The Gaming Den

The most common and basic dicepool system is the long standing "stat + skill" style, with all of White Wolf and many smaller games using that system. Honestly it's pretty good. It's easy for people to understand the divide between natural talent and training, and it's easy to fall back on when unexpected situations crop up. But is it actually any better than just having skills be themselves? Let's break this down in both mechanics and 'feelings' to see if it really holds up.

In terms of how the system would feel, I don't think there's much of a difference either way. Honestly, being smart doesn't mean you know dick about any specific topic, so why does a high intelligence stat give you a much larger base dicepool for mechanical engineering or whatever? And being a powerlifter with huge manmuscles won't make you good at climbing by default- quite the opposite really, since you have much more weight to try and balance effectively. So while I can dig why people want to pair their skills with base stats, it makes sense only in some cases and you have to really stretch for others. I don't think players would balk if you had them buy skills that represented their dude being strong instead of a stat and skills that represented their dude being strong.

In terms of mechanics, you basically have a much higher investment cost if you want similar skills, since you no longer have the common pool boosting stat to add. So making a "smart character" means you have to purchase all your "smart people" skills at much higher amounts to be significantly better than other characters. Also you'll have to cram actions into skills that are a best fit for them instead of defaulting to a stat when you run into edge cases. And... that's it? Honestly, giving people a discount to buying similar skills instead of adding a stat to them seems much more like what a stat should represent, in that natural talent makes learning things easier.

So, is there any reason why you should keep a stat + skill system instead of just having a skill system? It seems like it would simplify things quite a bit to only have the one.

Because skills are specific while attributes are generalized and thus useful for things like defaulting and derived stats.

Also, the whole power lifting comment just hits me as missing the forest due to the trees given that you're essentially equating strength with mass and concluding that being strong makes you a shitty climber. That's just dumb.

Stat+skill provides a clean, simple default system (stat) and provides the ability to be generally good or bad with areas of specialization. I think all the benefits of stat+skill can be had with small skill lists and large skill groups - if you buy "academic skills" or "athletic skills" that ends up with far fewer fringe weird things than buying "is smart" or "muscles have muscles", and either would theoretically allow you to then buy "particularly good at math" and "champion swimmer" and, if you feel like it's worthwhile to fuck around with the math enough to balance it, "surprisingly bad at throwing heavy things".

One thing that you'd wanna provide is either reasonable (and easy to calculate) defaults or sufficiently small numbers of skills/large numbers of points that defaults aren't necessary. Because the number of times i've been in a game where someone was like "roll your dex+stealth" and the player was all "I don't have stealth" and the MC was like "ok then roll your dex" is amazingly high and having a) the ability for people to not fucking fail at stealth bc they didn't manage to master the skill list and b) a quick resolution system for that is super important.

Whipstich: Rock climbers and cyclists can both validly claim to be strong as fuck, but if you think their massive muscles are gonna give them any edge in the other arena, you're wrong. And while there is a level of abstraction to be had here, my argument (don't wanna speak for spongeknight here) at least is that "good at lifting things" == "good at punching things" == "good at climbing" is way too much abstraction for most things - pretty much anything short of high fantasy where all of those are gonna go out of style pretty quick anyway.

And my point was that strength and mass isn't the same fucking thing, especially in an rpg context where characters more likely to be hopped up on vitae or Bull's Strength than steroids.

spongeknight wrote:So, is there any reason why you should keep a stat + skill system instead of just having a skill system? It seems like it would simplify things quite a bit to only have the one.

Why do you have a skill system at all?

All games have some sort of state. This can be crunchy and full of numbers like HP, armor class, status ailments, and character positions on a grid, or less quantitative but still stateful. Most of the time, players take turns around the table describing how the state of the game changes, and, if you're doing it right, everyone has fun.

Games that strive for consistency and verisimilitude tend to lump together game-changing actions which are perceived as related in some way, so that a character which is capable at actions X and Y is also capable when it comes to action Z. One way that D&D does this outside of its skill system is by parceling a higher hit die (better at taking hits) with a better attack progression (better at dealing out punishment). Skill systems do it by giving characters a single number that represents competence at a group of related activities. A skill like "Climbing" usually means that you're good at rappelling down rock faces, going up and down ladders quickly, brachiating through the trees, and bouldering. Someone who is good at any one of those things in real life is not necessarily good at all of them, but, unless your game is about specific modes of climbing, you probably don't care to be so pedantic about what constitutes "climbing."

