Skills Mainly

Hello again, after al this time. All right. I should start by noting something about procrastination - I have elevated it to an art form. Here the world has been shut down for months, I have had plenty of time to play with D&D and what have I accomplished? Not a lot. Strange. Though I noticed something specific about this, in the last couple months. I have also tried to write, signing up for one fo the off seasons NaNoMo projects - got 100,000 words done! But without ever actually getting to the point of where the story I was writing started. All backstory, motivation, exposition; no one took any over acts, other than talking to one another about, you know, backstory, exposition, motivation, etc.

I run into that problem a lot, when I write, and when I try to develop a D&D campaign. I get bogged down on the backstory. I work through the characters and their motivations, their plots and schemes - but I have the devil's time shifting that to actual over acts. And so with D&D: I can worry about the background - I find it very hard to sit down and mark out where villains are on a map so someone can start fighting them. A bad habit, and hard to break. Which might be why I am so tempted to give up on writing adventures and just work on world-building. I can do that!

But that is not the main topic of this post, though this is another fine source of time wasting. I Want to think a bit about skills in role playing games.

The proximate cause of this is getting a couple Call of Cthulhu books, reading them, thinking about them - and watching lots of Seth Skorkowsky videos. Not just about Call of Cthulhu: he's recently started a series on the space adventure game Traveller, which has its own interesting skill system. Call of Cthulhu, in particular, has me thinking about skills, how games can handle them, ow their systems compare to the world.

I have not actually played Call of Cthulhu, but I love the way its skill system works. It's simple enough: PCs are given a rating in any skill, from the default than anyone gets to whatever level of training they have. The rating is a percentage - every check basically requires you to roll lower than the percentage you have. If you have a 50% skill in, say, climbing, you would need to roll under 50 to pass a check, to climb a cliff say. That's the basics. Setting the difficulty of the task is equally simple: the GM (the "Keeper" in CoC) decides if this is a Regular check, Hard, or Extreme - this sets the target for the player, but still based on the PCs rating. Regular = the rating (that %0% say). Hard = 1/2 the rating (25 for this example), Extreme = 1/5 (10). You can also use these degrees of difficulty to rdetermine how much of a success the PC might get, if that's relevant.

In D&D, this probably isn't all that different, other than the dice used: you roll D20, add modifiers, and try to beat a DC the DM has set. But that's a bit harder for the DM: they have to decide what that DC number is. What is a "difficult" check? In Call of Cthulhu, you don't have to worry about that: it's based on the PC's rating. There are guidelines in D&D to setting DCs, but they never seem to work right. Especially if you have to come up with them on the fly. Maybe this is something you can get used to in D&D - but I find it very awkward. I would love to say, this is a hard check - beat your hard check score! because that's what you do in Call of Cthulhu.

That's just the beginning, though. Call of Cthulhu has several mechanisms that make skills much more interesting (or, looking much more interesting,) than D&D's. Mechanics for "pushing" rolls (re-rolling when you fail), or for using luck to change rolls; interesting ways to improve skills. The reason for that is that Call of Cthulhu is a skill based game, and D&D is not. D&D is a combat based game. Or - actual play of D&D is balanced between combat, role playing and exploration, but the system is strongly oriented toward resolving combat. Partly, this is because role playing and exploration don't need the same mechanical support in D&D. Role playing is something players do - it should depend on the players' decisions and choices, and only occasionally involve a dice roll. In the early days of D&D, exploration was the same: you found traps and spotted hidden doors and the like by taking actions. Players controlled it, not the character sheet. You didn't roll to "investigate" a hallway for traps and secret doors - you tapped the walls and probed the floorboards with your dagger and poked that pile of garbage in the corner with a 10 foot pole. Maybe sometimes there would be a roll, but it would be simple, more of a saving throw than a check. And even now - most of the time, skill checks in D&D are, basically, saving throws with less at stake.

It's not like they hide it, either - D&D 5E does not have skill checks, it has ability checks, that sometimes allow skill training to add a modifier. In practice, this works fine, most of the time - but it does mean that skills are secondary in the game. There is less variation, less granularity in how good you can be at a skill; there are no ways to improve skills easily, and so on. Most of the time, again, that's fine - the system works for most D&D situations. (Especially if you let players drive RP and exploration, which they should anyway.) I could reverse all this if I talked about combat - D&D's combat system is very robust, easy to understand, easy to use. Armor sets a target to roll against - the attacker tries to roll above it. Simple, etc. Easy to set up, understand, use, with lots of variation within what you can do, hwat modifies those rolls,a nd so on. Call of Cthulhu combat looks very arbitrary, to me, too abstract - but again, you aren't supposed to go around fighting everything you see there. It's a skill based game.

The problem, for D&D, is when you move into a story line that feels more natural to skill games than combat games. The obvious example, to me, is playing an urban, investigation campaign: one where fighting should be a last resort, for whatever reasons. That is nhw most Call of Cthulhu games work, of course - sometimes, though, you want to do it with D&D characters and settings. That is where a more robust skill system would be a godsend. Everything from better mechanisms for establishing the effect fo the player's actions - "I talk to the guard and try to find the name of who has a key to this room" - to better mechanisms for searching for clues at a crime scene. Again - at the most basic level, D&D requires you to say, finding the kobold's footprint requires a DC 17; Call of Cthulhu says, the kobold's footprint is a Hard Check. That kind of thing is a lot easier on the fly, I think. The other difficulty is in PC building - D&D is based on combat, and what the character can do in a fight - that is the core. Trying to build a character who is genuinely better in other situations is not as straightforward - might not even be possible.

There might be another post in this: looking at types of stories out there and which ones feel are based around combat systems, like D&D, and which around skills, like Call of Cthulhu. Again - this doesn't imply that these stories are dominated by combat or skills - but that that is where the system is required. Like: westerns strike me as almost universally combat based - even if the characters are not fighting, when it comes to testing something other than their own wits and personalities, it's when there is a fight. And detective stories - even hard-bitten ones, with plenty of action - hinge on the skills. Marlow vs Canino in the Big Sleep is a test of skills, not combat prowess: Marlow's ability to charm his captors, his ability to hide, his allies willingness to help him - the fight comes down to getting the drop on the other guy. This isn't Matt Dillon drawing down on a guy, or Bruce Lee facing the big bad. But all this is a subject for another day. For now - building a Matt Dillon type in D&D isn't all that hard; building a Columbo type in D&D - that would be a challenge.