Do Futuristic/Sci-fi Games Need Skills?

[inkmeister]

So let's say you want to play a game in a cyberpunk or futuristic setting, perhaps something like Star Trek or near future post-apocalyptic, and you wanted to do so basically with D&D, because D&D is the best system there is, would you leave the system basically as is, or would you feel the need to have a skill system added on?

I notice virtually all futuristic/sci-fi/cyberpunk games have a skill system. My favorite one thus far, Stars Without Number, has a skill system, though the underlying game is basically classic D&D. I'm curious what you folks think, with justification one way or the other.

[Random]

For a futuristic setting, I'd feel the need to bolt on some way to codify education (what levels in what fields).

It makes sense that, in the future, civilized people would generally receive at least the quality of education we enjoy now, so every PC would know some stuff regardless of class.

Skills could be done with ability checks of some sort (just like many do for D&D), with the added benefit of getting an easier check (or no check) if you're educated on the matter.

[talysman]

To answer that, I have to start with how I'd handle skills for non-futuristic D&D.

I would allow broad backgrounds (professions, rather than skills) in ordinary D&D, basically the Secondary Skills system from the 1e DMG with ratings given in years. My backgrounds do not give "skill checks", they basically just act as gatekeepers for some specialist abilities and maybe grant a +1 on a 1d6 situation roll, where appropriate, or a +1 in a contest with another skilled individual who doesn't have as many years of experience.

I can't think of a reason I would need anything other than that for a futuristic setting, so really all I'd change is the available professions. Classes may need adaptation, but Fighters and Thieves could practically be used as-is; there'd also be some thief variants adapted to other talents, and the M-U class could be used for psychics and mutants, with just the spells and spell casting system altered to reflect psychic and mutant powers.

Clerics wouldn't exist, but the Cleric class is a model for a hybrid Fighter/M-U, so lower-powered psychics and mildly-mutated characters might use that as a guideline instead.

[barrataria]

Think of it this way.... (leaving the brand name aside) why does fantasy gaming need to be class-based? I've been working a lot with d6 lately and I just think I like skill systems better. Of course, it also assumes the game to be run will make use of all skills. I find that thinking that the attributes and skills make me think of including tasks that use them during design.

Also, to crib a thought from gnombient, there's any number of shared tropes/world assumptions that lend themselves to expression in class terms. There's the knight in shining armor, the wily wizard, the cunning thief. Even if you play a gonzo game there are assumptions most players come to the table with not least of which is that you'll have SOME of these elements in your fantasy game. I think that's less true for sci fi. ST is sort of a quasi-military setup, so classes would look like that. But Star Wars has different archetypes, and you wouldn't assume there would be a ship's doctor or brash smuggler in ST any more than there are even engineers on the Millenium Falcon.

So, sci-fi rulesets with skills (SWN being a good example) make it simpler to build characters to fit the setting and the game, which will probably look a lot different depending on what the design says about things like FTL travel, or the size of the Empire/Imperium/Federation, and so on. I can run any of those sorts of games with not too much trouble with d6 or Traveller or what have you. But if I change the setting, I need all (or mostly) new classes. Picking locks or detecting new construction are not really going to be too helpful in a sci-fi campaign, but if those are just two entries on a list of lots of skills they're easily ignored for other things more applicable, without re-inventing the wheel.

I'm less enamored with class as the answer to all ills these days anyway, but in sci-fi I think it works well. And TBH I like the design flexibility in using a skill-based system to handle fantasy. I even got out my DragonQuest books

[Finarvyn]

I think I started a thread about this years ago somewhere. I've often been puzzled about the notion that scifi games needed skills rather than levels. I guess I think that a class system would work just fine, and when I ran my "OD&D Space" games I had no problem with classes.

Think of it this way: classes are just skill bundles. If you are a thief in a fantasy campaign, you have a bunch of stuff you can do. In the same way, if you are a pilot in a scifi game I just automatically assume you have exposure to the basics of being a pilot -- steering, navigation, repair perhaps, whatever -- and can hand-wave it as a stat check. No real difference between the genres, in my mind.

