Skill consolidation

[Cynic]

There are a lot of 3.5 systems that use skill consolidation. AE uses notice instead of the "spot, listen, etc.." group. Athletics for "swim, climb, etc." Acrobatics for "Tumble, escape artist, balance."

While skill consolidation makes the game simpler, there seems to be a slight disconnect in the fact that it isn't necessary that someone who is an expert mountain climber has to be as skilled at swimming.

Sure the dm can rule 0 it but we all know that rule 0 is a stupid and dumb idea.

So is there actually enough of a problem in consolidating these skills rather than letting them go their own way.

Most of the skill problems also arise because of DMF. Normally, I've been known to just allow my players to pick whatever skills they want as long as they don't go over their skill points.

It's effective in that it allows PCS to actually be proficient in skills that might work for their characters. But, it still raises the point of what's a guy with 5 skill points going to do if they want to be a Sir William of Baskerville or a Sherlock Holmes. Both of those character are athletically fit and great detectives.

So how does a monk detective actually be effective? Hell, or anyone else for that matter.

[Hicks]

Was there a question about skill consolidation in your post, or is it just a question on how to play monk detectives effectively?

[Psychic Robot]

While skill consolidation makes the game simpler, there seems to be a slight disconnect in the fact that it isn't necessary that someone who is an expert mountain climber has to be as skilled at swimming.

yeah but it makes it way easier to manage overall so the net win goes to consolidation in my book

[Hicks]

The whole purpose of any skill system is to make any N/PC feel "distinct" from another.

Skill consolidation, taken to its extreme limit, has every PC and NPC possess only a single skill, "ACTION", which dictates the success of any action undertaken, regardless of what that action is described as being, which can lead to players and MCs "feeling" their N/PCs completely homogeneous, interchangeable, and therefore irrelevant and unnecessary. However, a.completely condensed skill system is not as detrimental as you may think if designed to hide its nature. Any system that has a universal bonus applied to all skill checks (even a simple +1/level bonus) with N number of distinct skills is just a single ACTION skill system with a bunch of situational modifiers masquerading as a multi-skill system; the illusion of differerentation covering the inherent homogeneity.

[Wrathzog]

While skill consolidation makes the game simpler, there seems to be a slight disconnect in the fact that it isn't necessary that someone who is an expert mountain climber has to be as skilled at swimming.

Maybe... but being Athletic, beyond being just physically strong, is going to help with both of those activities.

Which is why I like the idea of specializations like WoD has. You can allow for that "Distinction" without having three dozen different skills cluttering up people's character sheets.

[Koumei]

I like to consolidate them into two skills: Thinking Things and Doing Things

Okay, joking aside, consolidation is generally good. Notice vs Stealth is generally good (it generally means stealthy characters aren't as hosed as they have half as many rolls they need to win), even if it does mean Blind and Deaf are the same thing and Invisible creatures are also Inaudible and Scentless.

Rolling a bunch of physical skills together can usually help things along (whether it be Climb+Swim=Athletics or Tumble+Balance+Jump=Acrobatics or whatever), and in the latter case there, cuts down on a little bit of the synergy where you take 5 ranks in one of those skills just to get +2 to another.

I could just about see sense in rolling Spellcraft into whatever the relevant Knowledge category is (Arcana for Arcane casters, Religion for Clerical casters, Nature for Druidic casters, Engineering for Quantum Physicist Casters). But people generally don't care enough about this one for it to be worth the effort. That includes me. Next.

I'm not so sure about what some have proposed, mixing various Classic Rogue Skills together to call them Larceny. I mean, you want their high skill points to be good for something and an actual advantage, where everyone else needs to forsake all other skills if they want to pick up the CRS and the Rogue can take them and a bunch of others. But maybe. Obviously Open Lock is part of Disable Device.

And I pretend the Class Skill system just doesn't exist. Which has been known to utterly shit people when I write a class up and they want to use it in a game with an anal DM, or they want to be an anal DM, or they want to put it on a wiki/pdf and make it look proper, but in these cases I have a suggestion:

Suck it

[RobbyPants]

There are a lot of pros and cons to consolidation. One nice thing is for opposed rolls that used to be two separate opposed rolls. When working with Stealth vs Perception, the sneaky guy only needs to win one contest. When working with Hide and Move Silently vs Spot and Listen, now he needs to win twice. The scout only needs to make one of those checks to notice the other guy. So it fixes issues like that.