By the same token, it's desirable to have some means of correlating competence across skills. Two straightforward ways that SR4 does this is with skill groups (by encouraging players to invest character-building resources into thematically related skillsets) and by using stat+skill dice pools. If you're disturbed by the apparent lack of verisimilitude from having a character be a champion sprinter and a champion shot-putter because they were just born that strong, you might be playing the wrong game (or the rules you're using might need to be revised).

IOW, using stat+skill is a quick and easy way to model correlations between skills. As pointed out, it also gives you a good way of backing off from skill dice (for when you need characters to make a check for a skill they don't have) to a coarser-grained representation of character competence.

I don't see anything particularly wrong with using skill lists or a job system to provide you with correlation between competencies and backoff to some default value (like levels in your Sneaky Guy job instead of your Dex score), but balancing such a system and keeping it playable would be a challenge.

An interesting project would be to take a bunch of genre fiction you want to emulate and looking at correlations between action words, to see what kinds of templates emerge. At that point, you could play around to your heart's content with various hierarchical clustering or dimensionality reduction algorithms to arrive at conclusions like, "Rand al'Thor's actions are 20% the 'hitting things with a sword' word cluster, 30% the 'going crazy manipulating saidin' word cluster, 25% the 'awkward interactions with women' word cluster, and 25% the 'crazy conversations with past lives' word cluster. A negligible percentage of his actions come from the the 'being really lucky', 'running around in wolf-dreams', 'channeling saidar', and 'gossiping about men' word clusters." Then your Wheel of Time skill system could have coarse-grained character competencies (represented as stats or otherwise) which correspond to these action word clusters, with the Rand and Egwene class templates providing skill points in proportion with the observed competencies of the characters they're based on. (This assumes that the things a character should be good at are the things they spend their time doing, but fixing that is outside the scope of this discussion.)

momothefiddler wrote:Whipstich: Rock climbers and cyclists can both validly claim to be strong as fuck, but if you think their massive muscles are gonna give them any edge in the other arena, you're wrong. And while there is a level of abstraction to be had here, my argument (don't wanna speak for spongeknight here) at least is that "good at lifting things" == "good at punching things" == "good at climbing" is way too much abstraction for most things - pretty much anything short of high fantasy where all of those are gonna go out of style pretty quick anyway.

100% on the nose. It's easy to recognize that a stronger person will be better at climbing than a weaker person with the same amount of training and practice, but that idea doesn't translate to other things easily. The most dextrous person in the entire world might not know the first thing about stealth- they're not going to be good at it just because they theoretically could move in the appropriate ways. The smartest person in the world might know fuck-all about medicine, so why can he make checks at a better bonus than someone with training just because he's smart?

Also, defaulting is incredibly rare and is fairly easily rolled into a "close enough" skill. I, for instance, have never actually had to default to a stat only in any of the stat + skill games I've played. That might not be the average experience, but I don't think defaulting is incredibly common either.

Before focusing on 'realism' you should think about how the mechanics of the game influence what kind of characters are made.

A Stat+Skill system encourages people who pump a stat (such as strength) to focus on skills that interact with that stat.

A combat heavy system where your strength determines melee power and also interacts with various skills means that people who are good at melee are encouraged to also focus on certain skills.

There's also the case of how granular you want to get and how many points you have to distribute. If climbing and lifting and running fast are different skills then an action-man character will have his divide his points across them than if they were all part of the "Athletics" skill.

Another thing you could consider is having inclusive skills like "Athletics" that covers climbing, running fast, and so on with a [tag] like "wirey" or "hulking" so being wiry help with proportionate strength activities like climbing and gymnastics and being hulking helps with sheer strength activities like lifting and pushing.

spongeknight wrote:I, for instance, have never actually had to default to a stat only in any of the stat + skill games I've played. That might not be the average experience, but I don't think defaulting is incredibly common either.

The fall back mechanic argument for stats is one of the only good arguments stats have going for them.

But, in this and many contexts, it is still somewhat flawed.

In the end a fall back is, well, a fall back, which essentially means they are a thing you resort to when something else is failing. To some, admittedly variable, extent this means that the better your "real" mechanics are at fulfilling your game play objectives the less you need a fall back position and the less argument there is for your fall back position slapping some attribute based lipstick on what is in the end all too often really just a fairy tea party pig.

The other problem is that when your fall back is getting as close to fairy tea party as Stat+0 vs whatever because we suddenly need a mechanic for WTF? then there are actually rather a lot of alternative fall back options ranging from pure fairy tea party to entirely alternative semi-formal fall back positions.

Like say Ninja Burger. Where many of the skills are really narrow, and the fall back skill for when they don't apply isn't a Stat that contributes to other skills, it's just a skill labelled "Other".