Suppose I wanted to run a modern-day game. Most adults can drive a car. Most can operate a computer. A few can program a VCR. If you are a "tech" class I can assume you are better than most, but if you are a fighter type maybe you are decent but not great at it. Does my game gain a lot of advantage by making an elaborate list of skills, just to verify that tech guys are better at computers and fighters are better at combat? My opinion is that I don't need it.

Anyway, that's how I see it.

[inkmeister]

Good discussion, I hope more people will chime in with their opinions.

After posting, I discussed this over dinner with the wife, and she is strongly opposed to a skill system. So that means whatever sci-fi game I get going will not have a skill system. But it's still an interesting topic.

I have been rather biased against skills for some time. I like games fast and loose, without a lot of looking stuff up, and without consulting character sheets all the time to see if a PC can do something.

I am rather fond of the approach Talysman has voiced here. Backgrounds are very simple and intuitive. Whether you have background = class, or background = a common sense approach to modifying a basic d6 roll (or ability check or whatever), I think that is a sensible and accessible way to go.

I should point out that the creator of Stars Without Number mentions playing his game without skills as an option. I generally like the stuff he comes up with, but even his simple skill system is too much for my wife; she finds D&D character creation to be time consuming enough as it is.

For those of you running sci fi games (or who have run them in the past), what classes did you see fit to add? So far the pilot has been mentioned.

[Random]

Aug 12, 2013 19:20:25 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

If you are a "tech" class I can assume you are better than most, but if you are a fighter type maybe you are decent but not great at it.

I think it's important not to discount how decent the fighter might actually be at some relatively basic stuff.

For a real-world example, I'm not all that handy and I don't know jack about repairing much of anything, let alone appliances. But, my washing machine broke last weekend and it only took about five minutes to diagnose the problem and maybe another ten or fifteen minutes to dream up and implement stable enough jury rig solution. In D&D terms, I basically just passed an intelligence check and spent two turns fumbling with the thing.

[jcstephens]

Historically, Metamorphosis Alpha/Gamma World managed to do without both skills and classes. Character abilities were defined more by their gear than anything else. That's probably going too far the other way, but it was done and did work.

[talysman]

One of the problems I have with most skill systems, especially those for classless games, is that they tend to have you build everything about your character, and they're stingy when it comes to tasks you didn't place skill points into. My preferred approach is similar to Marv's: just assume they have enough general knowledge that they could get by in many different areas of expertise.

That's especially true of the kinds of sci-fi settings I plan on running (when I write the material for them. Atomic age horror and old school rocket patrol adventure. Heroes in those settings tend to be multi-talented. In rocket patrol adventures in particular, pretty much every character can fight, MacGyver some piece of tech, or pilot a ship. The only other archetypes are brainiacs who aren't as good at fighting, but are exceptionally talented in one area, or freaks with mind powers.

[geoffrey]

Aug 12, 2013 17:41:31 GMT -6 inkmeister said:

Do Futuristic/Sci-fi Games Need Skills?

No.

Let me quote a few things from this thread, starting on page 5:
knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7328&start=60

Melan wrote on page 5:

The trick is to concentrate on what people do instead of machines - less emphasis on starship-to-starship combat, and more on individual skill. Maybe something like Frazetta's graphics from the 50s and 60s.

I wrote on page 6:

I like the idea of the implied setting being informed by works such as:

REH's Almuric
Rice Burrough's Mars series and Venus series
Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus
some of Vance's stuff
Lewis's Perelandra and Out of the Silent Planet
original Flash Gordon strips
Clark Ashton Smith's futuristic yarns
the more sci-fi aspects of some of Lovecraft's stories

Just looking at the above, one could see that technology would be very much in the background (though definitely present). Instead of zipping between planets on spaceships, one would be just as (if not more) likely to travel to another planet by means such as wandering into a cave and then coming out of the cave only to find oneself on another planet.

Geneweigel wrote on page 7:

That is a nice list.

Its a nice list because there isn't a lot of things taken for granted in it.

Like "force fields" being an automatic concept because its a "sci-fi term" kind of "taken it for granted".

AxeMental wrote on page 7:

Ive think you hit on something here. The key is to throw technological logic out the windo for the most part (leaving just enough to make it plausable) just make sure what you present makes some sort of sense and follows the classics somewhat, (so no spell Jammer boats flying around crap (TSRs attempts at interplanetary travel began and ended as far as D&D is concerned with that abomination), but Flash Gordon style ships is fare game and passes the "classic" test (they have some sort of propulsion system, they're made of metal etc. (the Movie FG with Sam J Jones and Queen sound Track had cool ships I thought).

