits that Diplomacy wins D&D.

I think the point was that any skill so broken as to "win D&D" will by implication never be used in its printed form, therefore is as close to useless as dammit. I saw this in my own group when I suggested the 4th level party could try a Diplomacy check and was told noone had any points in it because "seriously, that skill is so broken we assumed it was banned."

[Lago PARANOIA]

I think the point was that any skill so broken as to "win D&D" will by implication never be used in its printed form, therefore is as close to useless as dammit.

No one ever complains about the basic idea of people regularly running up to a guy and chopping off his head in one attack, but a significant minority (I'd say majority) of people, not just D&D people either, will bellow like castrated elephants if you achieve the same success rate with the diplomacy skill. Or similar skills.

I think you could make a strong case that any skill or any usage of a skill that speeds up the intended plot will be useless because a lot of groups will throw out the gaming book and filibuster the gaming session/whine piteously/indirectly gaslight and shun anyone who does so in a significant way. Use Magic Device is more overpowered than diplomacy, but it draws a lot less ire because a well-timed social skill can significantly cut out huge chunks of an intended adventure.

Note that I said that you get the flipping out from speeding up, not from weirdness. A lot of people will allow a plot derail as long as the new plot is as convoluted and effort-demanding as the old one, but very few people will tolerate a plot speeding-up.

[ishy]

No one ever complains about the basic idea of people regularly running up to a guy and chopping off his head in one attack(...)

Really? I've seen more complains about people being able to kill non-mooks in one hit than I have about anything else in d&d save, fighter vs wizards and alignment.

[Lago PARANOIA]

No one ever complains is a hyperbole I must admit since there are people (mostly 4Erries) who love padded sumo, but I still maintain that people are okay with the basic idea as long as it doesn't get out of hand. People do complain about rocket launcher tag along with some people getting ultradamage while others don't (which is the complaint about SoDs), but threads asking for the elimination of the critical hit multiplier are rarer.

At any rate it certainly doesn't inspire the same level of vitriol as doing much the same thing with Diplomacy.

[Chamomile]

One-hit kills might be an issue for non-mooks, but people are still more prone to complaining over diplomancing a pack of random generic orcs into leaving you alone and apologizing for interrupting your travels as opposed to dropping some magical nuke on top of them that vaporizes them in one or two die rolls. It's the exact same game effect but people actually will complain more when you talk them out of it, probably because it doesn't provide a really awesome special effects scene.

[NineInchNall]

Here's the thing. Got linked from here to where some dude on wotc.com said ...
"I hate the new (5e) charm person because

Note that the thread in question was in existence prior to the playtest release or release of any hard info on 5e. The poster was talking about charm effects - ANY charm effects - and why he hates them.

[Dominicius]

I hate the fucking skill system. It does literally nothing that would not be better served by rolling your ability mods and should get completely replaced by mid levels by actual ABILITIES. Making separate points for things like bluff or climbing should not ever be a thing.

[Lago PARANOIA]

It does literally nothing that would not be better served by rolling your ability mods

I guess this would be true if you didn't feel that differentiating between Napoleon Bonaparte's (who has a high INT) military and logistical aptitude and Blaise Pascal's (who also has a high INT) was an important thing to model.

[Dominicius]

One had a class that was Military General (Napoleon) the other had a class that was Renaissance Thinker (Pascal).

[Lago PARANOIA]

And how exactly is that an improvement over the skill system? If my wizard wants to be a great battlefield tactician or my warlord wants to be well-versed in religious studies, should I halt their advancement and staple those classes onto them?

[deaddmwalking]

More importantly, how does the DM adjudicate either one? Unless he is both a great battlefield tactician and a Renaissance thinker, how does he decide if what they're suggesting is a good or bad thing?

And, of course, there must be guidelines about what either one would allow a character to accomplish.

Otherwise it's just 'background' and one player can say 'I'm an expert battlefield technician' and the other can say 'I'm a philosopher' and it doesn't matter except that it makes them happy and gives them suggestions for how to role-play the character.

[tussock]

@Napoleon vs Pascal. You can't do either of those guys with the 3e skill system. There is no "military strategy" roll, nor "invent new math" roll, nor any way to set DCs, nor any suggested results that might happen. So, no.

@Disable Device: Objections fair, if you have a +15 custom item that puts the DCs in range, for 22,500gp (!, wand of summon monster x30), and the DM lets you find and disable them without being effected first (given that most serious ones have a fair radius and are triggered by you just being there). Assuming you don't have a spare Zombie to throw at it.

@Hide: read the monster manual. Nearly everything has Darkvision to 60'. You cannot hide inside the radius of Darkvision. Things without Darkvision use lights, and you can't hide near them either. Cover is the only thing that works at all, and the DM has to provide you with some to hide behind, which may as well be full cover when you duck and then this skill roll doesn't even happen.
A mid level Rogue can't even steal an egg from a hen house, y'all saw that thread?