Stat+0 is a workable fall back, but it isn't the only workable fall back and generally you want your game to avoid (and ideally not be built around catering to) a mere fall back failure state.

With a stat + skill setup, it's harder for one person to be the best at everything connected with a skill. e.g. one PC has a great dex + stealth, but maybe someone else in the party can at least match them at perception + stealth. I think this is good.

OTOH, sometimes the GM may be an arsehole and make you roll strength + piloting rather than the dex + piloting that you expected, which is a downside to the system.

I'd be tempted to eliminate the "+". Some things in the same ability might need stats and some skill.

Rappelling down a cliff might be skill, but pulling yourself up a cliff might be stat. Active stealth might be stat, but passively hiding in a bush might be skill. Etc, etc.

spongeknight wrote:So, is there any reason why you should keep a stat + skill system instead of just having a skill system? It seems like it would simplify things quite a bit to only have the one.

The system you're describing is basically GURPS: it's easier for someone with high Int to be good at biochemistry, and being good at biochemistry gives a good score in chemistry and in biology but doesn't help in mechanics. GURPS doesn't use dicepool, but you can tweak that and create a "GURPS-Dicepool" I guess.

Anyway, GURPS is probably the system the most complex I know that is still usable. Stat + skill has the advantage of being simpler and requiring less accountancy, while giving more or less the same results.

Stat+Skill has more variance due to bigger dice pools if you have both high skill and high attribute i guess.
Stat+Skill has the one silly point of going from skill 0 with high stat(knowing nothing about it) to skill 1 with high stat(knowing a bit about it) and suddenly being better than average at something . .

spongeknight wrote:So, is there any reason why you should keep a stat + skill system instead of just having a skill system? It seems like it would simplify things quite a bit to only have the one.

That's what Risus does, and it is very interesting how they take the obvious Spiral of Death.

I'm attempting a system at the moment where stats don't directly affect skills. Primarily because I want to make a slife-of-life game where basketweaving self-actualization is important, and the friend I talk to about game design mentions often the importance of being able to specialize in, say, playing the trumpet, without having a polymath with no training in the trumpet beating you with a lucky roll.

Right now the idea is starting to resemble something like GURPS, with 3d6 blackjack resoltuion, and specializations being a skill that Xibitz nested in a broader skill. In fact, I may just have to take the GURPS skill list and strip it down into something that seems in-genre for magical girls/idols/etc.

You might want to look at the SR3 skill/attribute system maybe.

Various people have tried to have games model learning in a remotely realistic way. And their experiments have all been shit because keeping track of synergies in knowledge and the vagaries of memory is way too complicated for something that you're supposed to be doing with a pencil and a sheet of paper in the background while you are telling stories about fighting Orcs. It's not even remotely practical.

So crap like RuneQuest's "Learning by Doing" or GURPS' skill defaulting or Shadowrun's skill web ends up being a nightmare of accounting. And let's be honest here: it's not actually more realistic at the end of the day than straight up Classes and Levels like you were playing AD&D in 1979.

The real question isn't "why do we need to add stats?" The real question is "why are we bothering with skills?" We could model a character who was a brilliant concert pianist but couldn't creep across a lawn at night and we could model a character who could lift a motorcycle over his head and couldn't swim, and we could do all kinds of crap, but all of that kind of granularity has an enormous cost is accounting and very little benefit in realism or storytelling capabilities.

The reality is that every single thing we are bothering to track as a potential difference between characters is something that we are also having to track as an actual number and label on every fucking character sheet. If your game is going to derdle about with how good any character is at trumpet playing vs. painting, that implies an amount of character accounting that is beyond anything I want to even think about.

You really honestly have to make a very compelling argument for any amount of complication you want to add to the game over giving each character a "goodness" score that determines how "good they are" at "stuff." And "because it's more realistic" isn't a compelling argument. You're actually going to have to make sophisticated arguments about role protection and team dynamics and shit.

A dicepool game is especially bad about splitting hairs with character abilities. While in a curved or flat RNG against a TN it is perfectly OK to have the default of a character be zero (or +0, as it were), in a dice pool game your value sets the amount of dice rolled. So all defaults have to be positive integers. That makes things inherently less forgiving about keeping track of different values for Pistols and Longarms proficiencies or whatever the fuck. Because all of those fucking things have to be positive integers which means you can't just leave them implied at zero the way you can with a dice and TN system.

-Username17

Ditching skills does sound like something I've wanted out of systems in the past. Having Batman whip out a hacking device he created by studying a Reach Scarab from his variable power toolbelt, instead of making a Hacking roll because he's super smart and knows every skill, for example.