Also, once you allow the random and occasional, dimensional doors and other means of travel, never mind Ming like dimensional vortex thingys or whatever the hell that was (along with classic transportation in space ships) you have effectively D&Difide the game (the spot light is once again on the PCs adventuring, spaceships and laser rifles are tools picked up and thrown down by men doing dangerous things). No longer do your players overly worry about logic. Magic and science fiction really do fit hand in hand.

(AxeMental won that thread with "spaceships and laser rifles are tools picked up and thrown down by men doing dangerous things." )

Geneweigel wrote on page 7:

Anyway thats the tendency in a lot of sci-fi games to define differences where none is needed and it drags down possibilities.

Lest this post get too long, I'll end it there and post another.

[geoffrey]

Imagine a D&D game with a long list of skills, each one doing one of these things:

1. riding a horse
2. driving a wagon
3. driving a chariot
4. putting your armor on
5. paging through a book
6. lassoing something
7. tying knots
8. rowing a boat
9. building a boat
10. building a lean-to
11. sailing a ship
12. swimming
etc.

I assume that all PCs can do all of the above (and a lot more). If my D&D campaign were set in "the imagined future" (as Gary put it on page 5 of Men & Magic), then I would assume that the PCs could reasonably attempt to do most things, whether piloting a ship, re-programming a robot, accessing a computer, donning and using power armor, etc.

Of course, a space-fantasy D&D campaign needn't focus on the high-tech stuff. Consider David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus. The protagonist gets to Arcturus in a mechanical spacecraft. No emphasis whatsoever is placed on the craft itself. It is the merest plot device to get the main character from Point A (Earth) to Point B (Arcturus). As soon as the protagonist is on Arcturus, the ship is utterly and completely forgotten. This is no different than the fact that no D&D game I've ever heard of obsesses over different types of wagons, building wagons, driving wagons, combat in wagons, etc. A wagon just gets the PCs from Point A (Krshal, say) to Point B (the entrance to a weird cave). I have no interest in space ships or in wagons. They are only trappings. The focus must be on the PCs and their exploration of the weird and the magical. Whether they arrive at their destination in a wagon or in a starship is immaterial to me.

Plus, I would want D&D spaceships to be like the old pulpy rocketships that can be instantly piloted by someone who had never even seen one before (such as Flash Gordon). "Look! Here's the windshield, here's the steering wheel, and here's where we push on the gas. I bet that big red button shoots lasers or missiles or some sort of flaming nuts..." ZAP! "Yep!" I most certainly do not want the ships to be the Apollo craft with innumerable buttons and switches, and that could be piloted only after years of training.

So who needs skills? Fighting-men in space still fight with the biggest, baddest weapons they can get. Magic-users still cast spells. Clerics still call upon the powers of the divine. This all stays constant whether the scenario is the rudest Stone Age, or medieval, or sci-fi. The trappings are there to flavor the dish, not to abridge possibilities and limit the fantastic.

[Finarvyn]

Aug 12, 2013 22:26:56 GMT -6 geoffrey said:

I would want D&D spaceships to be like the old pulpy rocketships that can be instantly piloted by someone who had never even seen one before (such as Flash Gordon). "Look! Here's the windshield, here's the steering wheel, and here's where we push on the gas. I bet that big red button shoots lasers or missiles or some sort of flaming nuts..." ZAP! "Yep!"

This also reminds me of Star Wars. Luke drove a landspeeder quite often and some sort of skyhopper, and this qualified him to hop into an X-Wing and zoom around shooting at TIE fighters. Watching Han Solo gives me the impression that starship repair was a lot like a guy who can pop the hood of his '67 Chevy and twist something with a wrench until it sounds like it's running right.

In Firefly Mal buys an old beater starship, hires a few high school dropouts to crew the thing, and heads off into space. Kaylee has no real formal training in repair other than maybe some brothers who fixed ships (or something like that), but can intuit her way through the engine. As geoffrey noted, we're not talking about highly trained NASA astronauts with engineering degrees, but basic folk living in the world of their time.