Of course, you run into weird issues where it's dark out, so the scout gets a Perception penalty, which somehow makes it harder to hear the guy, or there's a lot of cover noise that somehow makes it harder to see the guy. In that situation, I think it would be judicious to either ignore the penalty if you can (potentially) both see and hear the guy, or halve the penalty in this case.

Another way to allow you to "split" consolidated skills would be to have feats or something else to allow you to specialize. So, you could split Athletics into Climb and Swim by taking a feat that lets you go awesome feats while climbing or swimming. The skill is still represented by Athletics, but you have a character who is also particularly good at one aspect of it.

[Emerald]

Of course, you run into weird issues where it's dark out, so the scout gets a Perception penalty, which somehow makes it harder to hear the guy, or there's a lot of cover noise that somehow makes it harder to see the guy. In that situation, I think it would be judicious to either ignore the penalty if you can (potentially) both see and hear the guy, or halve the penalty in this case.

This isn't really a problem if you don't assume that Perception is merely making a Spot and Listen check at the same time and instead assume that a Perception check is making use of all available senses to detect people, and that Stealth is hiding from every sense as well as possible. Assigning standard penalties for partially and completely impeded senses (let's say -2 and -4 for the sake of argument), regardless of what those senses are, simplifies things and works well with the goal of consolidation. If it's dark out you get -2 for impeded sight and if it's noisy out you get -2 for impeded hearing, because in either case you're functioning less than optimally and the specific impediment doesn't really matter because the person you're trying to find is hiding from both vision and hearing. If it's both dark and noisy you get -4 total, same as if you're deaf or blind because in those cases you're more than a little disadvantaged, and if you're both deaf and blind you instead get -8 if there's still any way to sense them at all. (Obviously if you don't use a sense, like smell on a human, impeding it doesn't give you penalties.)

This also simplifies things like scent, blindsight, etc. because instead of (A) giving each sense its own rules on range and detection type and such and (B) making them binary see you/don't see you abilities that require a Darkstalker analog for stealthy types to compete, you simply let them give bonuses or manipulate penalties. Scent might give a +4 bonus, for instance, so that a bloodhound could detect things better than an unimpeded human and effectively ignore some vision- and hearing-related penalties, and many objects and constructs might "impede" scent due to having no distinctive scent of their own; a bat's blindsight simply lets it ignore vision-related penalties but doubles hearing-related penalties, and so forth.

[RadiantPhoenix]

The whole purpose of any skill system is to make any N/PC feel "distinct" from another.

Skill consolidation, taken to its extreme limit, has every PC and NPC possess only a single skill, "ACTION", which dictates the success of any action undertaken, regardless of what that action is described as being...

We can even consolidate that: we'll call this skill "level" so that people have one less number to keep track of, it will replace all other numbers and allow unprecedentedly low amounts of conceptual space to be spent on the mechanical aspects of characters.

[Josh_Kablack]

More Skills in a system

• Characters become less likely to have overlapping skill sets
• A group of PCs becomes less likely to have any given skill
• Players have more options at chargen.

The first one prevents a potential problem where players in a game group might have issues with spotlight time - that's a positive, but I'm willing to argue that it's a relatively minor positive. The second one makes it either less likely for a PC group to succeed at a given skill check or requires the MC to take the extra effort to tailor skill checks and challenges to his PC group - both of those are negatives. Surprisingly, the third can go either way. If a player has too narrow a range of options they may conclude that their input is meaningless ("I rolled all 9s, guess this guy's a dwarf fighter") but a player presented with too wide a range of options will take a longer time to design their character and becomes more likely to miss a skill more appropriate to their character concept.

Fewer Skills in a system

• Characters are more likely to have overlapping (or outright identical) skill sets.
• A group of PCs becomes more likely to have any given skill.
• Players have fewer options during chargen

The first of those can be a minor negative, but frankly I don't care. Fiction, especially the adolescent power fantasy action movie/comics/anime/video game genre stuff that so much of RPGs are based off of, is rife with characters who have overlapping or exactly the same power sets. Ever hear of Ken and Ryu? Howabout Superman and Super Girl (not to mention Bizzarro) ? Iron Man and War Machine ? Spider Man and Venom ? etc etc. So there's really no reason to discourage characters from making characters with overlapping ability sets. Any problem with spotlight time or characters overshadowing each other is a problem that needs to be solved at the game group dynamics level, not at the system ruleset level.

