Should skills advance on a separate track in fantasy TTRPGs?

[Lago PARANOIA]

We already know of d20 modern's biggest fuck-up: that you have to be a kung fu master in order to be a master hacker. So swap in another genre (sci-fi, superhero, historical, urban fantasy, etc.) instead of 'fantasy' for most TTRPGs and the answer is a resounding HELL YES.

On the other hand, for a lot of fantasy games it gets a bit more muddled. Yoda and Gandalf and Maleficent don't eschew tracking bears or playing the piano or whatever because they'd be bad at it; they don't do this shit because it's beneath them. Yet when they bust out the swords and deciphering and intimidation and shit they end up better at it than specialists that are lower-level. What's more, even if the game declared that being a high-level Jedi knight or wizard doesn't mean that you can ride a beast of burden or reprogram a droid, they have more than enough superpowers to skip the skill check and bust out a game effect of equal or greater effectiveness.

That said, there's equal precedent in fantasy for superpowered badasses known for the skill in question to get their shit handed to them in fair contests by preternatural muggles. Athena gets shown up by Arachne in weaving in most versions of the story. Georgian fiddle players can beat Satan on a lazy afternoon. No one is really going to bat an eye if Muramasa beats Hephaestus in a weaponsmithing exhibition. And out-thinking a certified war god on the battlefield is a rite of passage for most Mary Tzus.

So assuming the answer to this question is 'yes', how should things proceed? How do you make an expert scholar or musician or engineer that doesn't have to kill a bunch of orcs? How far should muggles be able to advance on this track before they get into 'holy shiz that's impossible' territory? And if they are allowed to get that far, should they do anything special to reach that tier? How do you balance a legendary-but-mundane mason against a wizard that can conjure a castle from scratch? What about a legendary mason who also happens to be a wizard going up against a different but equally leveled wizard who is not a mason -- what should the difference in castlemaking be? If skills advance on a separate track, what can you do about people who create characters like Goku (who has no skills at all outside of fighting) against Iron Man (who has a ton of skills in addition to their superpowers)? Should adventures be balanced around the assumption that most people are going to make Mr. Fantastic, Goku, or something in-between?

[Seerow]

I tend to think there should be explicit tier breaks. When you cross the threshold into a new tier, you gain access to a new set of stuff you can do, and stuff from the previous tier becomes somewhat easier for you. But you advance the actual skill bonus completely independently of those tiers.


Basically the higher dc stuff gets you access to harder/more obscure things, and higher tier gets you access to more raw power. So you can totally have Einstein the level 1 commoner with ridiculous Knowledge(Physics) and Profession(Researcher) checks, but no matter how high that bonus gets he's not going to be able to match Tony Stark's Paragon Tier equivalents of the same skills giving him access to super tech.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Just completely divorce different sorts of advancements from each other. If, in the end, Yoda can use 'force piano' to play as an expert-level pianist without investing in the pianist skill, that's fine as long as Victor Borge wasn't investing in piano instead of force.

The main issue is how separate ability sets advance. You won't be gaining piano experience from killing people.

[OgreBattle]

This must have been the thought process that created point-buy systems. With that being said, why not use point buy for that kind of storytelling?

[Meikle641]

I just had that sort of thing as hobbies in Biwa, and gave them for free each level. They're a separate pool, so taking non-combat/flavour stuff won't weaken the character.

[Josh_Kablack]

So assuming the answer to this question is 'yes', how should things proceed? How do you make an expert scholar or musician or engineer that doesn't have to kill a bunch of orcs? How far should muggles be able to advance on this track before they get into 'holy shiz that's impossible' territory? And if they are allowed to get that far, should they do anything special to reach that tier? How do you balance a legendary-but-mundane mason against a wizard that can conjure a castle from scratch? What about a legendary mason who also happens to be a wizard going up against a different but equally leveled wizard who is not a mason -- what should the difference in castlemaking be? If skills advance on a separate track, what can you do about people who create characters like Goku (who has no skills at all outside of fighting) against Iron Man (who has a ton of skills in addition to their superpowers)? Should adventures be balanced around the assumption that most people are going to make Mr. Fantastic, Goku, or something in-between?

I hate to say it, but the 4e Skill system is actually pretty close. Everyone gets defaults that increase with level, but Skill training or not makes as much difference as an entire ten level tier. Having a skill based off a primary combat stat for you class makes roughly the same difference as a tier at the start and then diverges further at higher levels. Add then the application of feat, power and item bonuses make for more divergence.

A level 1 character optimized in a skill with a 20 in their max stat, skill training, a skill enhancing feat has a +12 with a skill before race, powers or items.

A level 30 character who didn't care about this skill has roughly a 10 dump stat, no training, and +15 default from level.

That handles your Yoda playing the Piano situation, where they are on a competitive RNG. Or at least it does until the system collapses under the amount of bonuses Yoda can stack as soon as his player cares.