Tech can be complex or it can be simple. Simple means you can fake it with classes if you like.

[thorswulf]

Maybe instead of skills for classes, what you need are class aptitudes. Fighters fight better than other classes(obviously), rougish types generally have an aptitude for being stealthy, and getting away from a bad situatio in a hurry, and so forth. I think Xplorers handles this pretty well.

[sinenomine]

Speaking only for SWN, I found some sort of skill system to be necessary to provide a degree of mechanical distinction for characters. In a traditional fantasy game, characters tend to have qualitative differences in their abilities- you can cast fireballs, or you can heal wounds, or you can wear plate mail, or you can pick locks, or you have pointy ears, or so forth. Sometimes a character might have abilities from more than one bucket, but as a general rule characters are not compelled to be mechanically identical. Even in Moldvay Basic, where two first level fighters differ in little more than their gear and hit point rolls, you always had the option of playing an elf or cleric or thief instead.

Sci-fi settings tend not to have this kind of qualitative differences in ability. In a group of Intrepid Space Heroes, they're not usually differentiated by magical powers or unique abilities that others in the group could never obtain- they're differentiated by what they're good at doing. There's the Doctor, the Scientist, the Assassin, the Pilot, and so forth. Sure, you can always toss in an alien with some unique physiological trait or a psychic with Space Magic, but the bulk of the differentiation happens in the aptitudes of individual PCs.

You don't have to establish this differentiation with a skill system, of course. You could use classes instead, granting special mechanical distinctions to each. This starts to get cumbersome when players want to mix and match their skill sets, however, and so I decided a simple skill system was an easier way to provide that kind of individuality.

[barrataria]

Aug 13, 2013 5:58:13 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

Simple means you can fake it with classes if you like.

I guess it's all in your perception, I think it's easier to fake with SWD6 style default attributes. Luke probably has a 4D rating in MECH, so whether or not he has a particular skill in speeder op or starfighter pilot doesn't matter so much... he's better at that than Greedo, for instance, whether or not he's had special training. And what kind of a class is Luke (at least in Ep. IV)? A fighter? A pilot? One nice thing about the skill system is that one character can be crap at an attribute (say TECH) but well-trained in a skill (say First Aid). You can have a noble doctor that's really incompetent with tech other than medicine but very socially skilled, if that's what you want to play. With the skill bundle/class thing you end up with all doctors being good at all the same things. Are they all terrible shots? Incompetent pilots? I guess this is just a turnaround of the irritating "I want my magic-user to be good with a sword" discussions, but I appreciate being able to give characters and important NPCs texture in that way in sci-fi games which are going to cover so many tech levels and alien races and so on.

I also find it a lot easier to speculate which attribute something falls under a d6 attribute than which "class", especially since classes in D&D tend to overlap somewhat. Detect a snare on a trail... druid? Ranger? Thief? Fighter? Barbarian? At some point some of these things make all the characters look like the others too, a la C&C and the fighter flavors. And if they're just "background skills" everyone knows, like riding in an Old West or fantasy game, it's easy enough to make a short list of those things.

I'm not seriously going to argue skills over class, especially to this board, since I like D&D and run it happily. Maybe what I'm really saying is I'm usually bored/underwhelmed with sci-fi "classes" as implemented.

Oh, and as to Kaylee I thought several hints in the show implied that she had some kind of psychic/empathic connection with machines (and maybe a part of her early connection with River). And it's certainly clear that other than Wash and maybe the Shepherd no one knows much about how to make the thing work. Which makes sense to me, as I don't think the Firefly universe assumes those things are all automated/magical. If you're handwaving that or playing Conan-in-space then such differences probably don't matter.

[geoffrey]

Aug 13, 2013 5:58:13 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

This also reminds me of Star Wars. Luke drove a landspeeder quite often and some sort of skyhopper, and this qualified him to hop into an X-Wing and zoom around shooting at TIE fighters. Watching Han Solo gives me the impression that starship repair was a lot like a guy who can pop the hood of his '67 Chevy and twist something with a wrench until it sounds like it's running right...

As geoffrey noted, we're not talking about highly trained NASA astronauts with engineering degrees, but basic folk living in the world of their time.

Yep, those are great Star Wars examples.

