As I mentioned at the start of of this posting season, skill design is the one area in which I have been able to make significant inroads -- to the point that I have contemplated playtesting these revised skill mechanics on their own; if you feel so inclined to try them out with your group, please let me know how it goes :)
Redrawing the Grid
Only a few minor changes were made, in terms of the setup of core skills:
- Break Objects is now STR/Infiltration, instead of STR/Athletics
- Animal Handling was removed, and changed to a Knowledge skill
- WIS has been removed, and remaining skills put under INT
- Influence skillset was renamed to "Presence" (to better reflect the removal of Animal Handling, but also so that each Skillset now starts with a different letter, for easier abbreviation.)
What this does is create a grid consisting of five Attributes and five Skillsets; symmetry is always nice to have, and 5 is a good number, since it also happens to be the number of classes per slate. It also cleans things up a bit, with each skill 'intersection' now consisting of no more than two skills. If there's one quandry that has arisen out of this, it's the realization that INT seems like a batch of skills that normally might be limited to a small number of classes -- I may have to just own it as a quirk of this particular system, and build lore from those mechanics.
Re-education
The setup of, "which Knowledge skills were tied to what Power Sources," has been a niggling problem since the conception of tying them together in the first place. I had mostly settled on having two skills for each, but it never quite lined up perfectly; when it came to actually doling out skills specifically to classes, the limitations were laid bare. So in addition to adding Animal Handling as a Primal knowledge skill, and combining History and Geography into one (since I felt neither were particularly weighty, individually) eventually I settled on having three skills for each Power Source: one unique skill, and two shared skills.
Going back and forth between my "Knowledge Skills by Power Source" tab and my "Power Sources by Class" tab, this eventually helped to greatly streamline the distribution of the latter, ensuring that classes had better access to the skills that seemed to best fit, thematically. Just as an example, I felt that classes like Paladin should be able to have Medicine without needing the Primal power source, and that classes like Druid should be able to have that skill without needing the Divine power source (since a skill like Royalty & Nobility doesn't really seem to fit, for a hermit...) The easy solution was to give the Medicine skill to both of those power sources.
Mechanical Crunch
The decision to move the math away from d20 was a direct result of me trying to fulfill the request for more gradations of skill competency. The previous designs (which have basically been in place since "Beta 4" days) boiled down to: d20; d20 with expertise; d20+d6; d20+d6 with expertise. There's a pretty sizable mathematical gap between those middle two expressions, and in order to bridge the distance, the d20 would need to somehow morph -- and it just can't.
What I had been tinkering with was some sort of disadvantage/normal/advantage scale, applying to both the d20 and the d6. Toying with that a little bit revealed essentially two things: that the d6 would always need to be added (except if the d20 had advantage) and ...that advantage on the d20 would be too powerful. This produced a really clunky and unintuitive structure (d20 w/ disadvantage or normal + d6 w/ disadvantage/normal/advantage) but it also sucked from a tactile perspective, as I discovered through the process of absentmindedly rolling these dice, to pass the time at my D&D games.
So I decided to start testing out other dice, and one of the obvious choices to go with (after trying a few permutations of solely using d6s) was 1d10+1d6 -- which I had used in my 'previous' project, as well as for the 'monster roll' in TNP. As it turns out, a straight 1d10 roll roughly mimics the math of a d20 with disadvantage, and (likewise) a d10 with advantage approximated a straight d20 (if a d6 was added on, in both cases.) After some further number-crunching, I decided to use a "best 1 of" dice pool for the d6, instead of disadvantage/normal/advantage, with advantage on the d10 coming from skill training.
This creates a setup which is fairly easy to grok: rank 1 is 1d6, rank 2 is best 1 of 2d6, etc., with ranks being gained by upgrading skillsets or attributes. Potentially, ranks could be increased even further (rank 4 for sure, anyway) without breaking any math -- so that creates another design space which can be played in. I initially wanted to keep "expertise" in some form, but realized that within a DC10 paradigm, it was a bit too powerful of a mechanic, when applied to a d10 roll (as apposed to d20.)
Mastery
I had (probably as far back as any playtesting I've done/feedback I've ever gotten) been thinking of alternate names for expertise, and mastery was always one of the contenders. The change in skill mechanics warranted not only a name change, but a change in this mechanic itself. In short, the point of expertise was to get the effect of being able to reroll 1s (although mathematically it's better than that) without having to actually reroll 1s (and slow down gameplay at the table.) But, a realization came to me when I was tinkering with methods for rolling stats in D&D; without going off on too much of a tangent, I realized that "infinite rerolls" is less of a slowdown, when applied to an activity (such as rolling stats) that doesn't take place very often.
Generally, in most tabletop RPGs, one skill check can encompass a large part of a non-combat encounter (or possibly even multiple linked actions, rather than just one.) As such, non-combat is generally resolved with fewer rolls than combat. If we apply the previously-stated logic, we can assume that allowing for rerolls in non-combat (i.e. skill use) should be acceptable, particularly if it fits within the desired mathematical parameters -- and in the case of using 1d10+1d6 for skills, it absolutely does. (As a side note, "Combat Mastery" will probably continue to function exactly as the old expertise, so "Skill Mastery" will be delineated as its own thing, in the rules text.)
For core skills, skill mastery is obtained by having training in both the attribute and skillset tied to a skill. Since the intersection of an attribute and a skillset is now limited to two skills (and with establishment of a default, that characters have training in a combination of two skillsets/attributes) this sets an effective cap for skill mastery, as well as a baseline from which to expand, for more skillful characters. For power sources, mastery functions a little bit differently, granting a minor bonus to all associated knowledge skills (if the player chooses to focus on boosting one skill as high as possible, or if they choose to double-down on a power source, rather than branch out.)
Implications
With effectively "borrowing" the old monster roll for our new skill dice, it's probably time to re-evaluate whether the monster roll mechanic works well. Looking back at it, I've found the implementation a little kludgy, and now might be the time to streamline the mechanics a bit, so that they work a bit more harmoniously on both the player-side and the DM-side.
Another question that all this begs, is whether skills used in combat should apply Skill Mastery or Combat Mastery (or leave it to the gamers' discretion.)
-----
Hopefully I'll get some time to do a little more design work in the near future; no time off work for me, during this extended lockdown, unfortunately.
I don't really have a topic set for the next post (April 14th) so feel free to send in your suggestions.
No comments:
Post a Comment