* Climb
* Jump
* Swim

If you want to model people who never get much better than real people, while performing nothing at all like real people, and wearing comedy fall-down armour. But people really do put points in those things and then complain that crappy 1st and 2nd level spells do it better, and so the spells get nerfed! Crappy spells originally. Nerfing bad spells to worse. Game design poison.

@Diplomancy bans: I think people object not to telling some Orcs to fuck off at 10th level, but that the same roll makes a Great Wyrm Red your best friend, no save. That is obviously going to be banned. No one actually gets to play a diplomancer because the mini-game doesn't exist for it. It is not at all like casting forcecage a couple times a day, it's like you have a forcecage of domination at will hidden in your otherwise crappy skill system.
And it causes people to want charm person banned too. Which is about as iconic a magic effect as there can possibly be in a fantasy game. Poison.

@DrPraetor: Thank you for the time spent.
[*]Gather Information: I use it too, but in games without it the players have to get all the same information some other way. It's a fine game effect, like making casters use some divination because I can't be arsed placing enough clues, it's just not a justification for having a skill system. Side argument, I guess.
[*]Intimidate: Yes, people outside combat yield, and then a little bit later they fucking hate you and come back to kill your ass. RTFM. In combat uses are worse than aid another, without serious boosts from elsewhere.
[*]Search: I have to agree, I mostly hate it for the "you must be this high" nature of the DCs when it allows take-20. It does mostly work and the DCs support skill purchase, except for finding spells that kill you when you get near them or look at them. "I prepared Explosive Runes this morning". Really high DCs are just your DM helping you justify your skill point expenditure, in a game without skills you'd still find all that stuff. Side argument again.



Anyhoo. The point I was intending to make before losing out to nerdrage.

• When people have to fiddle with their character building and get fuck all out of it they become offended when any easier-to-acquire mechanic, like a 1st level spell, does that thing better in every way.
• These common complaints have made recent designers of D&D remove vast swathes of awesome (and fairly mundane) effects from the game, to preserve this illusion of variable utility. That is unquestionable to me, but feel free to try.
• Aside, if skills were vastly easier to gain and use, even easier than 4e and scaled with level-appropriate effects that didn't likewise offend everyone, that would help future complaints.
• Can't we just give the Rogues Invisibility? And Improved Invis later on? That's what they [bneed[/b]. It doesn't have to be a fussy mechanic.

@Star Wars: Yes, in a game with no awesome at all, it matters not that your skills are also a pile of used tissue, they're still the best thing on your character sheet. It's only game design poison in a game where we want characters to become something more than Olympic athletes with shiny trinkets. More than 4e ever let them be.
NB: 4e is heavily based on the success of their Star Wars RPG. Where the spells, feats, and many class abilities function through the skill system. Take all that out and it's just poison again.

[Chamomile]

Differentiating between Napoleon and Pascal is best done with After Sundown style background skills. Napoleon gets a "military commander" background with a bunch of points in it and Pascal gets "renaissance thinker" or "new math inventor" or whatever. It's flexible, it's a dedicated resource to an almost completely freeform mechanic which means people won't neglect it because there's nothing else to spend those points on nor will they feel cheated when if they don't get to use it every session because it was clearly a niche thing from the get-go.

[Username17]

@Disable Device: Objections fair, if you have a +15 custom item that puts the DCs in range, for 22,500gp (!, wand of summon monster x30), and the DM lets you find and disable them without being effected first (given that most serious ones have a fair radius and are triggered by you just being there). Assuming you don't have a spare Zombie to throw at it.

Nice straw man. You don't need a +15 custom item. Hell, you don't even need a funky item at all. At 10th level, a "level appropriate" trap has a DC of 30, so you only need 20 points of bonuses. You get 13 from ranks and 2 for using thieve's tools, so your stat + miscellany only needs to be a total of 5 at 10th level to take 10 on level appropriate traps. I used a +5 item (for 2500 gp) to crest the DC to disarm 9th level spells. 100% of the time. As a 10th level character.

As for being allowed by the DM to find and disarm traps from outside their radius, you realize that the PHB explicitly says you can do that, right? Abjuration effects have a discernible presence out to the limit of their effect, not merely the literal rune written down. I've never encountered a DM who, when confronted by that piece of information, has not caved and allowed the Rogue to find and remove sigil traps.

A +15 custom item would be super helpful at 1st level, but if you have a halfway decent Int bonus, a bonus item of any kind is not needed from the moment you get skill mastery to the end of the campaign.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

@Napoleon vs Pascal. You can't do either of those guys with the 3e skill system. There is no "military strategy" roll, nor "invent new math" roll, nor any way to set DCs, nor any suggested results that might happen. So, no.