In my own Carcosa, I have the following note: "Because of the Space Aliens' plysical similarity to humans, Space Alien technology is much more comprehensible to mankind than is the lost technology of the Primordial Ones or of the Great Race."

Remember that the humans on Carcosa are at an Ancient/Medieval level of technology, yet any one of them can automatically use any and all of the following of the Space Aliens' technology:

projectile weapons (laser rifles, etc.)
power cells
grenades
grenade launchers
bombs
mini-missiles
telescopic sights
nightvision sights
high-tech armor
space suits
force fields
absorption fields
communicators
healing doses
night vision goggles
submarines
aircraft
spacecraft
etc.

The only thing I make the characters roll for is re-programming robots, as follows:

1-8 No effect.
9 Robot goes haywire, attacking every living thing.
10 Robot now a servant of its re-programmer.

(One attempt per character per robot.)

I use intuition and DM fiat as to how long it takes a character to figure out a new piece of high-tech, but it's measured in seconds or (at most) minutes. "OK, you're in the cockpit of the ship. The hostile Space Aliens are running towards you, about 200 yards away." "Come on! Come on! Where is that d**n ignition switch?"

[inkmeister]

Very good posts, Fin and Geoffrey. Thanks especially, Geoffrey, for the in depth write up.

You guys do a good job at pointing out a real stumbling block - the focus on too many little nitpickety details. How does this work? Why is this here? Does my character have a skill for navigating the bureaucracy of Hullabaloo IV? I think a lot of modern games focus on stuff that is less fun out of a sense of responsibility to realism/believability. At the end of the day, it ain't gonna be believable anyway because reality is exceedingly complex. So move on and focus on the adventure stuff. By the way, I read the thread you linked to Geoffrey, and it was pretty good.

I think another issue, raised here by Kevin Crawford, creator of SWN (thanks for showing up and talking about it here! You rock!), and others, is that of differentiation. Kevin is of course right that a lot of players want a high degree of differentiation between characters. He was probably smart to include that option in his game (as well as the option to ignore that whole aspect). But I think it is over-done in most games. Even D&D over-does it,I think, especially as you get to the advanced stuff and the later edition stuff. Really I think a lot of the differentiation should come about through roleplaying and character development, not by mechanical complexity. For instance, in D&D, instead of having a barbarian class, why not just a barbarian background? You're still a barbarian, but do you really need distinct numbers to tell you that? Likewise in sci-fi; you could come from a low tech world and be something of a barbarian, or you could have a medical background, or whatever. Doesn't have to be quantified.

[inkmeister]

As a kid I liked Shadowrun. I think I would have liked it and played it a lot more if it was like D&D in terms of gameplay. Instead it was too complex.

One thing I want to avoid in future games is creating a situation where you feel like you need some kind of decker/hacker/computer guy in order to really be playing right. Shadowrun and other games of that style always had the problem of the hacking mini-game which meant a long break in play for the non-hackers. You also can get into a thing where you make having a hacker necessary, and so some guy has to be that guy, just so they can make the high skill roll to deal with the security doors/bots/force fields/whatever, but they will automatically have to suck at everything else (or else everyone wants to be the decker, because it's like being awesome fighting man + genius!!!). I like the much cleaner D&D divide of magic user and non magic user. Depending on your flavor of sci fi, you could scrap the magic user and just have folks running around like Geoffrey says, piloting ships, using complex weapons, etc.

I remember in 3E having to roll to see if you could mount your horse and what not, and it was silly. I think one problem with the skill systems is that people start to feel like they have to use them all the time, and it ends up very silly. You get into having to explain very carefully in your rules system when skills are to be used and when not, and its a whole new layer of complexity not needed (for me).

[tec97]

Aug 13, 2013 9:45:24 GMT -6 inkmeister said:

I remember in 3E having to roll to see if you could mount your horse and what not, and it was silly. I think one problem with the skill systems is that people start to feel like they have to use them all the time, and it ends up very silly. You get into having to explain very carefully in your rules system when skills are to be used and when not, and its a whole new layer of complexity not needed (for me).

Ha! That, IME, was one of the biggest problems with Role Master - in college, myself and the folks I gamed with loved the graphic critical hit tables, but it certainly was easy to get caught up in the Movement/Maneuver Tables for the minutia of everyday fantasy life...