******


Well, my own preference is for a weird hypothetical hybrid of classes and tiers with skills, feats and class features:

• At mundane tier skills do mundane things like follow deer tracks and start campfires and clear mundane obstacles.
• At heroic tier some feats and class abilities become available which either enhance some skills and other abilities come on line which render some skill uses obsolete. 3e D&D does a lot of the rendering obsolete: with Light and Burning Hands as options, being able to start a fire with Wilderness/Survival is no longer as meaningful. With a Fly spell available having ranks in athletic skills for the purpose of Climbing or Jumping is only useful for obstacles beyond the spell's duration. However 3e doesn't do a whole lot of the enhancing pre-existing skill ranks - Tome Skill feats were an attempt to add this sort of functionality to skill ranks. However the key here is that the game itself still treats challenges as if PCs have none of these abilities and will only use mundane skills to navigate adventure.
• At paragon / leadership/ mangement tier, mundane skill uses cease being challenges. if your character doesn't have a given mundane skill, your company / army / kingdom has someone who does. Your henchmen and hirelings handle the basic lockpicking and bridgebuilding you need. At the same time, this is where tall-tale skill uses start to come online, allowing PCs to complete large scale construction / demolition / engineering tasks inside combat round timeframes . Heracles gets to muck out the stables by diverting the river, Popeye gets to use Fabricate a boat by punching trees instead of having to take the time to do carpentry and shipwright stuff, Pecos Bill's weather sense now lets him actually lasso and rassle a tornado. However at this level, your realm/ army / faction faces so many different challenges at any given time that the thrust of adventures is triage and proper delegation.
• And then at epic / immortal/ divinity tier: well this hasn't ever really worked, so it gets cut from the game.

[ACOS]

This must have been the thought process that created point-buy systems. With that being said, why not use point buy for that kind of storytelling?

Throughout my entire reading of the OP, I found myself thinking this exact same thing.

---

@Josh:
Objectively speaking, I am unable to totally hate that part of 4e (thought I do have some quibble, but I think that is simply a function of my own personal tastes and such).
As to the 2nd part of your post: I thought that was just part of the assumptions made by those playing the game above "noob mode". That being said, there are plenty of skills that remain relevant well in to the heroic tier. I also think that the epic uses of skills come online way too late to be relevant ... sure, you can (at least theoretically) get that level of use earlier, but when players are performing at that level, you run in to the "collapses under its own weight" problem you mentioned.

[Dogbert]

Lago:

Are you asking whether skills should advance differently in fantasy TTRPGs (as the thread's title says) or in -d&d-? Because point-buy games have been doing what you want since forever. I can list at least ten games off the top of my head without that problem (granted, none of them have progression by levels).

What you're talking about is more of an issue that's endemic to zero-to-hero games (and not all of them, even). d&d is a fantasy game, but not all fantasy games are d&d.

[JigokuBosatsu]

I would also put forward an idea from The Vampire Lestat, of all places. Lestat talks about how his vampiric (read: high level) agility and memory allow him to play all the Paganini he wants, but it's quite obviously mimicry, and nothing compared to the work of a human master.

So maybe there are skill tiers that are only reachable by actually buying the skills and training them up, versus the results you get from big bonuses. But is that a granularity we care about? Do we give a shit that Gandalf successfully gets to the top of a mountain but did the wrong knots in his line?

[CatharzGodfoot]

I would also put forward an idea from The Vampire Lestat, of all places. Lestat talks about how his vampiric (read: high level) agility and memory allow him to play all the Paganini he wants, but it's quite obviously mimicry, and nothing compared to the work of a human master.

So maybe there are skill tiers that are only reachable by actually buying the skills and training them up, versus the results you get from big bonuses. But is that a granularity we care about? Do we give a shit that Gandalf successfully gets to the top of a mountain but did the wrong knots in his line?

It sounds like Lestat has enough of a bonus to pass a play Paganini check, but not enough of a bonus to get an amazing success. This sounds more like an issue of being able to buy hits with attribute points than parallel ability systems. It's the 'how do you calculate successes' part of the game.

[MfA]

Training should be able raise skills, without progressing your character in other ways. XP (or it's equivalent) should also be able to raise skills. Maybe +1 to a skill for a year of study with some diminishing returns at the high end in a D20 game? It becomes slightly more obvious just how magical leveling is this way, but really it was clearly magical from the start so I don't care.

It doesn't matter for balance between players, the DM determines how much training you got before your character became an adventurer and you can have caps on some of the most useful ones for adventuring. Goku would simply have everything in athletic and perception skills.

[hyzmarca]

I would also put forward an idea from The Vampire Lestat, of all places. Lestat talks about how his vampiric (read: high level) agility and memory allow him to play all the Paganini he wants, but it's quite obviously mimicry, and nothing compared to the work of a human master.

So maybe there are skill tiers that are only reachable by actually buying the skills and training them up, versus the results you get from big bonuses. But is that a granularity we care about? Do we give a shit that Gandalf successfully gets to the top of a mountain but did the wrong knots in his line?

It sounds like Lestat has enough of a bonus to pass a play Paganini check, but not enough of a bonus to get an amazing success. This sounds more like an issue of being able to buy hits with attribute points than parallel ability systems. It's the 'how do you calculate successes' part of the game.

It sounds more like he has the Mimic (Music) skill at sufficient level to perfectly copy any musician's performance but doesn't have the Play Music skill (or has it at very low level).

Thus, if he witnesses Paganinni (or any musician) play he can produce an exact copy of the performance at will, but lacks the skill to produce an original performance.