The second of those is a large positive. The MC can now run off the shelf modules and not worry that nobody in the group has the required skills

And again, the third can go both ways. As the prior posts about having a 1-skill system with the single skill of "Action" or a 2-skill system with"Thinking and Doing" illustrate, it is possible to take this to absurd levels. But contrariwise, published systems tend to take this too far the other way resulting in option paralysis and characters lacking needed skills.
For an example: let's say I'm joining a HERO game set in the Wild West. If I want a character in an old west setting who modifies and improves firearms with the goal of developing something like the Spencer Repeating Rifle a few years ahead of actual history, then is it most appropriate to take Weaponsmith (guns) Inventor, Mechanics, Profession (Machinist), Knowledge (coppersmithing), or Science (metallurgy) ? - I've played and run HERO for over a decade and I can't answer that definitively. Furthermore, I'm reasonably sure that a new MC would answer that different than I would so either I get a character who can't do what I wanted the character to do or I would have to talk the goal over with the MC to decide how the rules actually worked - which sounds okay, but bypasses the entire point of using a pre-existent rules set. That is in fact the MC writing their own rules on the fly.

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Of course Consolidation vs Expansion is not the only option. Assuming we are talking something like 3.x D&D, you can also implement

Expanded Skills, Expanded Skill Points

In this set up you keep the core D&D (or HERO, or GURPs, or M&M, or Shadowrun or whatever) skill list, but you give everyone more skill points or make skills cost less than the listed purchase cost. I've seen people run 3.x with "double the skill points from classes", I've seen people run Shadowrun and M&M with skills at half listed cost.

This is often easier than re-editing an entire skill list and maintains syntax with prepublished modules. It makes it ever-so-slightly more likely that characters will have overlapping skill sets, a lot less likely that characters will fail to have a particular necessary skill but at a cost of complexity at chargen/


Expanded Skills, Generous Defaulting

In this setup, you keep the base skill list of the game, and you keep the base skill points and costs of the game. But you let PCs roll skill checks for skills they don't have with skills they do have with no more than a minimal penalty.

This is loosely how I'm running my current D&D game. For example: A PC who needs hear something can roll Spot instead of listen, and if they succeed they "see" a flock of birds taking sudden flight instead of hearing the musket shot, but the result is the same, they are aware that something loud is over yonder.

The advantage of this is that it makes it less likely to matter that the PC group is missing any given skill without increasing complexity nor becoming less compatible with existing modules.

The drawback to this is that it does make characters less distinct and leads into some magical-tea party into what exactly characters can do. You get characters rolling Knowledge (Arcana) on Listen Checks to see if their mystic pendant's vibrations have been altered - and in a system like D&D where skill bonuses divergence increases with level, that sort of thing eventually becomes more reliable than an untrained Listen Check, regardless of the penalties.

[Neurosis]

There are a lot of 3.5 systems that use skill consolidation. AE uses notice instead of the "spot, listen, etc.." group. Athletics for "swim, climb, etc." Acrobatics for "Tumble, escape artist, balance."

I did exactly this for the d20 system game I'm working on right now, CARRIER (uh, no real relation to the crappy dreamcast game). So I guess I come down on the side of skill consolidation being a good thing.

Spot & Listen become Perception, Balance & Tumble become Acrobatics, and Jump, Swim, and Climb become Athletics.

[Stubbazubba]

One option to avoid the disconnect of how becoming a better climber makes you an equally better swimmer is to make Skill Specialties or Foci, which give you an additional bonus on that skill check for that specific scenario. Taking a Skill Focus costs the same level-up wise as adding a rank in the skill, but it gives you a +2 or even +3 to that specific scenario. For instance, a character with an Athletics +4, but a focus of Swimming, gets a total of +6 or even +7. On the DM side, this means that climbing walls and swimming should have slightly increased DCs, to make specializing your character worth it. After all, a great swimmer who has never climbed a rock wall really shouldn't climb it just as well as a great climber.

This gives players options and an ability to differentiate themselves more, while keeping the skills the DM needs to prepare for at a reasonable minimum. Now that I think about it, you could then take a second focus on the same scenario and get an additional bonus, for that scenario. So there is a distinct difference between a novice climber, an experienced climber, and a master climber. Someone with just Athletics +2 would be hard-pressed to get up a tough cliff, with one skill specialization in climbing (additional +2, total +4) it would be a challenge, but reasonable, while someone with a double specialization would do it without any trouble (additional +2, total +6), all without magically becoming a better swimmer.

[Chamomile]

+6 is a 30% increase in your odds of success on d20. That's not a huge gap.