[idrahil]

Way back in the 90s, in my Star Wars campaign (West End d6), I had the decker/hacker guy. It started with the implat like Lobot's in Empire Strikes Back. But rather than a mini-game, it was just a new set of Attributes and Skills (based on the Matrix of Shadowrun) that got used quickly.

So, decker/hacker guy had his Lobot'like implant. (Implants let to reduction in maximum Force Points...sort of like essence loss).

That implant had its own "character sheet" that the player used when hacking the Net (I think it was called). The implant quality was like the deck stats in Shadowrun. And there were skill checks for attacking, defending and node manipulation that was based of the TECHNICAL skill of Computer Program & Repair. The implant quality affected things like initiative, programs (which were weapons and armor in the Net and how much data you could grab).

Why this instead of a regular skill check? In Star Wars d6, there was the above mentioned Computer Program & Repair skill that everyone including droids could have. My players wanted something a bit different that represented sorftware and hardware improvements.

After failing with importing shadowrun matrix rules, we took the "idea" of The Matrix and just trimmed them down. What it meant was: instead of running a hacking mini-game, we made regular rolls that were given different window dressing.

[geoffrey]

Aug 13, 2013 9:45:24 GMT -6 inkmeister said:

I remember in 3E having to roll to see if you could mount your horse and what not, and it was silly.

Oh good grief. That's something out of a joke session I've long thought about but never ran. Imagine having to roll for everything:

PC: "I'm walking over to the bar to order a drink."

DM: "OK, roll percentile dice to see if you're successful."

PC: "d**n! I rolled a 99."

DM: "Oooooh! Crit! Let's see... OK, you trip over your own feet and break your right leg. Take 2 points of damage. You won't be able to walk on your leg for at least 4 weeks."

Another PC: "I go over to help Scott."

DM: "OK, roll..."

It's ridiculous. You could have a TPK just trying to order drinks.

[inkmeister]

I wish I could say your hypothetical bar scene is far fetched, Geoffrey, but sadly there are a lot of folks who do it kinda like that. I think I've said before that none of the games I played have been played really by the book, but I think people try to utilize those skill systems when they think of doing so. From what I've seen in my last two groups that I played in (didn't DM), rolling dice for all kinds of things is sort of part of the RPG culture. It's what you do.

I liked the bit in the OSRIC book about how a skill system wasn't included, because, among other things, when you include a "Ride" skill, people start falling off their horses. It doesn't really fit with the fantasy very well.

I think part of the whole detail oriented approach (including skill systems) is that it can be tempting, in the interest of escaping to a different world, to want to really have the world come to life via rules. Someone in that thread you linked to, Geoffrey, was talking about how there is no reason you couldn't have such a detailed approach in fantasy also, where players could obsess over things like plate armor type A, which gives a strength penalty but a slight bonus to movement rate, or plate armor B which weighs more but gives a +1 saving throw vs fire, and so on. Endless detail. On the one hand, it can seem kind of cool, but I think in the big picture of what roleplaying games are, it ends up getting away from the core of the experience. Ultimately, it's probably cooler to just assume most adventurers in a fantasy game know how to order a drink, or ride a horse, or sharpen a sword, or put on armor. Likewise, it's probably cooler to just assume people in the future can operate a ship, or use a computer, or drive a car.

Then again, the silly scenario you mentioned might be more to people's preferences afterall; I grew so unsatisfied with my 3e and 4e group not only because the games themselves were not in line with my tastes, but also because RPGing seemed an excuse to act as ridiculously stupid as possible. I always felt sorry for the referees, because the players used the whole thing as an excuse to misbehave and treat everything as a comedy scenario. I like to laugh and make little references and jokes, but I also like to be a bit serious with it as well.

[barrataria]

Aug 13, 2013 11:38:15 GMT -6 inkmeister said:

I wish I could say your hypothetical bar scene is far fetched, Geoffrey, but sadly there are a lot of folks who do it kinda like that. I think I've said before that none of the games I played have been played really by the book, but I think people try to utilize those skill systems when they think of doing so. From what I've seen in my last two groups that I played in (didn't DM), rolling dice for all kinds of things is sort of part of the RPG culture. It's what you do.