I suppose it might look something like Josh's Feng Shui heartbreaker then, where if you want Magical Pop Idol to be a supported role, you give out music schticks that do things like charm crowds out of combat, and if combat is a thing, shoot Skyrim dragon shouts out a magically-amplified cordless guitar. And someone else who just wants to play trumpet without any associated schticks can write "plays trumpet in a jazz club" as a melodramatic hook.

FrankTrollman wrote:A dicepool game is especially bad about splitting hairs with character abilities. While in a curved or flat RNG against a TN it is perfectly OK to have the default of a character be zero (or +0, as it were), in a dice pool game your value sets the amount of dice rolled. So all defaults have to be positive integers. That makes things inherently less forgiving about keeping track of different values for Pistols and Longarms proficiencies or whatever the fuck. Because all of those fucking things have to be positive integers which means you can't just leave them implied at zero the way you can with a dice and TN system.

Why? Can you elaborate on that?

malak wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:A dicepool game is especially bad about splitting hairs with character abilities. While in a curved or flat RNG against a TN it is perfectly OK to have the default of a character be zero (or +0, as it were), in a dice pool game your value sets the amount of dice rolled. So all defaults have to be positive integers. That makes things inherently less forgiving about keeping track of different values for Pistols and Longarms proficiencies or whatever the fuck. Because all of those fucking things have to be positive integers which means you can't just leave them implied at zero the way you can with a dice and TN system.

Why? Can you elaborate on that?

Because it isn't d20/3.5.

malak wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:A dicepool game is especially bad about splitting hairs with character abilities. While in a curved or flat RNG against a TN it is perfectly OK to have the default of a character be zero (or +0, as it were), in a dice pool game your value sets the amount of dice rolled. So all defaults have to be positive integers. That makes things inherently less forgiving about keeping track of different values for Pistols and Longarms proficiencies or whatever the fuck. Because all of those fucking things have to be positive integers which means you can't just leave them implied at zero the way you can with a dice and TN system.

Why? Can you elaborate on that?

If you're using a dicepool system and your default is zero, that means rolling zero dice, which means automatically failing at anything which would call for a roll, so if you want an untrained character to have any chance of success at something anyone can ever fail at, you need a positive integer default. In a die and TN system, a default of zero means making an unmodified roll, which means you can succeed at any task with a target number below the maximum roll.

Is there any mathematical or game-balance reason why you can't set the default size of dicepools to, say, 3 and just have negative integers? I know about the interface reasons, but what about the game balance ones?

Well, a stat of -2 and a base size of 3 would be exactly identical to a stat of 1 and a base size of 0. So you could do that, but it would be more annoying to read. If you use the stat for something other than just dicepool size, having negative numbers would probably also make that more complicated to explain.

But it's just re-zeroing, so no, there's no mechanical difference. At least not inherently; if you were to multiply the stat by something having negative stats would obviously screw that up.

The only justification I can see for using a different base is leaving space to expand the baseline downwards so you can give normal people a zero and have space to add children.

name_here wrote:you need a positive integer default.

Then... just do that?

It REALLY isn't hard to do if you really wanted it to work that way. I mean, I don't see why you would and in the end I just see it as yet another in the endless litany of good reasons to just not use shitty dice pools as your resolution mechanic, but of all the issues to wring your hands over with dice pools "we would need to set a positive integer default!" is bloody easily solved.

And in a hypothetical attempt to eliminate Stat from Stat+skill like the OP describes a single fixed positive integer default is a simpler solution than the default to Stat+0 fall back, which is, lets remember a multiple and unfixed positive integer default.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Is there any mathematical or game-balance reason why you can't set the default size of dicepools to, say, 3 and just have negative integers? I know about the interface reasons, but what about the game balance ones?

You'd pretty much have to do that if you didn't default to stats. And no, there's no reason why you couldn't just say that an average adult rolls 3 dice on anything they could be expected to do just by being a member of society and having opposable thumbs. Anything that an adult couldn't be expected to do without training- fix a car engine, predict the weather, or whatever, you just wouldn't give them a dicepool for because they have no way of generating a success. I can't find any problems with that.

Sakuya Izayoi wrote:Ditching skills does sound like something I've wanted out of systems in the past. Having Batman whip out a hacking device he created by studying a Reach Scarab from his variable power toolbelt, instead of making a Hacking roll because he's super smart and knows every skill, for example.

I suppose it might look something like Josh's Feng Shui heartbreaker then,

In that no such system is likely to ever make it to completion.......