Skills in RPGs

[jaysm]

Shadowrun 1E was was probably the first 'modern' game I played, D20 and Traveller before that (and T&T, Take That You Fiend!) so I am always biased towards something like their Skill cascade posted in the other thread, it left an impression on me. In that respect I admit I house rule a lot, I have treated the specialised skills in Engineering to be the characters main job, and just have a -1DM to the others, sometimes with an increase in difficulty, but I try to be gentle there, especially if the players give me a reason no to, I like a good creative story/excuse. Electronics specialties can work the same way, just be a little harsher on difficulty if the start trying to hack an Imperial Cruiser.

Letting a single character chain a difficult Mechanic check into Engineering is an nod to the players using spit and duct tape to get things done, sometimes the by the book repair just gets done a bit creatively/cheap until you get to a starport with the Cr needed. I keep track of all those repairs that they fail to redo properly, because they tend to break again under duress. It does make the Engineer feel a lot of agency about their character.

I also allow Pilot1 or higher to have effective Eng0 just for the purposes of spinning up the Jump Drive, call it Bridge Operations if you like, same with a very basic Sensor sweep when you first come out of jump. That is a bit further from RAW.
Even further, and I admit very arbitrary, I split Science into Social and Physical, with a -DM within a group and no jumping between groups.

 

[actionman]

Do you really want a character sheet that looks like a BRP or GURPS character sheet with all those lovely skills...

Absolutely.

 

[actionman]

It does make the Engineer feel a lot of agency about their character.

Something I considered was skills by role. What does a character do on the team? What is his job?

• Infantryman skill would include skill with rifles, pistols, machineguns, fighting knife, grenade throwing, unarmed combat, and physical fitness, map reading, and generally any skill that a competent fit well-trained infantryman would reasonably do during a mission.
• Starship Drive Systems Engineer skill would include operating and maintaining starship drives, maneuver and FTL, and would include skill in working with all of the mechanical and electronic components of those systems.
• Starship Systems Technician skill would cover all the maintenance, repair, and operation of other non-specialized starship systems like life support and so on.
• Computer Specialist skill would include operating and maintaining computers, like maintaining the hardware and being skilled in using the software applications that are a part of the character's job.
• Computer Programmer skill would be for developing software.

 

[Vormaerin]

That's largely how Traveller works. Engineer covers all the stuff you put on Engineer. Mechanics covers all the stuff you put under Technician (except some of the life support stuff is Engineer).

Computer, being part of the Electronics MegaSkill does all of the specialist & programmer and more.

Infantryman is a bit of the exception, since that's several skills. Gun Combat, Melee Combat, Athletics, Survival.

 

[Condottiere]

Point system allows customization.

For finer detail, you can GURPSize.

 

[rinku]

If people are looking at their own skill suite, especially in terms of expanding skills available, you could do worse than import the cascade skill concept from older editions.

Blade Combat and Gun Combat were always cascade skills; the advanced careers expanded the concept, and Book 1 1981 replaced a few Air/Raft and ATV entries with Vehicle. MegaTraveller REALLY embraced cascades, including those for Physical and Mental stat increases.

The skill tables are easily tweaked. Just replace a fixed skill with a relevant cascade. Pilot or Gunnery may become Space. Gambling or Carousing may become Vice. In many cases it may be more appropriate to leave a fixed skill as is. Fixed skills can also appear in more than one cascade; in MegaTraveller, SensorOps is part of Exploratory, Space, Space Combat and Technical.

I was always a little surprised Mongoose didn't adopt the concept. It's clean, simple, and both reduces the random and expands the skills available in a career. I guess they preferred everything to be specialties. Maybe the admittedly complex web of skill cascades, "serves as" and "Includes" was seen as a bit much.

If you want to add lots of new skills without going entirely down the new specialty route, it's not a bad idea.