As a sage once said, "you can't fix stupid". Rolling to mount a horse (for a fantasy or old west character) is indeed stupid. I seem to recall an example in the C&C rulebook about carrying dishes up stairs, which seemed a crazy thing to mention in the rules at all. Rolling to see whether or not the character can run through a hail of gunfire, leap on his mount, and chase after the train? I think that's worth rolling dice for. Nothing wrong with narrative games, but I find that designing mindful of the time between die rolls helps form adventures too. I have found that the dice can sit on the table for a very long time in D&D games that involve anything but straight-up kill them and take their stuff. People do like to roll dice, although d6 can take that to ridiculous extremes in combat IMO. But die rolls bring players' focus back to the table in a different way than simple talk-and-respond gaming.

Aug 13, 2013 11:38:15 GMT -6 inkmeister said:

Ultimately, it's probably cooler to just assume most adventurers in a fantasy game know how to order a drink, or ride a horse, or sharpen a sword, or put on armor. Likewise, it's probably cooler to just assume people in the future can operate a ship, or use a computer, or drive a car.

I'm not clear on how that helps differentiate between characters (or NPCs) as to their relative skill level. I think Han Solo is probably a better starship pilot than Princess Leia, and he's clearly better than most TIE fighter pilots. For fantasy, is a character from Rohan a better horseman than a sailor who's never done anything but ride slowly into a town to buy provisions? If those things will matter in a momentous way in a game session I find it helpful to know those relative differences.

[sulldawga]

Aug 12, 2013 22:26:56 GMT -6 geoffrey said:

Imagine a D&D game with a long list of skills, each one doing one of these things:

1. riding a horse
2. driving a wagon
3. driving a chariot
4. putting your armor on
5. paging through a book
6. lassoing something
7. tying knots
8. rowing a boat
9. building a boat
10. building a lean-to
11. sailing a ship
12. swimming
etc.

I assume that all PCs can do all of the above (and a lot more).

I think the difference here is one between a world where you had to do everything yourself and a world where computers and machinery can do a lot for you. In a sci-fi world, it's not a stretch to assume most PCs have no idea how most things work because they just push a button, or speak a command, and things happen for them. I might argue that skills are more important in the future than in a medieval setting.  Skills tell you what the post-modern PC actually knows how to do themselves, versus what they understand in theory but can't execute in practice.

So do you have to roll for every little action?  Of course not.  On the other hand, saying a pilot knows how to repair a FTL spaceship because my D&D fighter can both carve out a canoe and row it is a bit of a stretch for me. 

It's a little harder to be a polymath in 2300 AD than it was in 1300 AD.

For my Stars Without Number game, I don't completely exclude players from trying stuff if they don't have any points in that skill.  Some things may be too complicated, period, but for the basic stuff, they at least have a shot at it.  The odds are against them but who knows?  Maybe they saw how to do it on a holo-vid or something...

[Koren n'Rhys]

I'll chime in here, I suppose. I don't have much interest in sci-fi, per se. However, cyberpunk & shadowrun are genre I love, but hated the rules implementation. I've got SWN (the free version anyway) and agree that even that level of skills is too much for my taste. I think Goblinoid Games' Starships & Spacemen is better (skills wise, that is). It's BX/LL based, so classes, and works for Star Trek gaming, IMO. I'm tinkering at a cyberpunk game that I'd like to see grow to a Shadowrun clone eventually and I'm trying to keep it as skills light as possible.

I see the class system working well, myself. Shadowrun had Archetypes, with pre-built skill lists that simply roll into classes. Cyberpunk 2020 did as well. The more I think about it, the d6 based "skills" of Delving Deeper's thief work for me and we've seen some creative use of that to build other classes too.

I think Fin & Geoffrey are on the money here. There are a lot of skills and education implied in a class's background. Characters will know how to do many things at a base level of proficiency, and be better at certain things dependent upon their class, much like we all have a base level of skills and knowledge due to a high school education at minimum. Your college degrees, licencing and certifications for your chosen profession are your "class".

[tec97]

I'll throw my two coppers with jcstephens above - I think if you're going to try to do an OD&D based sci-fi game, use the MA/GW model and lose the class system all together. Make 'skills' the domain of the GM based on the concept of the character.