No fucking shit it's not, but I wasn't talking about 3E's system. I was talking to Dominicus about the merits of an attributes-only skill system. Nothing to do with third edition.

Look, here's a hint about what motivates me with these discussions: I don't give a shit about fixing 3rd Edition. I'll play 3E if it's available, the DM isn't a douche, and we're starting at least at level 5. I also don't mind discussing what worked and what didn't work in 3E, especially if it's being mined for future fixes. But I am waaaaay beyond the question of 'how would we get this to work within the context of d20 or 3rd Edition D&D'. I flat-out view projects like Pathfinder and Tome a waste of time. And I wouldn't be bothered so much by this if so many people people didn't INSIST on seeing everything through the lenses of 3rd Edition D&D. Like the fucking entirety of this thread. I thought that 'Game design poison' was going to be a general discussion about skill implementation, not a thinly designed 3E wankfest where anything not in the context of 3E gets discarded or hammered to fit that paradigm.

[ishy]

Look, here's a hint about what motivates me with these discussions: I don't give a shit about fixing 3rd Edition.

I'm not sure I understand your leaps in logic. If in a thread about D&D skills you want to talk about a non D&D skills you might want to make that clear. Like for example

Differentiating between Napoleon and Pascal is best done with After Sundown style background skills.

Or you may want to start your own thread (though seeing another Lago thread is probably going to make people depressed).

[tussock]

@Disable Device: Objections fair, if you have a +15 custom item that puts the DCs in range, for 22,500gp (!, wand of summon monster x30), and the DM lets you find and disable them without being effected first (given that most serious ones have a fair radius and are triggered by you just being there). Assuming you don't have a spare Zombie to throw at it.

Nice straw man. You don't need a +15 custom item. Hell, you don't even need a funky item at all. At 10th level, a "level appropriate" trap has a DC of 30, so you only need 20 points of bonuses. You get 13 from ranks and 2 for using thieve's tools, so your stat + miscellany only needs to be a total of 5 at 10th level to take 10 on level appropriate traps. I used a +5 item (for 2500 gp) to crest the DC to disarm 9th level spells. 100% of the time. As a 10th level character.

True. That's only four wands. Mea cupla.

As for being allowed by the DM to find and disarm traps from outside their radius, you realize that the PHB explicitly says you can do that, right? Abjuration effects have a discernible presence out to the limit of their effect, not merely the literal rune written down.

The PHB skill says you have to be within 10' to search, a symbol is a 0-range effect that creates a symbol which kills people that look at it from 60' away. Disable Device presumably isn't having you wave your thieves tools in the air from 65' out. Abjurations only create invisible sparkles if they sit within 10' of each other for over 24 hours, which is that 10' range thing again. Most of them aren't abjurations in the first place. Sooooo many holes.

I've never encountered a DM who, when confronted by that piece of information, has not caved and allowed the Rogue to find and remove sigil traps.

I let Rogues use their class features too, sneak around the place, run up 100' cliffs mid-combat, I let Fighters jump onto roofs and across rivers, ride hostile dragons, use diplomacy in a way that's not broken, and all sorts, but I know that shit's got no real support in the rules. I'm mostly in the "if it's cool, do it" school these days, which I picked up by getting away from the exquisite detail of 3e into the OSR for a while.

A +15 custom item would be super helpful at 1st level, but if you have a halfway decent Int bonus, a bonus item of any kind is not needed from the moment you get skill mastery to the end of the campaign.

Right, now we're dedicating class features and items to it. I get it, most of the skills do something functional if the DM cooperates and ignores various rules and the player buys just enough gear and feats and levels to make them work. Even Hide works with some automated personal concealment, magic boosts, feats, and skill mastery, as a Halfling Rogue, unless they have some common spells, or are a dragon, or have blindsight, or tremorsense, or ....

not a thinly designed 3E wankfest where anything not in the context of 3E gets discarded or hammered to fit that paradigm.

Yeh, limited header size, but I did call out 3e in the OP. I mostly chat about D&D because it's by far the easiest to get a game together for, despite WotC's best efforts. I'd tell you how fuck all games really support variant intellectual characters like that, other than the MTP sort of thing Chamomile mentioned, and maybe GURPS if your DM wants to make up some results to justify it, but you're right, with stat-only you still need a space to write down something like "I'm an Architect".

[hogarth]

* Climb
* Jump
* Swim

If you want to model people who never get much better than real people, while performing nothing at all like real people, and wearing comedy fall-down armour. But people really do put points in those things and then complain that crappy 1st and 2nd level spells do it better, and so the spells get nerfed!

I don't give a shit about those complaining people. I've never met one in person, so why should I?

