Skills set? (Beta 4)

The Next Project has never used ability scores, in the traditional sense (i.e. a numeric value from which you derive a modifier, which is then applied to both combat and out-of-combat statistics and rolls.) Instead, the combat has used d20 and Class Dice for its parameters. Skills, on the other hand...

In many ways, this and other games I've designed/hacked are attempts at combining a few different ideas to make something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

5th Edition D&D had the idea of being able to combine proficiency in a particular skill with any one ability score/modifier, as reasonable (although in the final product, the two end up more or less married together.) I liked that idea, but I think things need to be more defined than that.

The idea I came up with borrows from 4th Edition D&D. You'll notice that "fighty" classes have a few skills in common on their class skill lists, namely Athletics, Endurance, Heal and Intimidate. The problem is, each of these keys off of a different ability score, so it's hard for any of these classes to be good at all of these skills (even though it thematically makes sense that they would be.) Similarly, if you compare the class skill list of Rogue with that of Blackguard, you can start to see something resembling a formula, at work.

So from all of this, I came up with the idea of a skill, or skills, being Basic Abilities (ability scores, without the 'score' part) crossed with Skillsets. "Rogueish" skills fell under one skillset, so making a class rogueish out-of-combat was as simple as granting them a bonus to that skillset. Likewise, "fighty" skills were put under one Basic Ability, so that warrior classes could easily be made strong and intimidating.

The problem came with what eventually came to be known as "Background Skills." It still made sense to put performance-type skills and knowledge skills under Basic Abilities, in theory, but in practice it ended up shoehorning and pigeonholing classes in weird ways. The end result is that the elegant application of bonuses to either a skillset or a Basic Ability got broken into something more clunky and/or granular.


Now, one of the core aims here is to make sure classes have utility in all types of non-combat encounters. The grouping of skills into Skillsets and Basic Abilities doesn't actually ensure this, because both groups tend to include skills from two or more "pillars." An idea I had had previously (but never followed through on) was to instead group skills by the type of encounter they are used in. This would necessarily require some of the broad skills to be broken into multiple smaller ones; skillsets could still be used to link skills in some fashion, but it would probably be more logical to just abandon them. On the other hand, the elegance of the system would be lost, if skills were to be solitary and de-coupled, and then parcelled out as long Class Lists.

Another problem that presents itself is how Stealth and Perception factor in. Finding hidden things vs. trying not to be found is sort of a concept that almost constitutes its own type of encounter, but could also be tacked onto or worked into other sorts of encounters. This sort of has led me to conclude that these skills should sort of be its own "4th pillar" that can dovetail into the other three (Combat, Exploration, and Social.)