[waysoftheearth]

I don't have any particularly relevant experience with sci-fi games.

But... someone has to argue the other side, else it's not a debate, right

Aug 12, 2013 22:26:56 GMT -6 geoffrey said:

Imagine a D&D game with a long list of skills, each one doing one of these things:

1. riding a horse
2. driving a wagon
3. driving a chariot
4. putting your armor on
5. paging through a book
6. lassoing something
7. tying knots
8. rowing a boat
9. building a boat
10. building a lean-to
11. sailing a ship
12. swimming
etc.

It's easy to put up a stawman and tear him down, sure. But what's the point?

Use rope,
Turn page of book,
Eat food,
Take crap,
etc...

Who really believes anyone uses stuff like that?


We could equally imagine a D&D game without any differentiation in any capability... Every PC would be an identical "man" with identical capabilities. There would be no "advancement" because that would necessitate differentiation of some sort, and that would be a giant no no in our skill-less game. Every piece of equipment would also be the same because we certainly don't want any differentiation in capabilities, and besides we wouldn't want to pollute our pristine character sheet with unnecessary "details". There would be no need for teams of complimentary PCs to work together to solve problems, because everyone would be equal at everything. PCs could be differentiated by player behaviour, sure, but players would ultimately have little motivation to profess any one pattern of behaviour over another, because it would all merely be window dressing; all PCs would ultimately be equal at everything.

That's the other extreme of the same spectrum. Clearly, most of the enjoyable games are played out somewhere in between.


The "Skill Hate" (if I can call it that) really is a curious philosophy. On the one hand the Skill Hater disdains the use of skills. On the other hand the Skill Hater gobbles up "classes" and "backgrounds" hook, line and sinker. Some even claim to use fighters for everything with individual fighters simply being better at some stuff than others.

What is a class if not a pre-packaged bunch of "skills"?
What is a background if not another pre-packaged bunch of "skills"?
What are these fighters "better at" if not skills?


Call it whatever you like people, but it's all the same thing in the end. Whatever capability "it" may be, from 10,000 feet your character either can't do it, or is okay at it, or is ace at it. The general pattern is that PCs are differentiated by their different capabilities.


The relevant point of distinction to me is not whether these "capabilities" are labelled as "skills" or "classes" or whatever. It's the granularity at which you want to manage these PC capabilities in your game. Do you want to clump capabilities together and call them "classes" or "kits" or "backgrounds" or whatever? Or do you want to divvy the capabilities out into ever finer grained things and call them "feats" or "deeds" or (Heaven save us!) "skills"?


My guess is there isn't a "one size fits all" answer; there's a different answer for each gaming group.

[inkmeister]

Generally pretty good points, Ways. No doubt there are groups who play skill based RPG's and enjoy doing so, and I'm not going to pretend to be Hitler and tell them they are evil for it! (All I can say is I generally didn't like how the groups I played with utilized skill systems).

Another way to put it to you is this: most (all?) of us who play OD&D/old school D&D here do so without a skill system. Is there something special or unique about futuristic or modern gaming that makes a skill system more useful, desirable, or necessary?

Thus far the main pro-skill arguments seem to come down to realism (not just anyone can repair an FTL drive) and character differentiation (it's more fun when PC's are good at different things). The response to these two seems to be that many of the realism concerns can fade into the background in these games; the adventure is what is most important. And a number of us don't seem to feel that you need much in the way of rules to differentiate PC's.

[drskull]

I'd agree that Sci-Fi games don't need a skill system and could be played with class ability alone.

I've always thought that DUNE would be perfect for a class system game. The Mentats have abilities no one else does, the Guild Navigators, the Bene Gesserit, the Imperial Doctors, etc. Each is a well-defined class with its own abilities and membership in the class is necessary to attempt many of these abilities.

[thorswulf]

In science fiction anybody can fire a weapon, drive a vehicle, or operate a computer as these are fairly common everyday things or they are simple to do. The difference between shooting a pistol or rifle and shooting it well are vast. It takes practice, practical application, and an intimate knowledge of function and design. Don't believe me? Ask a modern marksman.

Class abilities are skill subsets, or practiced skills. Fighters should be able to hurt and kill you with any weapon or their bare hands. I use fighters as they are the easiest to translate into this idea, but others work as well.