The fact is that if your game system involves traps and doesn't have rules for jumping or climbing over them other than "Mother May I", it sucks. Having some rudimentary laws of physics in your game is not a bad thing.

[Neurosis]

Stabbing people until you're certain they will love you is a horrible method of gaining advantage on a social test,

Charm Person and Sleep totes need a sarcastic new name to reflect this weirdness.

Fraternity Rapist's Charm? Yandere's Charm? Hostel's Charm?

"IWBYUYLM"

[tussock]

OK. I'm in a different frame of mind today, nerdrage well dissipated, thinking cap going back on. Thank you all for the slaps. Let me start anew.

• Skills are largely mundane in effect, a bit better with certain class features. Many can be bettered with a bit of thinking: not just "why climb when you can fly", but climbing is free with a grappling hook, which is itself free with a few minutes spare.
• Most still require strong DM cooperation and support, though the feeling remains one of player empowerment due to the mechanics. Gather Information doesn't really change what you learn compared to games without it, but it feels like your character earns those clues. Same with some others.
• Many players do get that "small in the pants" feeling when other game effects make their character investments look worthless, I believe in rough proportion to how much busy-work is required to select and make use of such things according to the rules. The harder it is for a player to get his character climbing a wall despite significant investment, the more offended he is when someone levitates up instead.
• Game designers, between editions, seem to try and protect the wounded party's niche. In 3e to 4e case, the Dumb Melee Fighters got to nerf everything which made them look so useless, range, movement, durations, all sorts. Rather than accept an open-ended scaling Diplomacy skill was always going to be broken, they just auto-scaled all the DCs and forbade any similar magical effect, to support diplomancers of all things.

So if I wanted to rid this poisonous design effect, it would be to encourage designers to focus on the most iconic parts of the game first.

If Charm Person invalidates your heroic-mundane social skill mini-game, designers should ensure that mini-game works with trivial simplicity, without great investment, and still works with the spells in question (or throw it the fuck out). The classic Charm Person isn't unbalanced, it's iconic, everything else is unbalanced. If high level Fighters are too easily Charmed, give them better saves against such low-level spells, 2+.

The poison isn't so much in what skills do or do not achieve then, it's in the designers throwing away old, familiar icons of the genre with long-tested and stable mechanics in favour of yet another new, largely untested universal dice and skill system. Then calling it D&D, like we wouldn't notice.

[*]I think it's still a good argument that we shouldn't have complex mechanics with fiddly resolution options for any mundane sort of task that's going to compete with your more awesome game components like spells and magic items, and the d20 skill system is pretty damn complex when you look at something like "Balance", or worse the new "Acrobatics"-like multi-page jobs. I mean, AD&D said "make a Dex check", and people did. Ref save these days, more detail just hurts people who try and use it, especially past 5th level.

[MfA]

"The fact that to find those spells automatically sets them off?"

This is only if you subscribe to the "rogues are not and should and can not be magical in any way" school of thought ... in the games I played search found magical traps without setting them off, period.

Traps have a search DC, if you meet it you find it and can disable it without setting it off ... I don't need some BS story telling device to explain how it's done myself, but I can BS one if it's really necessary.

[Username17]

Plus the search DC goes down by 4 if the activation radius of two symbols overlaps for 24 hours or more because of an air shimmer, so obviously there's something to find air-shimmer-wise at the limits of the activation radius. I have literally never ever lost that argument against any DM, no matter how Gygaxian they were otherwise behaving. The very fact that the outer limits of a Symbol's effect become more noticeable under certain circumstances has in every single case caused the DM to rule that it is in fact possible to notice the outer limits of a symbol's effect the rest of the time.

Which is not to say that I haven't run into DMs who thought that you couldn't find a symbol until you were inside the activation area and presently exploding, it's just that in literally all cases I have gotten the DM to walk that back by showing them the effect-overlap rules.

-Username17

[CCarter]

Whoever revised the Jump spell for 3.5 badly needs keelhauling, if only since at level 1-4 with the revised version you get a better bonus to Jump checks by casting Expeditious Retreat (+12 vs. +10).

The 'poison' in design is that its easier to reduce a number, or completely rip out a thing, than it is to make more complex adjustments to get a system to work. The slightly better fix for Jump skill, I think (apart from hitting the skill over the head with a shovel by rolling it into Athletics, though that's fine too) would be to adjust it so there are more uses in combat, where spending a round casting the spell is going to be a drawback. (this in turn would need fixing of the rules where fighters aren't allowed to move and still full attack).

[echoVanguard]

The core idea of skills is perfectly fine - numbers that dictate how well you do things that don't involve direct violence against other creatures. The problem often occurs when other parts of the game stomp all over those skills as defined. A better design involves abilities giving you skill bonuses that don't push you off the RNG instead of working at right angles to the existing system.

echo