Numbers quibbling aside, I generally agree.

[TheWorid]

Skill consolidation, taken to its extreme limit, has every PC and NPC possess only a single skill, "ACTION", which dictates the success of any action undertaken, regardless of what that action is described as being, which can lead to players and MCs "feeling" their N/PCs completely homogeneous, interchangeable, and therefore irrelevant and unnecessary.

So, basically TWERPS? The game in which you have one stat, Strength, which is used for everything, augmented with a very simple class (basically skill in this case) system?

I like to consolidate them into two skills: Thinking Things and Doing Things

...and this one sounds almost like 3:16 Carnage Among the Stars, whose core two stats are Fighting Ability and Non-Fighting Ability.

[DSMatticus]

3.5 benefits greatly from some skill consolidation. Sneaking gets simpler and clearer, less rolling. Making a physically-adept ninja-esque character (balance, climb, jump, tumble) can take half your skillpoints, which is pretty sucky for the little bit each one does. Consolidating the whole lot into athletics/acrobatics makes them a much more reasonable value.

If I were doing a skill system, I'd prefer a skill and subskill set-up. It'd be pretty hard to find someone who is an olympic runner but an absolutely terrible swimmer. It'd also be hard to find someone who is an olympic runner and an olympic swimmer at the same time. They're related but not equivalent.

In a system like Shadowrun, that's easy to emulate; condense some skills into athletics, allow specializations. You can even allow variable specialization: 1-4 athletics, 1-4 specializations in athletics' subskills. Representing the original range of 1-6 base skill + 2 specialization).

For D&D, it's trickier; I'd say for every 5 ranks in a 'condensed skill', let them have a skill specialization ([subskill]) for a +3 bonus. So you take athletics, get 5 ranks, and then they take skill specialization (swimming).

[Stubbazubba]

+6 is a 30% increase in your odds of success on d20. That's not a huge gap.

Numbers quibbling aside, I generally agree.

Well, that's without adding his Ability Modifier. And, this is possible at, like, first level, so a +6 plus a +2 ability Modifier is a total of +8, which is a 40% increase in odds. A first level 3.5 char with a +8 to a skill roll is, in my experience, in a pretty good position. IC, this would represent that he's a great natural swimmer, but otherwise not very athletic. As he trains his body, his swimming will improve with it.

[TOZ]

Random thought. Since everyone who can takes Perception, and everyone that wants to Stealth takes it, would it be too bad to just cut those out of skills and base it on class level? Thus relying on ability mods, armor mods, and feats to make them different? I see this making Stealth harder since monsters have fuckton Wisdom bonuses and what not, but at least characters aren't charged points to fail.

[Neurosis]

I do not think that's a good idea, TOZ. Characters should be able to allocate points/specialize/generalize (by allocating points) to Perception and Stealth just like to any other skill.

And having actual skill ranks probably makes fail less likely.

[Novembermike]

Random thought. Since everyone who can takes Perception, and everyone that wants to Stealth takes it, would it be too bad to just cut those out of skills and base it on class level? Thus relying on ability mods, armor mods, and feats to make them different? I see this making Stealth harder since monsters have fuckton Wisdom bonuses and what not, but at least characters aren't charged points to fail.

This is actually a fundamental issue in 3.X. If you want to do something, you need the class, the points in the skill and the stat to back it up. If you want to know about spells you have to be a Wizard (or other caster), you need to spend your points in the skill spellcraft and to be good at it you need a good INT. This isn't terrible for Wizards since INT already helps them, but it's kind of a pain for Sorcerers or Clerics. This also makes it awkward ofr a Rogue to detect traps (Wis) or a Paladin to have a good grasp of the knowledge of his order (Int).

It's like 3.X is halfway between something like GURPS and a real class system and doesn't know what it's supposed to do.

[Psychic Robot]

Random thought. Since everyone who can takes Perception, and everyone that wants to Stealth takes it, would it be too bad to just cut those out of skills and base it on class level? Thus relying on ability mods, armor mods, and feats to make them different? I see this making Stealth harder since monsters have fuckton Wisdom bonuses and what not, but at least characters aren't charged points to fail.

you could do that but it makes sense to be "trained" in sneakery/noticing things so you might as well leave it in and give everyone more skill points

[Prak]

What about a situation where skills are consolidated, for example Athletics (climb+swim, maybe jump), Acrobatics (balance, jump, tumble), Social (bluff, diplomacy, intimidate), etc. And then for broad skills like these, you can take specialties and deficiencies, so, you're the big strong man who climbs mountains all day, but suck at swimming, so you take a specialty in Climbing, and a deficiency in Swimming, at, say, 4. So you get +4 to athletics checks for climbing, and -4 to athletics checks for swimming.

Seems to solve the "many skills is system bloat" and the "climb well =/ swim well, necessarily."

[tussock]

Pfft. Climbing and sneaking and knowing about monsters or any other mundane shit is just something that PCs do. Don't even roll for it, it just works.

When the Rogue buys climb skill, it lets him backstab giants in the eyes and scale walls of force at a run. When a Cleric buys Religion, it lets him call up armies of fanatics (or undead). When the Wizard buys Arcana it lets him bring summoned Fiends to heel with an ancient curse. When the Fighter buys Ride it gives him a faithful animal companion by jumping on any creature's back.

Make skills do something worth the time they take at character creation. Stop making people futz about with 1st level crap when they're not 1st level any more. "Do I know the Red Dragon breathes Fire?" "Can I climb a tree?" "Can I stay on my Horse?" Really?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Make skills do something worth the time they take at character creation. Stop making people futz about with 1st level crap when they're not 1st level any more. "Do I know the Red Dragon breathes Fire?" "Can I climb a tree?" "Can I stay on my Horse?" Really?

That is of course an unfortunate reflection of the design goals of the skill system. Solving it is theoretically possible but highly impractical. Several reasons.

• A not-inconsiderable proportion of the playerbase do not want skills to do anything fantastical at any point. That means no balancing on clouds, at least within a reasonable campaign timeframe. This of course makes skills pointless because phlebtonium will come a lot faster than the skills will keep up.
• A not-considerable proportion of the playerbase want skills to be relevant at all ranges of play. You'd think that these people would have the decency not to overlap with caveat #1, but they do. But even if they don't mind players doing fantastical effects, some people are just dismayed at being told 'okay, you're level 9 now, don't bother rolling skills anymore just use the appropriate power'.
• Even if you accept caveat #2 and not caveat #1, a lot of people won't go along with the kludging. People will insist that even though they can accept Beowulf swimming to the bottom of a sea past a submarine that was crushed by the pressure, they don't necessarily want him having this same level of hardcoreness towards--say--gymnastics or even climbing.
• A lot of people have this mentality that because it's rolled it has to have a chance of failing. Even 4E D&D got into the act. You seriously can't have people using their Balance check to do awesome things like stand on clouds if a proportion of the playerbase insists on the ninja having a chance to fail it and fall through.
• Skills scale at different rates of effect. The differences in diplomatic skills between a peasant an an Angel Knight frankly aren't all that large (being about the difference in physics knowledge between Stephen Hawkings and Ray Comfort) but the differences in craft skills between a peasant and a Legendary Engineer are gigantic even though the Angel Knight and the Legendary Engineer are the same level. This is not an unsolvable problem, just really really hard to balance. See 3E D&D's fucking up of skill DCs to see an example.

I, personally, would put a hard cap on all skills and make them obsolete after a certain level and I wasn't restricted by space concerns. If you want to do something fantastical after that point you need to use an appropriate power. There's no such thing as a balance check that lets you stand on waves, you just have the Walk on Water power and it's easy to get.

[Username17]

That is one thing 2e did right. The skills were basically tags that did not much improve. As you went up in level you got more skills, but not particularly better skills.

They fucked it up when they left you trade those skills in for ninja powers, but such is the case for everything in 2e.

-Username17

[Emerald]

I, personally, would put a hard cap on all skills and make them obsolete after a certain level and I wasn't restricted by space concerns. If you want to do something fantastical after that point you need to use an appropriate power. There's no such thing as a balance check that lets you stand on waves, you just have the Walk on Water power and it's easy to get.

Is there any particular reason you have to obsolete skills and introduce powers at a certain point, instead of just saying that having X ranks in Y skill lets you do Z and still finding some way to make skill investment useful? The Epic Level Jokebook skill uses had ridiculously high DCs, granted, but the fact that there were both flat-DC skill uses and "For every +10 you add to the DC..." uses meant that people who cared about certain skills could actually do better than people who didn't while other skills had You Must Be This Tall options that everyone could use. I mean, if someone has invested in a given skill at low levels, I don't see why he should be told at a certain level "Congratulations, you and everyone else who is level X with one rank in Balance can walk on water now!" without keeping that skill investment meaningful.